“Just then, I heard a voice in my head that said ‘Jump!’ Who do you think it was who spoke to me?”
For the past few months, we’ve been helping a retired Adventist pastor and his family with a church-planting project in his home in a large suburb across the river from Ubon Ratchathani. Every Sabbath morning, a group of neighbor kids comes to church. We’ve been telling the kids Bible stories and teaching them Christian songs in English and Thai. It has been a lot of fun, and our ability to communicate in Thai has improved.
One Sabbath, I was telling the children a story about when I lived in India. We had just finished teaching them the song, “Jesus Loves Me,” and we had shared with them that Jesus is like our big brother who is always watching over us. Almost all of the kids in the group were Buddhist, and for some it was the first they had learned about Jesus. This was the story I told them:
“One day, I was walking alongside a busy road near the market. I had traveled by car to do some business in another city, and I was trying to find a certain restaurant. It had been a busy day. I had finished my work, and I was hungry. Somebody had told me about a great restaurant, but I was having difficulty finding the place. It was late in the day, and starting to get dark, so I parked the car and got out to go look for the restaurant on foot.
“As I walked along the busy road, I kept glancing over my shoulder to check the vehicle traffic that whizzed by. There was no sidewalk, and I sometimes had to step into the road to dodge people, dogs and other obstacles in my path.”
“Then, my phone rang. So now I was walking along the busy road trying to avoid the obstacles in front of me, watching the traffic and trying to find the restaurant while talking on my phone.
“As I walked, I came to a very large billboard next to the road. I couldn’t see what was behind it, and there wasn’t much space between the billboard and the passing traffic.
“Just as I reached the edge of the billboard, which was on my left, I heard a voice in my head say ‘Jump!’ Without even thinking, I jumped to my right. As I jumped, a huge bull reared its head and horns out from behind the billboard, barely missing me. If I hadn’t jumped just when I did, the bull would have gored me in the stomach.”
“So,” I asked the kids, “Who do you think it was who spoke to me? Who warned me that I was in danger? Who was watching over me?”
One girl had been listening intently as I told my story. She was one of the older kids in the group, about 12 or 13 years old. She was from a Buddhist family, and this was her first time in church. She had never heard Bible stories before. She had never been to Sabbath School in her life. The only Christian song she knew was “Jesus Loves Me,” which she had heard for the first time a few minutes earlier. She didn’t really know anything about Christians or the God we believe in. Yet, when I asked the question, she answered with almost no hesitation: “Jesus.”
At times I have wondered if it’s really worth all the struggle and cost for us to come all the way around the world to do what we do. Most days we just plug along, trying our best to learn the language and make sense of a culture that is foreign to us. We’re outsiders, and we make mistakes all the time. We misunderstand people, and they misunderstand us. Even the simplest tasks can seem impossible when nothing seems to make sense. And the voice of doubt whispers, How can we ever hope to reach people? Is it even worth it?
And then, a young Buddhist girl reminds me why we’re here. Jesus. Period.
