Will You?

Well apparently the adventures of living overseas also include those on the lighter side! A couple of days ago I went with a friend to meet up with one of their friends at a fruit juice place. This other 50-year old or so guy, we'll call him James, showed up with a plastic water bottle containing his own fruit juice (which I somehow think had more than that in it) and a pack of cigarettes. He politely offered me the first cigarette and I as politely said no thank you. You may laugh but having lived in an Adventist bubble all my life, this was the first time someone actually offered me a cigarette. James then proceeded to smoke 5 in a row.

It was a pleasant evening. We ate sandwiches, drank carrot-orange juice, and had a good conversation about being honest about your struggles. James readily admitted that he had struggles with smoking and didn't want to hide it. He attends the lesson study I go to at the university church so I already knew who he was. He told us that he would come to the lesson study with a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket because he didn't want to hide them in the car.

At one point, James looked at me and told me You have a pure heart. This is not the first time I've heard this phrase. In South Korea, when I was teaching English for a summer, one of the Korean teachers looked at me and told me the same thing. It always makes me somewhat uncomfortable, because I don't think of myself as a particularly holy person. I mean, I don't try to do wrong things but at the same time I can easily think of several other women who would be seen as holy. I'm just an ordinary woman trying my best to understand who God is.

James really wanted us to come to his house that evening and hang out, but an hour was all we had. So we said goodbye and headed back up the hill. I thought nothing of it and didn't connect the dots when my phone rang with an unknown number twice the next afternoon. I simply hung up as I don't answer unknown calls. Usually someone is speaking in Arabic which I don't understand.

Today, I was texting my friend who I'd gone to meet James with and he asked me if I was in a very long meeting yesterday. I said no and asked why. He said he had called twice and I'd hung up on him. I still didn't make the connection though. Then he said he was calling on behalf of James.

Apparently James had called up my friend and insisted he call me to meet James at the fruit juice place again. I hadn't answered so I'd missed the calls (thankfully!). James said he liked me and he felt that I could help him straighten his life out.

Though it's a somewhat amusing experience, at the same time my heart aches for the many lost souls in this world today who are looking for someone to help fix their lives. They meet someone and, hopefully, see the love of Jesus in them and they are drawn to that. Yet they feel that they will find help if they can connect with the person instead of connecting with the One Who can heal their hearts and their lives. How do I share this with them? In some cases, like with James, I can only pray and in others I can introduce them to their Creator and Redeemer. But in every case I know with certainty that God longs to bring them into relationship with Him so they can know they are loved and find hope again.