My Sudanese Summer: In the Midst

Our final week is upon us and our last week of village evangelism is now complete. As I write, in less than seven days we will home, as cliché as it sounds, the summer really has flown bye.  This week’s evangelism was nothing short of a finale. We had several people accept Christ for the first time and once again we climbed into the muddy water and baptized several more believers.  And how pleasing to know that as they celebrated their new lives by giving praises and dancing that heaven is throwing the “party of the year” for each one who comes to know him. This week and summer I feel like I almost have got a taste of what it must have been like in the early church. Daily our merry band would teach and disciple and learn from each other. 

• We had us three, your “three stick out like a sore thumb” missionaries. 
• You had Alfred, our translator who is missing his two front teeth. A constant reminder and testimony to the drunken fighter he used to be until the gospel changed him. 
• We had Michael, the pastor who always wore glasses and a shirt that said "Shakira" on it. He heard the gospel years ago in the village when missionaries came to him and was eager to share the word.
• We had Moses in our group who was young and the son of Michael. 
• And there was a young man by the name Alex who visited the church at midnight of the week we were there and found himself at his end.  19 years of age, being a drunk, his parents had kicked him out of the house and he found himself at the church hoping and praying for an answer to his life. That night he accepted Jesus and followed us in our merry band throughout the week. After several days of shaking from withdrawals he was beginning to look somewhat together. 

Day after day we traveled to homes on foot preaching the gospel and asking them to drop their nets and follow. At night we all slept together on the dirt floor of a brick church with no doors. Their wives provided us with more food then we could ever want. What a sense of community I felt as we read the scriptures for sometimes hours in a morning spending many hours in conversations of the Lord. What a blessing to even taste perhaps what it would have been to be an earlier follower of Christ.

                

This week we were hit with many honest statements and questions. An older gentleman on the last day came up just to greet us and tell us, "Thank you for preaching the word of God."  He began to share his testimony and he said in 1968 he was saved, but Satan did not fear his salvation. Later in his life after he quit playing in sin in 2000, he said he began to proudly share the gospel. A very simple testimony, but the words “Satan did not fear my salvation” was stuck in my head. I started wondering if Satan feared my own salvation. If the way I lived my life made Satan tremble or if he simply found himself not worrying about me because I was simply distracted a lot of times.  

I started thinking about my church and people my age, and started wondering does Satan fear our salvation? And honestly I began to think of it as a shame the number of times we have simply been idle and distracted by sins but things also we might not consider bad... like college, the American dream, and vacations. Does Satan honestly fear our salvations? I’m scared to say, but for a generation who has all the tools needed at hand to fulfill the great commission, for the most part we stand idle. I pray we would be people that Satan shutters at when he reflects on our relationship with God.