Our favorite family of missionaries parented by two former Colgate students will not be able to be with us just before Thanksgiving this year, as they have the past two years. They have recently relocated to the field; I am sharing with you a story related in the email announcing their arrival. I am being discreet about their identity and location for security reasons. This is typical of their God-adventures:

We had an overnight stay in the United Arab Emirates on the way here. While we were at dinner, we struck up a conversation with our waiter, named Lal, who was from Nepal. After my family went upstairs to bed, I stayed behind to talk to Lal. Knowing a bit about the spiritual openness that has come over Nepal in the past few years, I jumped right in and asked him if he knew about “Yeshu Crist”. He said yes, he did know something about Jesus because his mother was a Christian. He said that his Buddhist father had divorced her, and married another woman who shared his religion. Lal then said that his mother went to a church where they sang loudly. What he couldn’t understand however, was why they sang so loudly, or what they were singing about. He said that even though he was a Buddhist like the rest of his people, it was OK for his mother to be a Christian, even though he didn’t understand anything about her faith. At this point, I asked him if he wanted me to explain why the people in his mother’s church sang so loudly, and he said, “Oh, please do!” And so I explained the Gospel to him, plain and simple, yet in phrases he could understand. After I was done, he looked at me and said, “If this is true, then Christianity is the best religion in the world. Now I see why the Christians sing so loudly, and they should!” He continued, “Christianity is better than any other religion, it is better than my religion (Buddhism), better than Hinduism, surely better than this religion (we were in Arabia) – it is because Jesus is better than all the other men (Buddha, etc.). I think that when I return to Nepal later this year I will be baptized at my mother’s church.” And I said, “Then you will sing loudly too!” We both laughed.

Friends, I don’t know how Lal’s spiritual journey will end. But then again, I don’t know how many of ours will either. What I do know is that God is always at work in the lives of people everywhere. Maybe you won’t meet a Buddhist waiter from Nepal in a Muslim country today, but I am sure that you will come across someone whom God is working in. The question is, will you recognize it, and will you have the faith to join God in his work by sharing the plain, simple truth, that in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting men’s sins against them (2 Cor. 5:19)? Let me encourage you today to share the news that can make people from every culture sing loudly.

Seems like our missionary friends and those of us at HBF are on the same page: praying for God to intervene in the lives of individuals, and for sensitivity to opportunities to share the Gospel with them. Let’s keep at it, encouraged by our prayer partners - especially during Thanksgiving and the holiday season, when we see many folks we don’t see other times of the year. Hopefully we can all sing a bit more loudly this year!