Looking for home

                                                     

               

Maya, age 7, loves bananas, cartoons and her pink teddy bear.

She had to leave the teddy bear back in Syria when her family fled to Lebanon to escape the worsening civil war. “It’s probably riddled with bullets now,” Maya says. She’s probably right: Homs, the city they left, is now essentially a pile of rubble.

At least she has a stuffed blue Smurf to keep her company. But she doesn’t have many human friends her age in the “home” she occupies with her parents and her teenage brother, Hammoudeh. For more than 1,000 days, they have lived with other Syrian refugees in the crumbling Gaza Hospital in Beirut. It ceased to be a medical facility during Lebanon’s own civil war decades ago, but has played host to generations of refugees from the region’s conflicts.

It’s more comfortable than the tents, sheds and hovels many Syrian refugees endure in Lebanon. But Maya — a goofy, giggly girl with tons of energy — feels like she’s growing up in a prison.

“I’m a kid! I want to have fun,” Maya complains. “Who am I supposed to play with? I’m surrounded by 10 walls. … When I get bored, I go outside. I don’t find anyone so I come back in. I keep going in, out, in, out. I drive Mum crazy!”

Syria’s civil war bled into a fifth year in March, so Maya has little chance of going home anytime soon. She doesn’t understand the larger forces that are destroying her homeland, or why she and her brother can’t go to school, or why her mother seems sad most of the time. She laughs and dreams and makes the best of an awful situation. But she knows something is wrong with a world that snatches a home and a teddy bear from a little girl. You can see it in her eyes.

Let Maya tell you her own story here. It’s one of five brief, quietly powerful video portraits of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, part of the Al Jazeera series “Life on Hold.” Watch them all if you want a glimpse of what it means to live in exile. You can even post a message to Maya.

You will also meet young Omar, who misses his assistant chef’s job and his sweetheart back in Damascus. He cares for a leg shattered by an exploding shell before he fled Syria, reads the Quran, prays, checks out the latest songs and videos online, and waits. Haifa, a widow who closed the hotel she owned in Damascus to seek safety for her three children, misses home so desperately that she wants to go back — even though conditions are far worse now than when she departed. “At least if I die, I die in Syria,” she says. Hajj, an older man who cares for his sick wife, wonders if his 200 olive trees have withered and died. He has lost 38 family members in the conflict.

Al Furati, an award-winning poet and former government worker, cries for lost friends, co-workers and simple pleasures back home. He worries about his children missing years of school, part of an entire lost generation of young Syrians. He sits in a tent with his wife and children, writing mournful verses late into the night: “Why is my country draped in the black of night? And why are Syria’s hands hennaed with blood? … Your children are now crying and your women are wailing, your precious soil is awash with the blood of your men. I feel your heart is breaking like the valley of lament, I know that your wound is too deep to heal.”

Those words reminded me of the lament of another refugee poet: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion” (Psalm 137:1 NASB). Carried away into forced exile 26 centuries ago, the psalmist and his Israelite brothers and sisters could only remember their beloved land — and hope one day to return.

I’ve become acquainted with many refugees over the years, whether in dusty camps and border towns or after they resettled in other places — such as the city where I live. They include Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Cubans, Afghanis, Iraqis, Kurds, Palestinians, Burmese, Nepalis, Syrians. I’m proud to count some of them as dear friends. Before our own children came along, my wife and I were foster parents to two Vietnamese refugee kids for a time.

I don’t pretend to understand the refugee experience, however, or the trauma, despair, isolation and loss that come with it. It is impossible to fathom unless you have gone through it.

But God understands. He loves. And He gives hope. He commands again and again in His Word that we welcome and shelter the alien, the stranger and the outcast. Jesus Christ, who experienced rejection by His own that we can only imagine, calls us to befriend the wanderers of this world — and there are more of them than ever.

Millions of Syrians have been driven from their homes since the civil war began. If you want to help them, or any refugees, here are 10 practical ways to do so. And here are a few more: Listen to their stories. Cry with them. Be a friend. Offer the hope only God can give.

Love transcends all borders.

Bad news, Good News

 

The cascade of grim global headlines overwhelmed a friend of mine recently. He announced that he couldn’t take it anymore — at least until tomorrow.

“I don’t know why I care,” he wrote. “I don’t know why I bother. I check the news. Bad. All bad. Unless the news is horrible, it’s bad. Why care? Why bother? Why not just play ‘Angry Birds’ and pretend it doesn’t affect me? It sounds easier.”

Perhaps you can relate. I know I do. Violence and hatred rage everywhere. Wars, skirmishes and suffering flare up where we don’t expect them, and where we do. Ukraine and Russia. Syria. Iraq. Israel and Gaza. West Africa. Death and disease abound. Innocents are infected, blown out of the sky, kidnapped, driven from their homes, shot in the crossfire. In some places, the bad guys seem to be winning — if we can even figure out who the bad guys are. It’s too complicated, too confusing, too depressing. It’s tempting to tune it out.

Most people do.

Not my friend, however. Despite his frustration and discouragement, I know he won’t stop reading, watching, caring and praying. He’s an intelligent and compassionate young man, for one thing. He’s concerned about world affairs. He makes a point of keeping up with what’s happening and tries to understand it, unlike many others.

Most important, as a child of God, he’s in touch with the mind and heart of God, who so loved the world that He gave His only Son to redeem it. If He loved even those who hated Him, we must do likewise.

“The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love,” the Apostle John teaches. “By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world” (1 John 4:8-14, NASB).

It’s only His love, through His Spirit, that changes a broken world. By His grace, He chooses to use us, if we submit to Him. His love is more than enough to make up for our lack of it.

Another young person I know returned recently from a youth mission trip to Amsterdam, the Dutch capital. She and the group arrived there the same week in July that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down over Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew. Two-thirds of the passengers were Dutch. People on the streets of Amsterdam were just beginning to experience the shock of the tragedy as the youth team walked through the city and distributed more than 6,000 copies of the Gospel of John.

Some people they encountered rejected the small gifts of truth. Like many Europeans, the Dutch consider themselves secular and post-Christian. But many accepted it— many more than the Amsterdam-based Christian worker helping the young people expected — and they began reading it. Perhaps they were looking for something to hold onto, something to hope in.

While interacting with them, my young acquaintance learned some things about herself. She realized she wasn’t as tolerant, as patient or as loving as she thought she was.

“But through learning all these ‘I am nots,’ I learned who God is,” she said. Distributing the Gospel, “even if they were going to reject it a second later, is so much more important than my comfort. … I learned to really care for and love the Dutch people.”

So it is with all who seek to follow Him. It’s not who we are; it’s who He is. And He has overcome the world.

(Explore ways to follow Him into the world at http://going.imb.org/ )

World weary

                                        

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/195/19559/19559-107657.mp3

Did you see the picture of Marwan, the 4-year-old Syrian boy recently found wandering in the desert near the Syria-Jordan border?

A news photo of the refugee child went viral on social media. It attracted far more attention than the hundreds of Syrian refugees who cross the same border every day and night to escape the murderous war in their country. Turns out Marwan wasn’t alone; he had temporarily fallen behind his family members, who were among about 1,000 Syrians making the chaotic border crossing that particular day. Relief workers reunited the child with his parents about 10 minutes after the photo was taken.

People around the world responded to the photo because it depicted a lost child, dragging a plastic bag with his few belongings, seemingly alone in the world. Who wouldn’t feel compassion for this little boy? His personal, heartbreaking plight is easier to understand than the struggle of millions of refugees experiencing the same thing.

 “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” That statement is attributed to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who knew something about engineering death on a mass scale. He understood that most people can’t fully comprehend events affecting great multitudes — especially if those events are happening far away.

Media have radically changed the global landscape since Stalin’s time, however. News travels instantaneously. Digital devices bring us images of tragedies, wars and disasters 24/7, if we choose to watch. But that poses a new problem. The constant onslaught of events and information dulls our senses. We have our own daily problems. We turn away. Americans in particular, living far from many of the world’s conflict zones, tend to turn inward.

“It’s not that Americans are disinterested in foreign affairs, it’s that their interest is finely calibrated,” observes geopolitical analyst George Friedman. “The issues must matter to Americans, so most issues must carry with them a potential threat. The outcome must be uncertain, and the issues must have a sufficient degree of clarity so that they can be understood and dealt with.”

There aren’t that many global crises that neatly fit such criteria in these confusing times. The outcome of the war in Syria is uncertain, but its multiple causes and combatants are anything but clear to us. Does its eventual outcome, regardless of who wins, threaten us directly? Hard to say. One could say the same of the current troubles in Ukraine, Venezuela, Egypt, Thailand, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and other places. Trouble is always brewing somewhere. Let them sort it out, we say. We’re tired of being the world’s policeman. 

“Whether this sentiment is good or bad is debatable,” says Friedman. “I would argue that it is a luxury, albeit a temporary one, conferred on Americans by geography.”

Weary of years of war and overseas entanglements, many Americans are ready to withdraw behind our spacious borders — physically or psychologically — until something so big happens that we can’t ignore it.

That’s a national choice. But God calls His followers to greater things. If we serve Him, we are citizens of the world, no matter how chaotic the world may seem. In my last column, I asked how we can continue to go into the world and make disciples as a new age of upheaval dawns. Withdrawal is not an option for world-hearted Christians, because it implies one of two things: fear or indifference.

God is not indifferent about the world. He is passionately concerned about every people, every culture. The more suffering and turmoil a nation is experiencing, the more intensively He is working to bring His grace and mercy.

“This past month we have seen an amazing outpouring of God's Spirit,” said IMB worker Brady Sample,* who lives in violence-torn Kiev, Ukraine, a nation on the edge of cracking apart. “God is moving. This event is causing people to pray, and while they are praying for peace in the land, God is trying to bring peace into people’s hearts.”

No matter how difficult the destination or the situation, He will go with us. In fact, He’s already there, waiting for us to meet Him.

Don’t miss the appointment.

*(Name changed)

Rumors of wars

                                                          

 

2014 will mark a grim anniversary: 100 years since the beginning of World War I.

It was to be the “war to end all wars.” If only.

World War I is rapidly disappearing from modern memory. At the current pace of events, we often forget what happened last week, much less a century ago. We are twice as far removed from 1914 as Americans in that year were removed from the Civil War era. Another world war and scores of smaller ones have occurred in the generations since. Revolutions have shaken and reshaped entire chunks of the globe. Technology has transformed almost everything.

But we should never forget the consequences of “the Great War.” Aside from its staggering bloodshed and suffering (more than 30 million killed or wounded), it brought the end of the old order in Europe and laid the groundwork for a new one. It swept away monarchies and empires, set the stage for revolutions and years of global economic struggle — and ultimately led to an even more devastating global conflict.

Some historians believe we are entering a similar era of endings and beginnings. If Christians intend to make an impact on the world, we must strive to understand the times. We also must deal with the world as it is, not as we want it to be. If you’re waiting for general stability and peace before you launch out to the nations or lead your church to go, you’ve got a long wait ahead.

 “[T]he coming conflicts and challenges are pretty clear,” writes Gordon Adams, professor of international relations at American University, in Foreign Policy magazine. “We will hear a lot about the Syrian civil war, the fate of the Iranian nuclear program, conflict in Iraq, the departure of U.S. forces from Afghanistan — not to speak of what applecart Vladimir Putin plans to upset next, whether the North Korean regime will implode, and whether China and its neighbors intensify their conflict over the rocky outcroppings they all want to own. …

“As we reflect on this [World War I] anniversary year, however, there are deeper rumblings afoot, rumblings that will color and shape many of these conflicts. The same was true 100 years ago. … At the start of that new century, the shape of world politics was about to transform, while class conflict rose and shook the very foundations of the monarchies of continental Europe. Between these two forces, they would wipe out the Austro-Hungarian Empire, remove royalty from power in Germany, bring revolutionary turmoil to Russia, undermine the colonial systems established by France and Germany, and bring a new power — the United States — to the center of the world stage.”

Now the United States and its allies seem to be receding as global power players, by circumstance or by choice, while economic, political and military conflicts simmer around the globe. If that withdrawal or decline continues, other forces will fill the power vacuum.

In some cases, the vacuum itself will bring chaos. It’s an old historical pattern, repeated many times through the ages.

“Why so much anarchy?” asks Robert Kaplan in a new piece for Stratfor, the global intelligence analysis service. Twenty years ago, Kaplan warned in an influential Atlantic Monthly article (“The Coming Anarchy”) of “unprecedented upheaval, brought on by scarce resources, overpopulation, uncontrollable disease, brutal warfare and the widespread collapse of nation-states and indeed, of any semblance of government. ... Welcome to the 21st century.”

Some of those predictions came true; some didn’t. But “what is not in dispute is that significant portions of the earth … are simply harder and harder to govern,” Kaplan reports. He identifies five major causes for the persistent upheaval of recent decades:

n  The end of imperialism: Empires and spheres of influence built by international powers often oppress and exploit the peoples they absorb. But they provide (or enforce) order. When they crumble, freedom may follow. Or chaos and blood.

n   The end of post-colonial strongmen: National dictators replaced departing colonial authorities in many places during the post-colonial era in the 20^th century and again after the Cold War. Saddam Hussein, Moammar Gadhafi, Hosni Mubarak and many other strongmen are gone. But who — or what — will replace them? 

n  No national institutions and feeble national identities: Post-colonial dictators typically ruled by fear and secret police, not strong social and political institutions. “It is institutions that fill the gap between the ruler at the top and the extended family or tribe at the bottom,” Kaplan explains. Without such institutions, “the chances for either [more] dictatorship or anarchy proliferate.” States with such weak national identities become particularly vulnerable to “non-state identities that fill the subsequent void.” Think al-Qaida, organized criminal cartels and other bad actors.  

n  Doctrinal battles: Religious struggles have sparked many wars in the past. It’s happening again in the Muslim world “as state identities weaken and sectarian and other differences within Islam come to the fore, often violently,” Kaplan notes. Americans tend to focus on radical Islam versus the West. But the great ideological battle now tearing apart the Middle East — from Syria and Iraq to Iran and Saudi Arabia — is the blood feud between Sunni and Shiite Islam.

n  Information Technology: Smartphones “can empower the crowd against a hated regime, as protesters who do not know each other personally can find each other through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media,” Kaplan acknowledges. But they “cannot provide [or] maintain political stability afterwards. This is how technology encourages anarchy. The Industrial Age was about bigness: big tanks, aircraft carriers, railway networks and so forth. … But the post-industrial age is about smallness, which can empower small and oppressed groups, allowing them to challenge the state — with anarchy sometimes the result.”

What comes next?

“The real question marks are Russia and China. The possible weakening of authoritarian rule in those sprawling states may usher in less democracy than chronic instability and ethnic separatism that would dwarf in scale the current instability in the Middle East,” Kaplan warns. “The future of world politics will be about which societies can develop responsive institutions to govern vast geographical space and which cannot. That is the question toward which the present season of anarchy leads.”

That might be the political question. The spiritual question for Christians: How do we continue to go into the world, declare the Gospel and make disciples among all nations as yet another era of upheaval unfolds? There are as many answers as there are nations, cultures and peoples.

 But retreat is not one of them.

Boston and Syria, through God’s eyes

                                                   

Amid the tsunami of sympathy expressed after the Boston Marathon attack, a photo making the rounds online caught my eye.

It showed a group of young men and boys standing in front of what appeared to be a bombed-out building in a town in Syria. They held a banner emblazoned with these words in bold black letters: “Boston bombings represent a sorrowful scene of what happens every day in Syria. Do accept our condolences.”

I don’t know whether the photo is authentic or not. But the truth about what is happening in that suffering land is unquestionable. In fact, a day when only a few innocents are killed in Syria’s bloodbath of a civil war would be welcomed. An average of 100 civilians die each day as the fighting there drags on. More than 70,000 have lost their lives since the war began.

The numbers numb the mind. Millions of Syrian civilians have been displaced inside the country. They wander the countryside in search of shelter and food, dodging the crossfire of war and fleeing deliberate terror attacks on them as government forces and rebel groups battle for territory. Rape and torture abound.

In the latest of many reports of civilian slaughter, opposition activists claimed April 21 that government forces had killed at least 80 people — and as many as 250 — in a strategic town south of Damascus. Soldiers and loyalist militias burned houses, seized field hospitals and killed the wounded, according to the activists. A British-based human rights group said the dead included men, women and children.

“They’re just scattered limbs and charred bodies that are completely unrecognizable,” a resident of the area told The New York Times. Video images posted online appeared to show a row of bodies wrapped in carpets or bags. Several had been shot in the face. The damaged town’s electricity and water reportedly have been cut off. The only bakery has been destroyed. Those who don’t flee face starvation.

That hideous pattern has been repeated in many other Syrian towns. And rebel bands — some led by Jihadist fighters from outside Syria — stand accused of similar massacres.

“After nearly two years of violence, over 4 million people are in need of assistance,” Jeff Palmer, executive director of Baptist Global Response, told Baptist Press in March. “The number of refugees from Syria [in neighboring Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon] is approaching 1 million, with 80 percent of those being women and children. IDPs [internally displaced persons] in Syria are now approaching 3 million.”

Palmer told of a field partner who traveled into affected areas and “witnessed heartbreaking scenes of human suffering and darkness. In one area, a package of seven pieces of pita bread, a staple food, was selling for US $4. In another area, one liter of fuel was going for $10 — the equivalent of about $40 per gallon.”

Most Southern Baptist relief work so far has focused on Syrian refugees in surrounding countries. But the massive suffering inside Syria cannot be ignored, despite the danger involved in delivering aid. “We have had four project sites, with three being outside the country and one inside,” Palmer said. “Now, because of the deepening crisis in the country, we feel compelled to mobilize more resources through trusted partners inside Syria, while still supporting work in the refugee areas in Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq.” The aid will include staple foods, medicine and hygiene supplies, shelter, heaters and oil, clothing, blankets, mattresses, carpets and survival-based business assistance.

We mourn the victims of the Boston attack because they are innocents and because they are our own. The death of an 8-year-old boy breaks our hearts. The tragedy hits close to home. The seemingly endless violence in Syria, meanwhile, seems far away, impersonal.

But I can’t forget the Syrian refugee family I met last fall in a Jordanian border town. The Muslim father and mother had crossed the Syria-Jordan border with their five children. They had watched in horror as their teenage son was shot in the head in an ambush. As he lay bleeding in his mother’s arms, she screamed for help. A soldier approached, gun pointed. Their 4-year-old son, who rarely speaks, stood and held up his arms. “I beg you, Uncle, don't hurt us anymore. Have mercy on us,” he appealed.

The child’s eloquent words must have moved the soldier, who took the wounded older brother to a hospital for treatment. The whole family later made it into Jordan, where they found comfort and aid from a Christian church that helps many refugees. The older boy has recovered, but walks haltingly and needs physical therapy.

The Syrian crisis isn’t far away for me, because I have looked into the eyes of mothers, fathers and children who are suffering its consequences. But you don’t have to go to the Syrian border to sense their suffering. If you follow Christ, you can look through His eyes, feel with His heart and touch with His hands. He is inside Syria right now, seeking and comforting the lost and the suffering — just as He was at the finish line in Boston.

“Seeing the people, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd. Then He said to His disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few’” (Matthew 9:36-37, NASB).

When you think of Boston, remember Syria, too.
(Contributions to relief ministry among Syrian refugees can be made by visiting www.imb.org/syrianrefugees
and designating “Syria relief” in the comment line. For updates on how God is at work through the crisis in Syria and ways to pray and help, email love4syria@pobox.com)

For Middle East, harvest time is now

There’s a question that keeps Jack Logan* awake at night: Who is praying for the people of Syria?

Not just because a murderous civil war is tearing Syria apart, though that tragedy is unfolding. Not just because millions of Syrians are suffering and need help, though they do.

Who is praying for the Syrians God is drawing to Himself in the midst of great struggle? (See stories about ministry response among Syrian Muslim refugees at http://www.imb.org/main/news/details.asp?StoryID=11287&LanguageID=1709.) They aren’t embracing Christ because Christians are helping them survive tough times. Like so many others in the region, they are seeking truth because all else is collapsing around them.

Logan, a Christian worker and strategist based in the Middle East, has seen it before.

“Whenever there’s a war and people are affected, the Lord opens up doors to give us access to people that we really never had before,” Logan says. “It happened in 2006 during the war between Hezbollah [the Lebanon-based Shiite Muslim group] and Israel, which opened up unprecedented opportunities for us in an area that we had not had access to before.”

The same thing is going on now, as Syrians stream out of their embattled homeland — and as the peoples of the Middle East continue to cope with the changes unleashed by “Arab Spring” political/social movements across the region.

“My job is developing strategy for engaging the lost, the unreached and unengaged peoples for this part of the world,” Logan reflects. “But when we’re presented with these opportunities, it’s pretty reactionary. It’s humbling, but at the same time it’s incredibly exciting, because we see the Lord moving in ways that we never expected. I don’t know how to explain it. I just know that in times like these, we have to have our senses tuned to what the Lord is doing. Hundreds of thousands of people that we had no access to inside of their country, we now do. It takes giving up our own agenda and saying, ‘What do we need to sacrifice in order to get to these people that God has put on our back door?’

“During these crises, this Arab Spring, this stirring of peoples across the Arab world, God is creating opportunities like we’ve never had before to reach people at a point of need, to embody and proclaim the Gospel.”

Yes, the wider region is experiencing unpredictable turmoil. Yes, violence and persecution have increased. Yes, it’s dangerous to be a follower of Christ in certain places. Yet amid the ongoing crisis, the Arab world has become a harvest field for the Gospel. But after generations of sowing seeds in rock-hard ground, how many Christians believe it?

“The harvest is now,” Logan insists. “A few years ago I’m not sure I would have believed that myself. But it’s not only believable right now, it is a reality. We’re not preparing the harvest; we are working in a harvest field. This has to be ingrained in our expectations. People look at the Middle East and they see a barren land. They see sand and desert and dry land, not just physically but spiritually, and they look at it as an unreachable place. But our expectations are most often defined by past experience and present realities, when they should be based on what we believe God is going to do.

“If we believe we’re working in a harvest field, then we’ll give up anything to make Christ known and worshipped in the darkest of places. I want the church in the United States to believe that. I want us [workers in the region] to believe that.”

Sounds a little like Hebrews 11. Earlier followers of the Lord experienced some very tough sledding in the Middle East — before and after the birth of the Christian church — and they turned the known world upside down by faith. Today, some of the most faithful and courageous heirs of that tradition are Muslim-background followers of Christ. Many have come to Him after experiencing dreams and visions, after counting the cost of obedience, after paying a steep price. I sat in a church with one such believer in Egypt earlier this year and listened to him gently challenge Christian-background brothers to overcome their fear and timidity in the face of opposition.

“Christians have a problem with understanding their own religion, because if they understand their faith they’re going to make real change,” he told listeners. “The church has to move; it is not moving toward those from other backgrounds.”

A veteran Egyptian pastor leaned over and confided: “He is the future of the church in Egypt.”

Opposition is a given. Always has been. Followers of Christ who understand that recognize the signs of the times and keep moving.

“These are people who are walking in darkness, who are blinded by the god of this world,” Logan says. “We have the light of the Gospel inside of us. Do we perceive ourselves as Gospel bearers in a dark world? If so, then we have a responsibility to take the Gospel to the darkest places. Jesus told us to take the Gospel to all nations and make disciples. We know there will be people from every tribe, language, people and nation before the throne, so we know that there will be people from the Middle East. There will be Syrians, there will be Sunni, there will be Alawites, there will be Kurds, there will be Druze, there will be Palestinians, there will be Salafists, there will be activists, there will be secularists, there will be all these people who will worship Jesus.

“I hope the church will consider what it’s going to take for that to happen. We cannot get to the unreached and unengaged doing things the way that we have done. It’s going to take a higher tolerance of risk. It’s going to take a greater resolve to sacrifice, to give up and to follow Christ with abandon. What we really have to come to grips with is: Do we really love Jesus that much? People ask me all the time when I’m in the States, ‘Isn’t it dangerous?’ I’m not sure that’s the right question. Ultimately, there’s nowhere safe these days. The real question is: Is Jesus worth it? If it’s about ourselves, our safety, our future, or even doing it for the sake of the nations, that’s not enough.

“It’s got to be about Jesus.”

*(Name changed)