
I did not set out to be in the smelly ally of Wuhan, China at 3 in the morning staring into the coal black eyes of a short, foul-faced communist block leader. This was the furthest thing from my mind when I volunteered to do puppets for 12 kids in the small red brick, white columned church on a hill in middle America. The kids smiled and giggled as I hacked my way through a sing-along with a sore arm and a puppet mouth held wide open staring at the brown stains in the ceiling tiles. The kids forgot that performance but I did not. This was the first time I felt the burn, the burn comes from really deep down and lets us know in our own terms that there is more to existence than TV reruns on a couch every Thursday night. Even a 6th grader can feel that. I did not know what I wanted in that moment of clarity surrounded by kids and songs and purple velvet puppet stage cloth around my knees; but I did know what I did not want. I did not want to blend into the fabric of picket fences and pot lucks because something mattered out there and by God I was going to find it if it killed me.
The smelly ally was one of the first times I really understood what real fear was. Fear, not panic. Panic was the feeling I got when I jumped out of a tree branch hanging over a cliff into the black Chattahoochee river at midnight with 12 other brainless college students. No this was definitely fear. The icy kind of fear that starts at the back of your head and moves downward, first to your mouth making it hard to talk, then to your lungs restricting your breath to the point where your feel you are breathing in and out of a straw, then to your muscles which are both slow to respond and jerky. However it never seems to paralyze your brain. No, your brain races a thousand thoughts per second — how did I get here, what is he going to do with me, where is Jeffery, what is Jeffery’s mom going to say, man it stinks here, why won’t that guard say anything, why is he not moving towards us, I wish he would quit staring at us, did he see us place a hundred tracks in front of people’s doorsteps, he had to have seen us, dang I still have tracts in my hand, where is that Jeffery, what is he going to do with us, where is he going to bring us, I hope it smells better than here, what is my mom going to say when she find out, maybe she doesn’t need to know, thank God I see Jeffery, why is that guard not moving…
And then it happened. Nothing. Absolutely nothing happened. The soldier stood frozen, not speaking, not moving. Nothing. So we started walking away, around a corner and into the endless maze of 10 foot high brick concrete walls with doors cut into each side that stretched on for miles. We could hear a whistle and the mustering of other communist soldiers. But the leader had already let us get away. Thank God. I mean those words quite literally. On to a hundred or more doors cut into the crumbly concrete maze.
We got the tracts from a turnip farmer in Australia who said he heard God tell him to go to China. A couple of years later he ended up in Beijing. One night he rode his creaky chinese bike with a metal basket in front full of tracts into the grey concrete of Tinamin Square and handed out tracts to the students protesting there. He then went to sleep and, for the thousands that were massacred that night, those were the last words they read. “Why not get these tracts to everyone in China?” he thought. So he started with 100 cities in China. You know, small cities of 15 million people, like Wuhan. Apparently, sometimes we dream, other dreams find us.
The only problem was the 100 million Communists soldiers who typically do not take kindly to foreigners spreading religious propaganda in the middle of the night, among other things. This I experienced firsthand in the smelly alley. Fortunately, I also experienced something of a miracle at the same moment.
Foam puppets and hardened communist soldiers don’t have a large amount in common. But for me they do; both are a direct result of the persistent desire inside. It leads all of us places we would never dream, never dare, or never believe.
It strikes us all when we don’t want it to, and never when we’re ready.
And to think, I did not want to give up my rights and follow God blindly because I thought it would be boring. Slugs have made more informed decisions, I’m sure of it.
I had a maroon bible given to me for Christmas by my mom with my name written in it in cursive pencil that has almost entirely rubbed off. As a stereotypical boy, I loved reading the stories of battles and leaders in Judges and Kings, including that weird part about Ehud the left-handed liberator.
Something that struck me as obvious as when someone has gotten botox was the fact that everyone who followed God was challenged, tested, beaten, mocked, forced to hide, and a host of other adventures that were the furthest thing from boredom. Not altogether safe, but light years from boring.
Oddly, the maroon Bible did not have anywhere in it where God asked someone to do something easy. Completely uproot yourself and go to a far away land, free a million slaves with a stick, beat a giant with a rock, fight an army that outnumbers you 30 to 1, sleep with lions, tell an insane, murderous king that he is wrong, endure a cross are all fairly high-courage activities. Real courage, ‘not work yourself up at a multi-level marketing meeting’ courage. Yet in the red-brick church, little was spoken of a God who continually asked for massive sacrifice and straight up guts, no, we were reminded by our refrigerator magnets of the pink God who wants us to always be still. The contrast was stark to me like a bedroom light being flicked on – so I had to go read the whole be still refrigerator verse.
The maroon Bible said it differently.
It said Moses was in a jam. He had the greatest army in the world at that time chasing him, sharp-rocked mountains on either side, the red sea (more accurately the reed sea, but why change a tradition from the 1600s?) in front of him, and hundreds of thousands of Israelites complaining in his ears. He was pretty sure that God was going to save them; as a few miraculous plagues would lead him to believe. Yet the humble leader did not know how. This is when he coined the refrigerator magnet verse, be still and see the salvation of our God.
This is a very true and powerful statement repeated many times in other places. There are times to trust and wait upon the Lord. This was not one of them. God responds to Moses’ comforting words with a few words of His own, What are you waiting around for! Tell them to get up and start going! Hardly comforting. Definitely not easy. God needed the Israelites to act so that he could go ahead and make water split and inspire the world (and a Charleston Heston movie) for thousands of years with one of the greatest miracles ever. As they took action, God acted.

I realized this as I sat alone in my flat in the college town of Uppsala, Sweden. It was a Friday night, but I felt this genuine desire to stay in and talk to God – historically called prayer. I had a gut feeling that I needed to pray for opportunities to share my faith for some time now. I figured that the idea of heaven forever, and hell forever were real. In response, I enthusiastically prayed out loud, really loud, “Dear God, please give me some opportunities to share your love with other people.” Afterwards I was feeling pretty good about myself – almost ready to write my own pink-God-refrigerator-magnet.
In the midst of my gross self-approval I was interrupted by what I felt was a voice inside that seemed to almost scream, “quit praying, get off your couch, and go outside! I can’t give you opportunities to share with others in your apartment.” Once again being surprised by God’s simple logic, and my inept ability to see the obvious, I got up and started to walk outside where thick white snowflakes were slowly meandering their way to the ground. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing, but God told me to quit praying, so there I was.
I walked by a nearby park. Over a dozen pre-teens were hanging out, throwing snowballs at each other. A few snowballs landed on me and started melting down my back, so I put a few in their little Swedish Jr. High faces. Afterwards I got a chance to talk with them. I was bombarded with questions which lead to an opportunity to talk about Jesus the God with all of them. I got the privilege of praying with one of them, who decided to follow Jesus several months later, which made me so happy I wanted to karate kick the air.