'God Help Me!'

I was at our annual international executive leadership meetings in the UK some days ago, and decided to take a walk during my lunch break. This particular city is approximately 40% Muslim (the UK total a little less than 5%), so this is a good place for ReachAcross to have its International Office. And this particular area seems to be almost totally Pakistani. Look at the buildings, and I'm sure I'm walking past a typical English street of town houses. Look at the signs and the people, and I--could be anywhere in the Middle East, or Central and South Asia.

As I rounded a corner, I heard someone behind me exclaiming, ‘God help me!’

'What do you want Him to do for you?'--I asked. (I'm generally a slow processor and would usually not come up with that sort of response, but I think perhaps God was in it.)

It turns out that the young man was  putting advertising leaflets for a computer repair firm in the mailboxes. He was taken aback by my question, and didn't seem to know what to say. I guess if he said, ‘nothing’, it would betray his Muslim convictions. (Don't want God to do anything for him?--of course he does!  And yet he probably didn’t want to get too personal. 

I tried to explain a bit about how God has already very richly helped us through Jesus. We parted after a brief conversation about why Jesus had to die on the Cross, and ended with a promise that I would pray for him.

Not all Muslims are willing to sit down and talk about Jesus, and what He means to us Christians, but many are. All the more reason to send as many workers as we can to Asia, Africa, and to the U.K.--and the U.S., and probably wherever any of us happens to live.

I'm reminded that I came to Christ at age 17 through a British evangelist who cared about a lonely West Texas kid who otherwise spent his time daydreaming in la-la land. 

God seems to love working cross-culturally, after all, He crossed the greatest cultural barrier there ever was. Maybe we should be ready to cross the street, cross town, or go wherever He wants? He'll be helping us!

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,  but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant . . . . (Phil 2:5-7, ESV)