When you travel—whether for business or pleasure—what goes into your thinking about where you will go, where you will stay, and how you will order your days?
Rick Steves is the trusted travel guru whose guidebooks seem to be in the nose of every third tourist you see on the streets of Europe. There’s the Japanese guy who’s always snapping the same pictures of a friend in front of a building (same shot every time! What’s that about?). There’s the twenty-something with backpack you can smell from ten paces (don’t they have showers in those hostels?). And then there’s the lost-looking American like me with a Rick Steves book in hand. Anyway, Steves has written a new book called Travel as a Political Act. The premise is this: We commit a political act every time we travel, so we ought to be careful what kind of political act we commit. We should all travel with a greater sense of purpose—to open our minds and hearts to others, not to impose our politics on others.
Steves thinks we ought to go to places that challenge our own point of view. We ought to learn to see life from the perspective of others in order to learn more about the diversity of the world and to be good global citizens. When you look for a McDonalds in Prague or a Holiday Inn in Azerbaijan in order to enjoy the comforts of home away from home, you learn little and are changed little. Politics is literally the way people organize and govern their own lives. So you commit a political act when you enter into their ways instead of carrying your ways with you.
He cites Mark Twain who said, Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. Steves is a passionate Christian who understands that the gospel takes root in cultures by transforming them from the inside, not by destroying them from the outside.
The Apostle Paul must have known this. When we pick up the story in Acts 16, he has already begun to travel with gospel purpose. He has gone to Asia Minor—which is modern day Turkey—and somehow keeps feeling that the Holy Spirit is preventing him from speaking the word in certain regions there. Now, I have to tell you that I don’t really know what that means exactly. But whatever it means, what’s clear is that Paul didn’t try to impose himself or the gospel on people; he was openhearted enough to allow himself to be pushed around by the Spirit and move as he felt he was being led.
Imagine what would happen if we all were that spiritually sensitive to how God was leading us. How different our lives would be.
Paul gets vision during the night. He and his companion Silas are in the coastal city of Troas on the northwest tip of Turkey, just 11 miles from Troy. A man from Macedonia appears in the vision and begs Paul to come over and help them.
Now, just a word about words: the man asks for them to come and help them, not to come and save them. It would have been easy to use the word save if that were the point, because it could have also meant help, and that would have given the plea a more spiritual feel. But when he asks for help or assistance, it still feels to Paul like an opening for the good news; so he goes, convinced God is in it.
When we answer the call to go to the Dominican Republic or to North Africa or Kenya or Peru or wherever, the request is seldom phrased as Come and save us. Many of us grew up thinking that’s the only purpose of missions: that we go and save the heathen; that we bring Christ to them. But what we keep finding out as we go is that Christ has already beat us there and is drawing us to come join him by directing us through his Spirit. What’s more, before anyone really comes to know Jesus as Savior, he or she comes to know one of Jesus’ people. And that usually happens because one of Jesus’ people has helped that person in some way that doesn’t seem immediately spiritual but really is because it’s motivated by no commercial interest—just a human interest that reveals itself later as a divine interest.
Why are you here? That’s the kind of question people ask when we go to help someone with no agenda but the well being of the person or group. We have friends of our church who are living and working in a strict Muslim country in North Africa. They have found ways to help disabled orphan children in their town. In that culture, disabled children are thought of as disfavored by God because of their condition. So when Christians simply reach out and help these children, that compassion moves people who haven’t seen much of it. And it leads to conversations about Jesus. And conversations about Jesus lead sometimes to conversions to Jesus.
Notice what Paul did when he arrived in Philippi. He simply stayed there for a few uneventful days with nothing much happening. Then on the Sabbath, he went down by the river where he supposed some might have gathered to pray. Now, why would he do that? Because he was not just looking for a synagogue where he might interact with Jews more like him. He goes outside his comfort zone. He knows that if non-Jews are spiritually inclined, they will gather at a place like a river. And indeed he finds them there. Women. The first converts on European soil are women. They were worshipping in the best way they knew how, although their worship was vaguely directed to a God they did not know personally. Paul and Silas sit down and join their worship, and they begin to talk. Lydia is mentioned by name. She is a dealer in purple cloth and a foreigner in Philippi. Hold that thought.
We aren’t told what Paul said to her. We don’t know what witnessing technique he used. And that’s probably a good thing, because it takes away our performance anxiety. When people come to faith in Christ, it’s not because we have been such expert witnesses; it’s because we have simply been there, paid attention to those around us, listened deeply, spoken kindly, and then God opens their hearts to believe.
This is also true about traveling through our days here in Dallas. You don’t have to leave Dallas to travel as a spiritual act. You do it every day. But we get in travel ruts. Do you have routines designed to make you feel comfortable and that keep you from encountering people you don’t know but whom God may have divine appointments for you to meet if you just had a little spirit of adventure? So many of us are so purposeful about our days that we make a bee-line from here to there and never think of what we are missing along the way. We keep such tight schedules that we can’t stop and talk with the very people God might be conspiring to bring into our path.
Our own Doug Haney got out of his routines one Saturday to take a class at the Dallas Arboretum in hydrangeas. So he sits down and says hello to the woman next to him. She asks him what he does, and he lets her know he’s the music minister at Wilshire. Immediately Debbie Butler says her heart started beating fast. Doug does that to women, don’t you know?! Actually—sorry, Doug—it was because Debbie felt like she was caught up in something spiritual. She had moved to Lakewood from the Park Cities and was looking for a church. She had visited Wilshire anonymously a few times. Doug asked if she sang. (Always the recruiter.) Well, she’s been a choir member ever since and has found a home among the Wilshire prayer group that gathers at this river on the Sabbath, so to speak.
Now this was not a born again experience for Debbie, it only felt like it. She was a Christian already. But here’s the thing: God is also at work drawing Christians who are adrift from the body of Christ until they are deeply embedded again and serving in the church. If we want to see new people joining our church, we have to begin to get outside our comfort ones, meet people and talk to them with the intention of seeing whether God might have been up to something in that person’s life before we got there. And even those who have never made a profession of faith most likely have a spiritual hunger, like Lydia, that prepares them for the good news of Christ, if we will simply put ourselves in position to meet them.
You can’t spend all your time with Christians and be a witness for Christ. You have to commit a spiritual act by traveling into relationships with different kinds of people. When you’re in junior high and high school, you tend to look for friends who are just like you. If you are a football player, you hang out with the football players—and maybe the cheerleaders. If you’re in theater, you hang out with thespians. Band, with musicians. But think how narrow that makes your world if you continue the trend over a lifetime.
Churches often do this by trying to be as homogeneous as possible in order to draw “people like us” on the theory that “birds of a feather flock together.” But where does it say we are supposed to go after some demographic as if we’re trying to gain market share for God. Look, God already has all of us, but God wants all of us to know it. And God is calling the church to model that by widening our worldview, stretching our relationships, and seeing how God prefers different to same since that’s the way God created with world after all—with infinite variety.
Consider Lydia again. Remember how Luke tells us that the Holy Spirit wouldn’t let Paul stay in Asia to witness? Well, it just may be that God wanted Paul to go to Macedonia order that he would meet a businesswoman from—of all places—Asia! She would go back to where God didn’t want Paul to stay. She would carry the Christian message back to Thyatira, and within a generation a church would grow so strong there that by the time of the writing of the Book of Revelation, Thyatira was one of the seven churches in Asia John wrote to. Go figure.
There’s a new pizza place across the street in the Albertson’s shopping center. Lover’s Pizza. It bills itself as New York style pizza. I’m a skeptic about that—and cheesecake. It turns me into a food critic. It’s like, I’ll be the judge of that, whether it’s New York style or not. We’re like that, New Yorkers. But you native Texans are like that about Tex-Mex and BBQ, so fugettaboutit. Anyway, Kim and I went and it’s not bad—the crust is a little thicker than it should be, and it could use a little more olive oil, but it’s pretty good. Anyway, the young man at the counter didn’t sound like a New Yorker, so I asked his name and where he was from. Kosovo, he said. He had lived for a while in New York, and the owner is a New Yorker, but he’s from Kosovo. So we got to talking—Timmy and I. Nice guy. New in town. You should go by and say hello and tell him I sent you. Invite him to church as I did. You never know.
But you’ll really never know if you don’t meet him and invite him. We may not get to Kosovo any time soon, but Kosovo has come to us. All we have to do is travel across the street to commit a spiritual act. Then it’s up to God to open hearts.
