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| Downtown Harrisburg, PA. I was visiting this city for the Allume conference... the conference that God decided to use this girl in an unexpected way and forever change her. |
God asked me to go to a pub. I had first seen it the night my friend and I pulled into town for the writing and blogging
conference we were going to attend. The pub was in a brick building complete with an Irish name and a few bearded hipsters sitting out front. Two nights later, I felt this strong prompting to go. The thing is, I have never once stepped foot into a bar. I argued with God. I tried waiting for this strange knowing to just go away.
God I don’t know what to do. I’ve never been in a bar. Do I just sit down? Are there servers? Do I order at the bar? What if it’s crowded? What if I get hit on? God? Really?! The pub?! I am at a Christian blogging conference and there’s fundamentalists here and what if they see me? God didn’t answer my stream of questions and excuses. I just knew I had to go.
So I did. I walked towards the unknown, and as I approached the pub the feeling lifted and I knew I had gone as far as God needed me to go. So I turned around and walked towards a promising bench to put pen to paper. As I walked, I smiled. By chance, one young man smiled back so I said “Hi.”
As I sat on the bench, I penned these words:
God, I don’t want to be where it’s safe. Okay, maybe I do, but really, I sense the weight of the way You love people—the way life is so messy—and the mystery of the way You make it beautiful. I don’t want to crave the affection or admiration or recognition of other Christians. I have the Hope of the world, they have the hope of the world, and You see ME! (Wow!) You see me in a room full of people I think are incredible. You see me and I can bear Your Glory, the Hope of the world, in this beat-up, messed-up vessel and You can mysteriously let me shine… I don’t need them all to know my name to change the world with the gospel (and I couldn’t change the world anyways—that’s an only-God thing).
Perhaps, five or ten minutes went by when someone sat down on the bench I was occupying.
It was the young man to whom I had said hi, whose path I would have never crossed had I not walked towards a pub and turned around. Immediately, I worried he thought I was hitting on him with my “hi.”
“Oh,” I said wide-eyed and big, “I need you to know, I am married. I didn’t say hi for any reason other than to be nice.”
He repeated back, “You are married?”
And I heard it. A familiar accent with soft R’s and heavy D’s. “Where are you from? I know that accent.”
“The Ivory Coast.” (Which he had to repeat for me 3 times before I could understand.) His skin was dark-chocolate, his nose was wide and his eyes were dark, but his gaze was soft and full of youth. I relayed my little bit of connection to the Ivory Coast.
And then I knew. I sensed the stirring of the Spirit. I needed to put Jesus in this conversation.
“Um…” I paused to work up my nerve. “Do you know Jesus?”
He looked a little puzzled. “No.”
“Would you like to know about Him?” I braced myself for the impending rejection.
“Yes. I think I would.”
I was shocked. How did that work? I took the longest thirty seconds to collect my thoughts.
I told him of my battle with depression and anxiety attacks, of cutting on myself and how God rushed in and set me free. I told him of Jesus’ death and resurrection. I told him of how we can try so hard in this life to make something happen, and somehow when we stop striving so hard for our own way—when we open our life to God and allow Him to be in control—somehow we have a joy and a peace that cannot swayed by circumstance. I told him of sin and the shame we carry when we do what we know to be wrong. I told him of God’s forgiveness.
I was jumbled. I spoke like a California Valley Girl. My words were full of like, totally, um, seriously, and ya know. I reached a point when I knew it was time. I asked, “Would you like to know Jesus?”
And the seven words that forever changed both our lives: “I think so. What do I do?”
I told him what to do. About the little step of faith. How the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but it’s the power of salvation for those who believe (1 Cor. 1:18). How when you put even a little faith in God, He meets you right where you are and proves Himself to you.
We prayed a simple repeat-after-me kind of prayer on a city bench. Hundreds must have passed by seeking to fill their emptiness with alcohol and women…while one man allowed Christ to invade his life.
I gave him my Bible, put him in the book of John and told him how precious my Bible was to me. I told him that I really wanted him to have it, but he wasn’t allowed to take it if he was just going to throw it on a shelf and never look at it. I thought of all my precious notes scribbled in the margins—God’s words to me. How the Bread of Life had nourished me and spoke to me and how I was breaking off this precious gift—Word of Life—and it could now nourish him. The Word is life and sustenance whether you are a white woman or West African man. I gave him my card and told him to email me when he found a church.
I left and went to the prayer room at the conference. I sat down and wept—like boo-hoo cried, like snot running down my face, like can’t keep the sobs quiet kind of weeping.
How did that work? It shouldn’t have worked.
In what world does a white surburban housewife who looks a bit like a librarian when her hair is pulled back tight get to lead a black man from the Ivory Coast who is in the States to finish his Master’s degree to Christ??
Not this one! And I guess that’s it, I didn’t do any leading. I don’t know how God was able to use me. But He did.
I penned this simple prayer before I left for the conference:
“Surrendering my expectations for my blog, for my writing, for the conference, surrendering my lofty ambitions and my parenting ideals so that God can raise to life His Glory in Me. In MUCH or LESS let Christ be glorified in me!”
I am wrecked. My plans, my writing, my life, my expectations all wrecked. I am not an evangelist. I am an introvert. An introvert who just happened to be obedient to a very strange prompting to walk to a pub. My words were awkward and simple. Yet somehow the mystery of Christ’s Glory happened.
“For God, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not ourselves” (2 Corinthians 4:6-7).
God puts his light in earthen pots—of clay, dirt, earth. Earthen ware. Completely incapable of having light shine through it. And yet, God’s ways are mysterious, and He delights in doing that which makes no human sense. God doesn’t shine brightest where we are talented and gifted and fabulous—God shines brightest where we are the most human—the most broken. God shines the brightest where we can’t take any of the credit.
My life was once full of ambition, full of ways I could use my talents. I just want to be dirt now. I just want to shine God’s glory. I—broken—just want to reach a lost and broken world.
“God uses the foolish things of this world to confound the wise” (1 Cor 1:27). And like Paul, what I once counted gain, I now count as loss (Phil 3:7)…I want to be a fool.
I went to a conference wanting people to know my name, to find my place in the writing world, but I found He knows my name and I get to wear HIS name…
…and really, it’s HIS name that makes the difference in the world.
***Dear readers, maybe I could ask you to pray for me? That God would direct my paths. That I would have the courage to do whatever He would ask. That I would not be swayed by emotion but rather the leading of the Spirit. And pray for this man (whose name I prefer to keep private) that God would meet him in his step of faith. That he would find Christian community. That God would somehow speak to him through that English NASB Bible. That he would daily choose to live his life for Jesus and His Glory.
By Grace,
Amanda
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