Thursday, May 29, 2014

What If It Was Me?



Imagine opening your eyes one morning, you look at the ceiling to see a roof made of banana leaves.  You roll over, stand up, and look down to see the dirt floor you have been sleeping on.  You step outside your hut to see your Mom making breakfast: rice.  The same meal you ate yesterday.  Hopefully, if your Dad catches some fish today, you’ll have something other than rice to eat.  But you’re thankful, the fish are plentiful now, so you’ll probably be eating twice a day instead of once.  You wonder what today holds—you would like to go to school, but you don’t have the supplies—maybe you’ll walk all those miles to that tiny room they call a “school” just to see some of your friends.  Although it’s rainy season, which makes the walking harder, especially with no shoes.  Never mind, school is boring—the teacher is always sick anyway.  The last one died of some strange disease.  At least you won’t get that disease, your parents are Animists, and fear evil spirits, and do all those crazy rituals to keep sickness away—because if you ever did get sick, the nearest medical facility would take almost a week to reach on foot.


This isn’t story time.  This is reality for many people around the world.  Poor, sick, uneducated, hungry, and lost without Jesus.  This month alone, Global Infusion has 6 mission teams active in the field.  They will be in Asia, Central America, the Caribbean, and for the first time ever, GI has a domestic team operating in the United States.  We have many more trips coming up, full of people who have asked themselves, “What if it was me?”  What if it was me, or you, growing up in a village that provided no hope for tomorrow, the future or eternity.  Would I want someone to come and help feed my family, put me in school, or tell me about Jesus.



This summer, one of the mission trips I will be leading is a GI mission team to the Philippines.  The story described above is not uncharacteristic of a typical villager.  We will be traveling to remote areas to distribute food, school supplies, and preach the Gospel.


Please pray for our team, and all of our other GI teams.  I also strongly encourage you to consider supporting our Philippines outreach.  The more we raise, the more families we can feed, the more children we can provide school supplies for, and the more people we can reach with the  Gospel of Jesus Christ.