On Missions and Martyrdom…

What are you called to give?

I just completed a fairly substantial redesign of the website for an organization called LifeChange International… They partner with missionaries on 4 continents to serve the needs of people and share the love of Jesus… I’m very pleased to be involved with the organization and happy to help them use social media to raise awareness of the work that they do.

My first project with LifeChange was working with Jack Fairweather at Arise Ministries in Manila, the Philippines.  Arise has opened an orphanage outside of the city proper, where they take in kids off the street and give them a safe and loving home… I first wrote about Jack when we launched our GiveBack feature last summer… You can read those articles and see a video about Arise by following this link.

The funny thing is that I know Jack and his family… his daughter and mine are the same age and went to each others birthday parties before they sold all of their worldly goods and moved to the Philippines to live in a dorm with a dozen or so homeless, street kids.  I had talked to him about that move for six months and it still kinda stunned me when they actually did it.  Now we Skype occasionally and I think of him as “my friend in Manila.”

Jack and his family have given themselves to God in a very literal, measurable way that many of us never will.  Even for me and my wife, as we move back into church staff ministry, the sacrifice isn’t as “real”… We still have a nice home, two cars, other stuff we like…

I wonder how I would respond to the call of God that Jack has on his life…

OR EVEN MORE POIGNANT, a woman in our church named Semsa (say: Shem-sa) Aydin, whose husband was martyred for his faith in Turkey in 2007,  shared her testimony on Sunday in halting ESL that somehow communicated the message of Jesus more eloquently than any preacher I’ve ever heard…

Semsa’s husband knew the men that murdered him for weeks before his death… They had been coming into the church and asking questions about Jesus.  And as a pastor, he had been talking with them, answering their questions and trying to share Jesus’ story to them and his own story of conversion from Islam.

He told his wife that he knew they were false… He used the illustration of Judas’ betrayal… He somehow saw what was coming but felt that the call of God on his life was to keep serving these men and sharing Christ with them…

On April 18, they made another appointment to talk about Jesus…

And they slit his throat.

I also thought about one young lady who was killed in the Columbine shooting, more than a decade ago… The shooters pointed guns at here and told her she would live if she would renounce her faith… she declined… they shot her…

What kind of faith?  What kind of relationship with Jesus makes a person do that?

There might be an answer in the life… or more pointedly in the death of Stephen (Acts 6)…

But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.

“Look,” he said, “I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”

At this they covered their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him, dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. (vs 55-58)