Part 4 (1/2)

* reports of 1.75 billion people who live on less than $1.25 a day?1 What do we see? ”When He saw the mult.i.tudes, He was moved with compa.s.sion for them, because they were weary and scattered, like sheep having no shepherd” (Matt. 9:36).

This word compa.s.sion is one of the oddest in Scripture. The New Testament Greek lexicon says this word means ”to be moved as to one's bowels . . . (for the bowels were thought to be the seat of love and pity).”2 It shares a root system with splanchnology, the study of the visceral parts. Compa.s.sion, then, is a movement deep within-a kick in the gut.

Perhaps that is why we turn away. Who can bear such an emotion? Especially when we can do nothing about it. Why look suffering in the face if we can't make a difference?

Yet what if we could? What if our attention could reduce someone's pain? This is the promise of the encounter.

Then Peter said, ”Silver and gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk.” And he took him by the right hand and lifted him up, and immediately his feet and ankle bones received strength. So he, leaping up, stood and walked and entered the temple with them-walking, leaping, and praising G.o.d. (Acts 3:68) What if Peter had said, ”Since I don't have any silver or gold, I'll keep my mouth shut”? But he didn't. He placed his mustard-seed- sized deed (a look and a touch) in the soil of G.o.d's love. And look what happened.

The thick, meaty hand of the fisherman reached for the frail, thin one of the beggar. Think Sistine Chapel and the high hand of G.o.d. One from above, the other from below. A holy helping hand. Peter lifted the man toward himself. The cripple swayed like a newborn calf finding its balance. It appeared as if the man would fall, but he didn't. He stood. And as he stood, he began to shout, and pa.s.sersby began to stop. They stopped and watched the cripple skip.

Don't you think he did? Not at first, mind you. But after a careful step, then another few, don't you think he skipped a jig? Parading and waving the mat on which he had lived?

The crowd thickened around the trio. The apostles laughed as the beggar danced. Other beggars pressed toward the scene in their ragged coverings and tattered robes and cried out for their portion of a miracle.

”I want my healing! Touch me! Touch me!”

So Peter complied. He escorted them to the clinic of the Great Physician and invited them to take a seat. ”His name, . . . faith in His name, has made this man strong . . . Repent therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refres.h.i.+ng may come from the presence of the Lord” (vv. 16, 19).

Blotted out is a translation of a Greek term that means ”to obliterate” or ”erase completely.” Faith in Christ, Peter explained, leads to a clean slate with G.o.d. What Jesus did for the legs of this cripple, he does for our souls. Brand-new!

An honest look led to a helping hand that led to a conversation about eternity. Works done in G.o.d's name long outlive our earthly lives.

Let's be the people who stop at the gate. Let's look at the hurting until we hurt with them. No hurrying past, turning away, or s.h.i.+fting of eyes. No pretending or glossing over. Let's look at the face until we see the person.

A couple in our congregation lives with the heartbreaking reality that their son is homeless. He ran away when he was seventeen, and with the exception of a few calls from prison and one visit, his parents have had no contact with him for twenty years. His mom allowed me to interview her at a leaders.h.i.+p gathering. As we prepared for the discussion, I asked her why she was willing to disclose her story.

”I want to change the way people see the homeless. I want them to stop seeing problems and begin seeing mothers' sons.”

In certain Zulu areas of South Africa, people greet each other with a phrase that means ”I see you.”3 Change begins with a genuine look.

And continues with a helping hand. I'm writing this chapter by a dim light in an Ethiopian hotel only a few miles and hours removed from a modern-day version of this story.

Bzuneh Tulema lives in a two-room, dirt-floored, cinder-block house at the end of a dirt road in the dry hills of Adama. Maybe three hundred square feet. He's painted the walls a pastel blue and hung two pictures of Jesus, one of which bears the caption ”Jesus the Goos [sic] Shepherd.” During our visit the air is hot, the smell of cow manure is pungent, and I don't dare inhale too deeply for fear I'll swallow a fly.

Across from me, Bzuneh beams. He wears a Nike cap with a crooked bill, a red jacket (in spite of furnace-level heat), and a gap-toothed smile. No king was ever prouder of a castle than he is of his four walls. As the thirty-five-year-old relates his story, I understand.

Just two years ago he was the town drunk. He drank away his first marriage and came within a prayer of doing the same with the second. He and his wife were so consumed with alcohol that they farmed out their kids to neighbors and resigned themselves to a drunken demise.

But then someone saw them. Like Peter and John saw the beggar, members of an area church took a good look at their situation. They began bringing the couple food and clothing. They invited them to attend wors.h.i.+p services. Bzuneh was not interested. However, his wife, Bililie, was. She began to sober up and consider the story of Christ. The promise of a new life. The offer of a second chance. She believed.

Bzuneh was not so quick. He kept drinking until one night a year later he fell so hard he knocked a dent in his face that remains to this day. Friends found him in a gully and took him to the same church and shared the same Jesus with him. He hasn't touched a drop since.

The problem of poverty continued. The couple owned nothing more than their clothing and mud hut. Enter Meskerem Trango, a World Vision worker. He continued the looking-and-touching ministry. How could he help Bzuneh, a recovering alcoholic, get back on his feet? Jobs in the area were scarce. Besides, who would want to hire the village sot? A gift of cash was not the solution; the couple might drink it away.

Meskerem sat with Bzuneh and explored the options. He finally hit upon a solution. Cow manure. He arranged a loan through the World Vision microfinance department. Bzuneh acquired a cow, built a shed, and began trapping the cow droppings and turning them into methane and fertilizer. Bililie cooked with the gas, and he sold the fertilizer. Within a year Bzuneh had repaid the loan, bought four more cows, built his house, and reclaimed his kids.

”Now I have ten livestock, thirty goats, a TV set, a tape recorder, and a mobile phone. Even my wife has a mobile phone.” He smiled. ”And I dream of selling grain.”

It all began with an honest look and a helping hand. Could this be G.o.d's strategy for human hurt? First, kind eyes meet desperate ones. Next, strong hands help weak ones. Then, the miracle of G.o.d. We do our small part, he does the big part, and life at the Beautiful Gate begins to be just that.

When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compa.s.sion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

(Mark 6:34 NIV) Gracious Lord, in the Bible you are called ”the One who sees me,” and I know that your eyes are always upon me to guide and protect and bless and correct. You have given me eyes too. Grant me the power to use them to truly see. Help me see those you put in my path-really see them, with all their hurts, their desires, their longings, their needs, their joys, and their challenges. As you open my eyes, prompt me to open wide my arms to offer whatever help and encouragement I have to give. In Jesus' name I pray, amen.

CHAPTER 8.

Persecution:

Prepare for It; Resist It

The priests, the captain of the temple,

and the Sadducees came upon them.

-ACTS 4:1

On April 18, 2007, three Christians in Turkey were killed for their beliefs. Necati Aydin was one of them. He was a thirty-five-year-old pastor in the city of Malatya.

He nearly didn't go to his office that morning. He'd been traveling for ten days and his wife, Semse, wanted him to stay home and rest. She fed breakfast to their two children, Elisha and Esther, and took them to school. Upon returning, she walked softly so as not to awaken her husband. Even so, he stirred, squinted, opened his arms, and admitted his weariness. ”I don't want to get up today.”

But he did. There was much work to do. Only 0.2 percent of the mainly Muslim nation follows Jesus. Ironic. The land once knew the sandal prints of the apostle Paul and provided a stage for the first churches. But today? Turkish Christ wors.h.i.+ppers number less than 153,000 in a nation of 76 million.1 People such as Necati live to change that. He pulled his weary body out of bed and got ready for the day.

As Semse remembers and retells the events of that morning, she pauses between sentences. Her round cheeks flush with pink. Dark hair sweeps in a wave across her forehead. Until this point she's been able to contain the emotion. She described the attack, the cruelty, and the harshness of sudden widowhood without tears. But at this sentence, they press through. ”My dear husband walked out the door at eleven. I was waiting for him to get on the elevator. There he smiled at me one last time, but I didn't know that was the last smile. That's what I'll always remember . . .”