“Grandpa” appeared out of nowhere, so short that one could hardly notice him in the crowd of soccer game-goers dispersing across fields in every direction. He found me and smiled a big, stained-teeth smile. Grandpa respectfully kissed my arms and hands over and over and over. He hugged his short-person head into my chest almost in reverence, like he had met his guardian angel. Grandpa had been hoping I was a Christian and had guessed right. Now he couldn’t contain himself. His heart spilled out all at once, “I love Jesus! I want more than anything for Him to come soon and make all things new. Thank you, thank you, Jesus, that I have met one of Your followers today!”
“Can I have your phone number?” I asked. “Can I visit your home?”
His body stiffened, and he was suddenly aware of the eyes all around him. “No. I will find you. It is better if I come to you.”
A few weeks later, this 80-year-old man rode his motorcycle for an hour and showed up on our back porch. More kisses. More enthusiasm. He admires Caucasians in general, and I think he was a little star-struck. His main desire was for a Bible, and we gave him several before leaving for our furlough in the States.
Right around Christmas, he came again. Stephanie showed him into our bedroom, where I was confined with a broken leg elevated on pillows. (We have resumed construction on our house that sat during furlough. As I was measuring for the roof, I tumbled off the ladder and straight to the ground—multiple fractures.)
Grandpa said he had made the long trip twice while we were on furlough but that our doors were closed. He asked for two more Bibles. One was to replace his own. Several friends had asked him for it and fought each other over it. The other, he wanted to send to his son, who is a Muslim teacher in another province. With enthusiasm like he was encouraging a favorite racehorse, he said, “I hope if my son reads it, he will understand about Jesus and teach his students! Many will come to our side!”
As we visited, I got to know Grandpa’s faith. He has a lot of knowledge of Islamic, Buddhist and Hindu beliefs, and he believed that they were compatible with Christianity. For example, Grandpa thought man came from fire, wind, earth and ice and that the wind goes back to God when you die, a Hindu idea. And from Islam, he understood that Adam and Eve were created in heaven and were sent down to the earth for refusing to bow down to Satan. He had other views about the afterlife and how there were punishments in the grave.
But then I read Genesis 1 and 2 with Grandpa, showing how God created the earth in six days and spoke us into existence, and then how we do not exist after we die except in God’s memory. I explained that the Bible was the ultimate authority, not the Quran or Hindu or Buddhist teachings and that there are things which he must unlearn.
When we talked about the Sabbath of creation, his eyes widened with surprise and delight as they opened to scenes he had been wondering about his whole life. “I want to study deeply into this,” he said. “Then I want to go with a few friends on a mission from town to town, dialoging unobtrusively at mosques. I would only share with people who want to learn, not the argumentative ones.” Every word was soaked with contagious enthusiasm.
I told him how important it was for his Great River People to have their own missionaries. After all, a tall white person like me would raise a lot of suspicion. I suggested that he and Grandma come live in our guest house for six months of intensive study. He said they have a twelve-year-old grandson living with them and going to school, that their rubber trees, which he taps daily by himself, are their only income, and that Grandma can’t leave the house because all their belongings would be unattended. He’s 81 now. It’s a long trip to our house, and the fuel is hard to afford. Please pray for some arrangement to work out so he can get the spiritual feast his soul is craving. Pray that he brings friends along to study, too.
This is not the first time we have had someone whisper to us that they are a Christian. One was at our mechanic shop when the young man filling our tires said, “I follow Jesus, and many of my friends do, too.” There have been others. Our team is convinced that there are many seekers hidden just below the surface, not knowing where to turn and stifled by fear of persecution.
We feel convicted to use social media to find these precious ones. We hope to teach them the Bible online, answering their questions. Many stumbling blocks to accepting Christ can be taken away—all through the privacy of their phone. We will travel around the country later to meet them in person and invite them to make Jesus the King of their life—counting the cost.
Thank you to everyone who showed us so much love on our furlough. We are more excited than ever to be your ambassadors in God’s harvest. Please pray that a second generation of missionaries will be raised up . . . of the Great River People . . . to the Great River People. I think one of those will be Grandpa Zacchaeus, the short man who could pick a child of Jesus from a crowd.
