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One Lesson From Morocco

When I was young, our house was adjacent to some woods that stretched for miles in which a good-sized river created deep swimming holes that helped cool the body in the hot summer sun--a perfect playground if ever there was one. This was before children spent their weekends in organized sports activities under the direct supervision of adults; for us kids, it was a case of “no rules, just right” to purloin Outback’s slogan. We got to play games that we invented, governing them by our own code of conduct. It was a different era and time was easy to lose track of. The day typically ended when we got hungry. Walking back home through the woods, depending on how close the sun was to setting, could be a scary thing if one was alone – lots of rustles in the leaves, the creaking of trees rubbing together in the breeze, branches snapping underfoot, all served to fuel my active imagination and not in a good way. However, if my brother or sister was with me, there was no fear; it was simply the way home. I often wondered why their presence made a difference, after all, my brother was seven years younger than me and my sister was about a foot shorter. What would they be able to do should danger arise? The answer was nothing; it simply boiled down to not being alone. There was comfort through the simple presence of one other person.

Fast forward 45 years to this recent trip to Morocco in North Africa. The “rustles in the leaves, the creaking of trees and the snapping of branches” have been replaced by the “governmental threat of expulsion, whispered comments of neighbors that could expose one as a believer, and the daily calls to prayer that reverberate from mosques throughout the country, reminding one of the enslaving grip of Islam.” But for our supported friends in that country, and particularly the believers that are spread out in the smaller towns and villages, all of those “threats” could perhaps be more easily endured if there was simply another believer that they could “walk with” and really pour their hearts out to. That was the value of this most recent trip, and I want to thank you for the opportunity to go and be an encourager and to be encouraged so much by those that are there, laboring for the gospel. It was a joy (and convicting) to see their love for the people of Morocco, to see how they see fields as white unto harvest with such longing that tears are easily shed at the blindness of the people. I felt like I was traveling with Jesus as he rode towards Jerusalem and wept at the people’s unbelief. One of our friends, looking out over the city of Fes spread out below in the valley, had tears in his eyes as he asked privately, “Lord, do you have any in this city that are yours?” What a testimony of lives poured out for the sake of the gospel. They are doing an unbelievable job and demonstrate such love and compassion, easily segueing almost every conversation into the reason for the Hope they have. But for the few believers in Morocco (perhaps 1 in every 32,000), and to some extent, our supported friends, the loneliness is real…

Imagine being alone in your faith. God has opened your eyes to the truth of His Word and you have embraced Him but your family is angry and threatens to disown you and shouting matches become a daily occurrence, your aspirations for a job are now compromised, you desire to marry in the faith but there is no one of the opposite gender in your world that shares your faith, you have no place to go for fellowship with other believers, you have virtually no access to Christian literature. If you are an older woman, you are likely to be functionally illiterate as you were never taught to read, you are “alone”. Yes, God is with you but He is not a “skin face” and it may be harder to take Him at His Word when there is no one there on a regular basis to explain what His Word means. For our supported friends, Jesus and His Word become vitally important as that is often the only source of “food” available to them.

Contrast that with a typical Sunday morning at New Covenant. There is no threat in traveling to church, a Sunday School has been prepared that teaches some life lessons from God’s Word, there is a half-hour of fellowship with like-minded believers, there is organized singing that allows you to express your worship through songs of praise, there is corporate prayer for the needs of the body, there is an in-depth opening of God’s word in the morning message, there is a time of remembrance when corporately we celebrate Christ’s broken body and shed blood on our behalf, there are CareGroups we can attend that allow us to share more intimately and to demonstrate care for one another. You have fifteen or more Bibles floating around the house somewhere that you have picked up over the years, you have Christian books that you received for free from attending a conference that you haven’t even read yet, you can read and write and you can have meetings in your home without closing the drapes or the windows in case someone on the street sees who is visiting you or overhears you talking about Jesus. Yet perhaps, because we have access to so much fellowship and material, our focus simply on the sufficiency of Jesus and God’s Word may be moved more to the back burner.

Here’s what I hope for and what I would encourage all of us to pray for. That our supported friends around the world would be encouraged by the increasing presence of other national believers, that there would be mature Christians that would speak into their lives as well so they wouldn’t always be being drained but that their spiritual tanks would at least occasionally get replenished, that they would know the joy of fellowship. And, that we who are satiated with fellowship and instruction and access to material and religious freedom would grow in our passion simply for God and for the gospel of Jesus Christ. For all of us, wouldn’t it be great if, regardless of our location in the world, we were able to truly say “for to me, to live is Christ” and that we would be fully satisfied with that.

Walking through the woods with you,
Ross