Previous Reflections
REFLECTIONS
October 18, 2009
I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.
John 4:35
A Call to Help
John Steinbeck once traveled throughout our land with his faithful dog. He documented his adventure in the book, Travels with Charlie. It was a delightful book telling of the places he went and the people he met along the way. A trip like his sounds like fun for the sights one might see and for the people one might meet. But reality says that I really don’t have that much adventure in me. A quartet of college boys do. They took a summer to travel around the nation just as John Steinbeck did. The purpose was to discover how people felt about God.
From Dallas, Texas the quartet headed west to New Mexico in search of random interviews with people they would meet along the way. The questions they would ask were unplanned, but they wanted to learn how people felt about God, whether they knew who Jesus was, and what they believed happens after death. They set out to survey the nation, not to change it. They professed no answers themselves, although their love of Jesus could not be hidden.
The travels took them around the perimeter of the nation and the people they met were as varied as the terrain they traveled. The answers to the questions they asked are documented in a movie they made entitled One Nation Under God.[1] The responses were sometimes inspiring, often disturbing, but always revealing. The interviews revealed confusion about God, misconceptions about Jesus, and fears about death. But they also revealed a deep concern about all three. They revealed that people have searched for answers and most often found unsatisfying ones. They revealed to us a call to help.
Certainly we find great resistance to the subject of God and even a greater one to Jesus. But there is a call to us to help with the answers to questions about God’s love, salvation from Jesus Christ, and life after death. And that means we have a great opportunity to tell the story, and a great opportunity to live the story.
The adventure of four college boys uncovered a call to us to help in our communities, our neighborhoods, and even our homes. Even today the world is just as Jesus found it to be. "The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field." [2] We are those workers.
“You are the light of the world.”
RichardÌ
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