Big Country
Recently we just got back from an amazing trip at The March for Life in Washington DC. God was very present throughout our journey there and touched us each uniquely. It was humbling to see the ways in which God would work through us as we applied some of the things we have learned this month studying Pope John Paul II’s call for a new evangelization and what that means in each of our lives. John Paul II stated, “To be Christians means to be missionaries, to be apostles. It is not enough to discover Christ – you must bring him to others.” This has weighed heavily on our hearts, it is the duty of every Christian to go forth and make disciples of every nation. I always felt that I was doing this because of my involvement in youth ministry, but what we have discovered is that with every encounter lies the opportunity to share Christ with others. So as we began our journey we really prayed that God would open our eyes to opportunities and that he would bring people into our paths to share with them the Gospel and the reason for our hope. One day before the march we were walking to visit some of the museums when John-Paul saw this beggar. The day before we left on the march we were studying about evangelizing to the poor, and I think the words of Matthew 25 and “he who shuts his ear to the cry of the poor will himself also call and not be heard” (Prov 21:13) were still burning in our hearts. So we felt the need to try and help this man and possibly share with him the reason for our hope. We quickly learned that the man’s name was Country and that his biggest need at the time was hunger. We offered to walk with him around the corner to this restaurant and buy him some food and he accepted our offer. As we walked with him we learned his struggles and he shared with us the reason he was in this predicament was because there just wasn’t enough jobs in DC. We asked if this was something he had been praying about and he quickly shared with us he believed in God but didn’t believe in Jesus Christ and didn’t believe in heaven or hell. As we continued to talk with him we found ourselves at the beginning of the line so we purchased our food and looked for a seat. We hoped that we could sit down and share with him more but all the seats were taken and he just wanted to take it to go so we just walked outside and felt the strong need to pray with him. We asked if we could pray for him before we left and he humbly accepted. Through our studies this year we have learned that it is not our words that bring about conversion but the Spirit of the Lord. So we prayed a loud for that Spirit to come upon our new friend that he too would come to know the love and peace of Christ that truly satisfies our hunger and all our needs. We concluded our prayer and went on our way and the whole time up to that point my focus was how can we evangelize to this man, but what I didn’t see is how God through this man was evangelizing us. He was bringing to life what we were learning, He was answering our prayers to bring people to us to share the Good news with, and most of all he was driving home the sense of emergency in Pope John Paul II’s words, “The moment has come to commit all of the Church’s energies to a new evangelization and to the mission ad gentes*. No believer in Christ, no institution of the Church can avoid this supreme duty: to proclaim Christ to all peoples”. It is my prayer that our eyes will be opened to the spiritually and materially poor around us, and that we may constantly feel a strong sense of urgency to go forth and proclaim Christ to the nations.
* Ad gentes is the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on the Missionary Activity of the Church, it is Latin for “to the nations”
