Joseph.

Allow me to introduce you to a friend I made in Thailad. His name is Joseph. He works in the rug shop on the second floor of the local mall, near our ministry base. I’m not entirely sure how I met him, but i’m confident that it will be a long time before I forget him.

He always wanted to talk religion, which was fine with me. Joseph thrives on his intelligence and his intellect, compared to others–more specifically, to that of Christians. If I ever mentioned a verse that he hadn’t read before, he wrote it down. If I said a word he’d never used before, he wrote it down. And the next time I’d go in to visit him, he showed me notes he’d taken when he looked them up after I left.

There were some days when I’d have to get up in the middle of our conversation and walk out of his shop. He wanted to debate, and I clearly told him that if/when our conversation becomes a debate, a matter of who is “right” and who is “wrong”, I must go. He wanted to prove himself to me. He continually sought out confirmation that Allah is supreme, and that Christian views of Jesus are ridiculous. He had everything mapped out. He could explain everything with a formula. He clung to his beliefs because they could be backed with logic. “Your book of words lacks logic and reason” he told me. “What you call a Bible, I call a compilation of contradictions. It just doesn’t make sense”. What Joseph failed to know is that we make a choice to believe. We live by faith, not logic. Yes, this faith comes from wisdom and knowledge of God, but wisdom and knowledge cannot trump or prove God–when this happens, you’ve got a different problem altogether. I couldn’t paint him the back and white picture he was asking me for. The only thing I could tell Him, was you either love and serve the true God, or you don’t. C.S. Lewis makes a note on this in “The Great Divorice”:

The attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents us with an absolutely unavoidable ‘either-or’; that, granted skill and patience and (above all) time enough, some way of embracing both alternatives can always be found; that mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to retain. This belief I take to be a disastrous error…We are not living in a world where all roads are not radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a river, but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection.

Joseph wanted perfection–and he believes that he can reach it through knowledge and logic.

Through Joseph, God has challenged me to really know His word with passion. I had to distinguish between backing down and walking away to avoid prideful arguements, and retreating out of fear and lack of knowledge of scripture. If i’m honest, there were times when I walked away from Jospeh simply because I didnt’ know how to respond to him, and other times when I walked out of his shop questioning my knowledge of God. Father, do I know you according to who you say you are? And do I, even for a moment, put up any sort of resistance when I sense a loss of faith?

Through these encounters, God has definitely pressed on me the importance of having His words written on my heart. But Psalm 119.11 tells us two things:

Note: it has nothing to do with proof. No logic. No equations. No reasoning. No justificaiton. This is purely a matter of intimacy with God. We dive into His word to know Him. And when we know Him, we fall in love with Him-we can’t help it! He’s so good! And when you love someone that much, you do everything in your power not to hurt them. In our case, everything in our power not to sin. We do this by reading God’s word, and hiding it in our hearts. With this devotion to His word comes wisdom and knowledge–two things that I feel God is asking me to dive into. For too long i’ve fallen back on the “I have my faith. I just believe….” excuse. It’s time to know God on His terms.

Joseph has a callous on his upper, middle forehead–this is from a lifetime spent bowing down several times each day on a tile floor. When I asked him about it, he said it was the mark of a good man. He asked me where my mark was. I told him I didn’t have one, that I wasn’t “good”, and that because of it, I desperately need a savior. He laughed at me and patted my shoulder.