A few days ago, I shared the Gospel with someone for the first time ever.
And honestly, I’m embarrassed. But first, here’s the back story.
My church back home does a book study together at the start of every year and for the past two years I have read the book and participated from the field. It’s been a really beautiful gift to feel the connection to my community back home through reading the books along with them and watching the recordings of their Sunday morning worship and teaching.
This year’s book is Letters to the Church by Francis Chan. He takes a look at the American church culture and compares it to the Kingdom that Jesus talked about and the early Church in Acts.
And WOW. It’s something special.
I don’t recommend reading it if you are wishing to relax and become comfortable in your faith, because it made me so uncomfortable. Not in a bad way, or as an attack, but it made me look critically at myself and what I have been doing.
I’ve been traveling the world for the past year serving in the name of Jesus, I’ve seen incredible things and have seen Holy Spirit move in ways I could have never imagined, I saw restoration come to my family and redemption for my past and my testimony.
I’m learning to walk in obedience and live with a willing ‘yes, Lord’ spirit – but only where I’m comfortable. Yikes. Looking at my time with the World Race, am I just doing a good thing? Or am I actively bringing the Good News?
I asked the Lord to bring opportunities for me to step even further out of my comfort zone, to bust me out of coasting through ministry, and the very next day we were evangelizing for our ministry. At the port. To truckers. Who don’t speak English.
With evangelism ministry in the past, I’ll admit that I usually stuck around the back or the group under the guise of praying for those actually doing the thing, but it was truly because I didn’t want to do the thing myself.
And so, we set out in our lil group with a translator. And I did it. I sat down with two guys and started a conversation about their lives and what will happen afterwards. It was awkward at points, it was uncomfortable, and they didn’t want to follow Christ, but even still I got to laugh with and start a relationship two people who got just a glimpse of how desperately Jesus wants a relationship with them.
And so, here I am, not as a super Christian missionary, but just another person learning more about how to walk in the light of the Good News, willing to look back and know when I haven’t done well and committed to doing better than I did yesterday.
