Siete

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Pg 155:
“The gospel, coming as a message from another world, achieved its first ethnic conquest, not only by the demonstration of miracles, but even more significantly, by dynamic appropriation of Hebrew redemptive analogies. It had been God’s chosen strategy for introducing the Christ.
But to me, as I gazed wistfully across the swamp toward the Haenam manhouse, it seemed that God had not troubled Himself to prepare the Sawi in any similar way for the coming of the gospel.”

Don Richardson, the bringer of the Word into a totally new and outlandish culture that had no resemblance of the concepts of Christianity, found himself in a fix when trying to make the gospel comprehensive to the Sawi people. In the beginning of his ministry, Don was completely perplexed as to in which way he should approach the Sawi with the Christian religion. Don compares the culture of the Sawi with those of the Hebrews and the Greeks stating that the latter two cultures had a connection to the Christian beliefs and thus the religion had been fairly easy for them to embrace. What Don did not know until later was that God had indeed had a “chosen strategy for introducing the Christ” to the Sawi people: the tradition of the tarop (Peace) child.

Sometimes God works in ways I don’t understand. He gives me only a limited view of the whole scope of the situation and thus causes me to feel frustrated at Him for not showing me the whole picture. Like Don, it is easy for me to feel like I have arrived at a dead-end. With the world closing in around me and hardship happening after hardship, it is easy to wonder what in the world God is trying to do with my life. Nevertheless, I should always remember that God is the ultimate planner. He is the Creator and He knows this planet from top to bottom. Although sometimes it may seem that nothing good is going to happen and that everything is getting stuck in a rut, the only thing that I can do is to have faith in God and trust in Him to take care of everything; because one way or another, He definitely will.