chapel at the local hospital. It’d been a bad day for both of us. We’d both lost good people that day, at about the same time, and to the same disease, cancer, and both of us needed to sit in the hospital chapel. I guess we both needed to ask God the same question. It’s the question all of us have asked—why is there such cruelty in the world, why does a loving and merciful God permit it?
“Well, the answer to that question is found in Scripture, and in many places. Jesus Himself lamented the loss of innocent life, and one of his miracles was the raising of Lazarus from the dead, both to show that He was indeed the Son of God, and also to show His humanity, to show how much He cared about the loss of a good man.
“But Lazarus, like our two parishioners that day in the hospital, had died from disease, and when God made the world, He made it in such a way that there were, and there still are, things that need fixing. The Lord God told us to take dominion over the world, and part of that was God’s desire for us to cure disease, to fix all the broken parts and so to bring perfection to the world, even as, by following God’s Holy Word, we can bring perfection to ourselves.
“Gerry and I had a good talk that day, and that was the beginning of our friendship, as all ministers of the Gospel ought to be friends, because we preach the same Gospel from the same God.
“The next week we were talking again, and Gerry told me about his friend Skip. A man from the other side of the world, a man from a place where the religious traditions do not know Jesus. Well, Skip learned about all that at Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma, the same as many others, and he learned it so well that he thought long and hard and decided to join the ministry and preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ...”
Skip’s skin was a different color than mine,” Gerry Patterson was saying in another pulpit less than two miles away. ”But in God’s eyes, we are all the same, because the Lord Jesus looks through our skin into our hearts and our souls, and He always knows what’s in there.”
“That’s right,” a man’s voice agreed in the congregation.
“And so, Skip became a minister of the Gospel. Instead of returning to his native land, where freedom of religion is something their government protects, Skip decided to keep flying west, into communist China. Why there?” Patterson asked. “Why there indeed! The other China does not have freedom of religion. The other China refuses to admit that there is such a thing as God. The other China is like the Philistines of the Old Testament, the people who persecuted the Jews of Moses and Joshua, the enemies of God Himself. Why did Skip do this? Because he knew that no other place needed to hear the Word of God more than those people, and that Jesus wants us to preach to the heathen, to bring His Holy Word to those whose souls cry out for it, and this he did. No United States Marine storming the shores of Iwo Jima showed more courage than Skip did, carrying his Bible into Red China and starting to preach the Gospel in a land where religion is a crime.”
And we must not forget that there was another man there, a Catholic cardinal, an old unmarried man from a rich and important family who long ago decided on his own to join the clergy of his church,” Jackson reminded those before him. ”His name was Renato, a name as foreign to us as Fa An, but despite that, he was a man of God who also took the Word of Jesus to the land of the heathen.
“When the government of that country found out about Reverend Yu, they took Skip’s job away. They hoped to starve him out, but the people who made that decision didn’t know Skip. They didn’t know Jesus, and they didn’t know about the faithful, did they?”
“Hell, no!” replied a white male voice from the pews, and that’s when Hosiah knew he had them.
“No, sir! That’s when your Pastor Gerry found out and that’s when you good people started sending help to Skip Yu, to support the man his godless government was trying to destroy, because they didn’t know that