Written by a Cafe 1040 Grad
I remember the first time I saw someone pray to something other than God. My team and I were on our way back to where we lived from a look around the city, and along the way we were passing through a busy section of town decorated on all sides by brightly colored storefronts and restaurants. Locals and tourists crowded the sidewalks as we maneuvered our way around t-shirt displays, rows of parked motorbikes, and strange smells. Within a few weeks I will have memorized this route and navigate it with ease, but this was only our second day in the country and I was still laser-focused on trying to figure out how to walk. Yes, how to walk. You think you know how to put one foot in front of the other until you try to do it on an unfamiliar street on the other side of the planet.
As a result of my hyper-caution I was keenly aware of all my surroundings. Many of the types of things I would overlook from familiarity in a month stood out like a noodle in rice soup. One of those noodles I discovered while passing what might have been the twelfth restaurant within a quarter mile. Directly outside the bustling hubbub of clinking bowls and unintelligible conversation I saw a young woman. She stood in the open air before a newly erected folding table draped in an ornately patterned cloth, on top of which was prepared a feast of choice meats and vegetables. In her hands smoldered a stick of fragrant incense, and her position was one I found all too familiar. Head bowed. Eyes closed. Hands clasped together. Lips moving in silent speech. She was, as obviously and publicly as a pastor on Sunday, praying.
That image is still burned into my memory. Though it was only a passing glimpse, I can see it as vividly in my mind as if I were there, passing her by in stunned silence. This was far from my first interaction with another religion or its practices, yet something about that moment, watching the genuineness of her appeals to heaven, hit me like a spiritual punch to the stomach. What troubled me far above the rituals or the food offerings or the incense was one hard truth: she was calling out to deaf ears. Despite her belief, there are no ancestors to hear her thanks, no spirits to grant her requests, and no gods whom she may have sought to receive her worship. It looked like prayer, yes, but in reality it was a heart-breaking attempt to reach something that could not listen and would never answer. But there is a God who does both, and one of the most powerful lessons I learned during my time overseas was just how wonderful that is.
I yearn greatly for that woman and for all the people caught up in the same lies to turn to the God who listens and answers. I wish with all my heart they would know the One who would eagerly attend to their cries and gladly receive their worship, who would be fully pleased with them apart from futile food offerings or scented sticks. What a difference it would make. How often do we forget that we, those of us who follow Christ, are the only ones in all the world who have access to the only God who can be spoken with? Billions pray, but few are heard, so let us pray on their behalf that God would graciously draw them to Himself. That he would speak, and they would listen, and so turn to Christ and be heard for eternity.
“We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him.”
John 9:31
