After 64 years, I think there are some things I’ve learned about myself. One of them is that I am not typically a visionary thinker. Sometimes, in response to prayers for direction, the Lord has given me a glimpse of His heart about something and, as a result, has used me to bring a ministry into being, but those times have been more the exception than the rule.
Mostly, He has led me to carry out someone else’s vision, or continue a ministry begun by someone else. I’m comfortable when things are already in place and I can just pick up where the previous person left off. I might make changes, but mostly my gifts seem to be more suited to maintaining and strengthening the status quo.
In my teaching, I’ve also discovered that I love detail. So much so that I can get bogged down in a passage of Scripture just contemplating the meaning of a word, or forming a practical word picture of a concept so others can understand it more easily. However, when it comes to getting an overall aim for an entire chapter, I can easily get lost in the detail of the trees and overlook the forest.
So when the youth pastor who led the senior high mission’s trip sat us down before we left and asked things like, “So what do you hope to gain from the experience (of being on a mission’s trip)?”, I could only think in terms of ministry to individuals. I thought of things like: the blessing of encouraging individual students, praying with people, showing compassion to the residents of the AIDS camp, etc. They were all I could really come up with. I thought only in terms of going and doing and had very little expectation that the Lord would give me any kind of big picture view from the experience. I was wrong.
It began to happen first when I spoke to Felicia, a missionary who, along with her husband Tim, left the US about a year and a half ago and moved to the Bahamas to minister full time to the residents of the All Saints AIDS Camp. She was talking to me about why they came and she said something that the Lord would build on through other things to give me His bigger picture. The impactful statement she made was that what started out simply for them as a ministry of compassion to the people of the camp had now become a justice issue.
Justice issues have come to be more in the forefront of Christian thinking these days than they ever were in the past – or at least the recent past. Evangelicals are typically wary of them out of fear that in an effort to address them we might water down the gospel, or forget it all together. Sadly, I have been one who has thought like that.
God has gifted me to teach the Bible, so never, ever, would I want to neglect the gospel message. I firmly believe the Apostle Paul when he says in Romans 1:16: “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.” The gospel alone is the only source of true hope for this world and the next – something just feeding people, or bringing fresh water alone, will never accomplish. But, as a result, I (and many of my fellow evangelicals) have erred in the direction of neglecting altogether the physical needs of those who cannot care for themselves and have left the responsibility to others.
Felicia’s comment helped me see the narrowness of my view. She WAS bringing fresh water and compassionate care into the lives of the residents of the camp in the name of Jesus – but that wasn’t all she was doing. She was also, of necessity, standing in the gap, not only in prayer but in action, to deal with negligent government agencies and camp leaders, to bring justice to the camp residents who can’t fight for it themselves. Suddenly, I could SEE what I was blind to before. It wasn’t enough just to bring the gospel, or to offer compassion in the name of Jesus. The Lord just might want to use me to bring justice as well – to advocate for those who are powerless to speak in their own defense, as were the residents of All Saints, who were probably even oblivious to the injustice to which they were being subjected.
Another wake up call for me came out of a conversation I had with Tre, the construction supervisor for Next Step Ministries. Tre (Theresa) was telling me that when she wasn't working all summer in the Bahamas, the rest of her time was devoted to forming a non-profit agency based out of Florida to provide fresh drinking water here in the US. I naively asked, “Where in the US do people NOT have fresh drinking water?” I’m ashamed to say that I could not conceive of a place in this country where fresh water was not a given. Tre lovingly and non-judgmentally set me straight by pointing out that for Native Americans living on a reservation in New Mexico and people living in impoverished areas of Appalachia, fresh water was far from a “given”. How could I be so blind and ignorant to the justice issues in my own country?
Not coincidentally, before I left for Nassau a friend gave me a book entitled, “Good News About Injustice”, by Gary A. Haugen, the current president of International Justice Mission in Washington, DC. Here is a portion of what I read this week that has had an impact on me as well.
Haugen writes about John Gregg Fee, the evangelical founder of Berea College in Kentucky, whose conversion to Christ moved him to take up the slavery cause in his day. Haugen writes: “It was while (Fee) was on his knees in anguished prayer that he confronted the costs of discipleship. (Fee said) ‘I saw that to embrace the principle of abolition and wear the name was to cut myself off from relatives and former friends’, but he prayed, ‘Lord, if needs be, make me an Abolitionist.”
How good and gentle the Lord is to remove the blinders from my eyes and help me see what I did not see before. The Lord HAS given us Christians the role of standing in the gap for those who can’t represent themselves – in addition to sharing the gospel with them, and showing compassion in Jesus’ name.
With a much better big picture view of what my role as an evangelical Christian could be, the focus of my future prayers just might be more like that of John Gregg Fee: “Lord, if needs be, make me an advocate for justice within MY sphere of influence.”
Isaiah 1:17 “Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.”
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