Feeling the Weight

Most days we feel the weight. It's the weight that comes from living in a country that is 95% Muslim. It's that weight from looking into the eyes of your friends and neighbors and even the stranger on the street and knowing that in the deep recesses of their heart there is no hope.

It's a weight that comes from sharing life with a people that you dearly love, a people that have captured your heart, yet have never tasted the goodness and the grace of the Lord.

It's a weight that grows heavier with every call to prayer from the mosque that we hear and every person publicly praying that we see.

It's a weight that comes from telling spiritually blind men to look to Jesus and be saved, knowing that the blind cannot see.

And sometimes we wonder where the weight comes from. Is it a messenger from Satan meant to discourage us? Meant to make us see the vast task before us and think, "What's the use?"

Or is it Jesus teaching us to see others as He does so that His compassion might grow in our heart and His unfailing love might move us to action.

So with tears and prayer and the hope of a multitude from every tribe and tongue one day before the throne, we let the weight of the lostness around us drive us again and again to the Gospel.

For the Gospel is not only their hope. It is ours as well.