When we last were together, I told you about my friends from Indonesia who ended up in Palawan, when they wanted to go to Palau. The first is an island in the nation of Philippines. The second is an independent nation, over 1,000 miles away.
In order to protect both the innocent and guilty, I need to be careful what I share. But let's see what we can learn about getting to the right place.
As far as I know, until sometime after my friends got off the plane in Palawan, they thought they were headed to right place. I imagine that when they came down the jet-way, they wondered why there was no one there to meet them. I'm not sure how long it took for them to realize that there was no one there to greet them, because they weren't really there. I do know that that realization was an important one. On the other end, my friends in Palau were concerned because the delegation from Indonesia hadn't arrived. My Palauan friends--they are marvelous hosts--had gone to the airport in the middle of the night to meet their Indonesian brothers and sisters. They stayed until the last passengers exited the aircraft. At that point they knew something was terribly wrong. They knew their friends weren't where they were supposed to be. They had no idea where they were. And, they had no way to get in touch with them. It would have been about this time that the wandering Indonesians figured out they were in the wrong place. On the Palauan end, someone who had passed geography realized what might have happened.
Knowing you are in the wrong place and/or headed to the wrong place is an incredibly important realization. Only when that realization comes will one be motivated to seek a solution. As I said yesterday, I'm sure Palawan is a lovely place. I can see how a group of weary travelers could just settle down there and say, "This is good. We'll just stay here." In the world of spiritual reality people do that all the time. In Jesus metaphor about the road to life and the way to death, it is the road that leads to destruction that is most comfortable.
In my friends' case, after they found out they were in the wrong place, coming to a solution was difficult. Airlines are responsible to deliver people to the places stamped on the ticket. From the airline's perspective, these people were in the right place. In the spiritual realm the Bible gives ample warning that living in the default mode will deliver one to a place where no one wants to be (see the link at the bottom of this page). People find themselves separated from God for eternity not because there is no warning, but because they ignore the warnings that are there. Read Romans 1-3 for more on this.
Finally, flying twenty-two people over a thousand miles is an expensive proposition. I don't know who paid. I do know that there was a lot of conversation, at the highest levels, about what could be done. Eventually, an agreement was reached that enabled the happy result shown in the picture below, the delegation from the Evangelical Church of Indonesia in front of the Palauan Capitol. In the spiritual realm we read about this gracious transaction:
“Yet it was our weaknesses he carried; it was our sorrows that weighed him down. And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God, a punishment for his own sins! But he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins. He was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be healed. All of us, like sheep, have strayed away. We have left God’s paths to follow our own. Yet the Lord laid on him the sins of us all.”
(Isaiah 53:4–6, NLT)
Don't end up in the wrong place!
You can find out about how to get where you really want to be here.
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ven newer is a church among an even smaller, younger people group. My friends and associates Doug and Dorcas Williams have been instruments in God's hands to reach out to the Awa, a tribe that lives in the Highlands of Ecuador. I have met Paulino and Milton, the Elders of the church there. Both of them are first generation Christians. In a few weeks they will be leading the Awa for the first time, ever, without any assistance from missionaries. (At right is a group of Awa children at one of the meeting places of the Awa church.) They have already been taking steps to reach out to Awa communities where the Gospel has not yet been taught.
'll tell you more tomorrow, but here is a group of people who have gone from killing missionaries to being missionaries within my lifetime. It is a radical transformation. It's the kind of thing God specializes in. I once heard a definition of a missionary. "A missionary is someone who goes to a place where people don't want him to come, and stays until they don't want him to leave."