Let me tell you what happened this past Sunday morning.
I attended an unknown church today that in my mind was a deliberate plan by God. I say this for one clear reason. My soul was in desperate need to listen to the message the speaker had to say. The speaker today was not your conventional, old, white preacher who had seemed like he had pronounced his message to his own mind a dozen times before stepping in front of the crowd, but of one man who had not prepared himself in such a way, because it wasn't as dissolving, it was real. The man who spoke was a missionary from Uganda and he spoke of the current condition of the country of Uganda and a simple but important challenge to America. The condition of Uganda is like this. Full of physical poverty, but rich Spiritually. The country is going through what many reformed Christians call a "revival". You can look it up on wiki if you are unfamiliar. There have been thousands of people professing to surrender their lives to Jesus. Twenty years ago what seemed strange and unconventional to be or call yourself Christian is now unconventional to say you are not a Christian in this country. A complete turn around.
As he stood up in front of the church a faint but growing smile bloomed from his face as he continued to tell of what God has done. Continuing to praise God and confess to the group of who had been involved in doing such a thing. This person who was involved in Uganda is God.
It did not happen this way easily. The story went on that the rulers (two for a fact) before this immense "revival" were very anti-Christian in their thinking and agenda towards the current pocket of believers there. There was a great persecution, where professed Christians were considered the enemy of the government and were put in prison, interrogated, physically tortured, and in many cases put to death because they claimed one thing. That they had been radically changed by Jesus Christ.
This did not however cripple or destroy to Christian believers there, but only strengthened them even more. Their strength as he urged was founded in their meekness and their dependency upon God. Their weakness was their strength. And this was the core of what led the country to change. Prayer.
Not to mention, the news-championed AIDS outbreak began in this country. It began in Uganda, with over 30% the population having the incurable disease. This was later to drop rapidly in the coming years.
After this feeble man professed all that God had done miraculously in Uganda, from changing an entire nation to even crippling most of the AIDS breakout in the country to 6%.
I was recollecting all of this unbelievable information from this man to come to the conclusion that I did not believe God at his word and depend on God. I was overwhelmed at another one of those Isaiah 6 moments, where you really understand how tiny and small you are in comparison with a Holy, Just, and Merciful God.
American Christians for the most part (including me) do not understand persecution or true dependence upon God. We live in our own little protective bubbles and as long as we jump out of our bubble once a week we are fine, and we feel like we can pat ourselves on the back for our obedience to God, when God put to death this so called bubble we put around ourselves. This bubble is my attempt to describe our tendency to run toward comfort/isolation from outside risks and difficulties. We are living in a false Disney World.
Suffering sounds like an American past time where the TV screen were black and white and the feel was so old school, but this is not the case. Suffering is the norm. Not that we seek after it like water, but that we seek after faithful obedience according to God's word first (Hebrews 4:12) , and not what is comfortable for us in the light of the moment.
We as Christians are called to suffer.
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