Global Leaders

This weekend there was a Global Leaders conference at my church that a couple people from my team went to. It consisted of 11 different people from around the U.S. of different professions such as pastors, psychologist, authors, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, CEOs and Founders of different groups. All in all, a pretty eclectic group. It was a video conference that was dubbed in Spanish so there were 4 of us in the very back where the audio people so kindly set us up with headphones so we could listen to it in Spanish. There was SO much information that if I would've listened to it in Spanish I would've walked away confused and frustrated.

These speakers touched on everything; humility, vulnernerability, wise leaders and workers compared to foolish ones, tough callings, taking a stand and having a daring and bold faith. There was so much to take in that these next couple days I'm going to try and process it all so we'll see how that goes. There's one story I have to share with you. The President of Compassion International, Wess Stafford, spoke. He was sharing about a Pastor that lives in Ethiopia and was preaching the Gospel EVERYWHERE he went. Having the predominant religion being Islam, governement officials wanted to stop him. They beat him numerous times, put him in jail a couple times, and did all kinds of horrific things to this man. It didn't, however, stop him. They were fed up so they were going to give him the death sentence by the electric chair... a minor overlook was that electric chairs didn't exist so they had to create one. In the plaza square, they were going to perform this execution. He put his hands through the wire loops and grabbed a hold of these wires hanging down from the tree (this was their version of the electric chair) then "BOOM," all the lights in the area went out but he was still alive. The officials were mad and confused and they put him back in jail while they tried to fix it. The next day they tried it again. Same thing happened. They got so frustrated with him that they just told him to get away. He walked away and as he was leaving he saw Wess on the hill. They stopped and talked and then the Pastor said he had to leave to go preach at a funeral. Wess told him he'd be praying for him along with thousands of other people back in the States. The Pastor said, I'll be praying for all of you too. Wess thought to himself, what exactly is he praying for for these Americans who on the surface have everything. So he asked. This is what got me... his response,

"Here in Ethiopia, we HAVE to depend on God to live to see the sunset at the end of the day. We're lucky if we have 1 Bible per church but we've torn it apart to hand it out page by page to the people of the church so they could memorize it, because if they got caught with it, they'd be in great danger. I hear in the U.S. most people have more than 1 Bible in their house... even people who don't believe. I even hear that sometimes people go all day or all week without reading the Bible or praying. How can that be possible?"

They put their lives in danger everyday and sometimes we make the choice to ignore God until it's convenient for us. My world was rocked by that story. I didn't tell it NEARLY as well as Mr. Stafford did but I hope you get the picture. For stories like this one, I'm going to be processing for a while. There were many more stories that were just as impactful.

On a different note, today we got a lot of stuff for our apartment/home and we're ready to move in on Monday!!!!! We bought a fridge and a couch so we're pretty much ready to go minus needing actual beds to sleep in :)

I hope you're all doing Fantastic! Happy soon to be Thanksgiving!