LIVING AS AMBASSADORS IN RELATIONSHIPS

I wrestled with God in prayer all night that night in 2006. Diana and I were in the Philippines for the World Christian Gathering on Indigenous Peoples. Unlike the previous gathering, I was not scheduled to speak – and that was fine. I understood my calling this time as meeting with leaders and building relationship around conversations concerning their vision for WGCIP and how things were unfolding. Yet the Lord seemed to be prompting me to share my personal testimony as a descendant of Scottish Highlanders. My people were as abused, exploited, and massacred by invaders of their land as were the people of color and colonization who made up the vast majority of those in attendance. The only difference was that my skin is white and my people have – largely – found a way to navigate our history and prosper. But I was not scheduled to speak and I was sure the impulse to share was a product of ego alone.

Except He would not leave me alone. And so I prayed and protested all night.

 

I knew that if I shared it would be stories of uses and abuses to which I have been subjected by family and friends over a lifetime – on top of my Scottish heritage. It would be about my repeated efforts to forgive and move on, only to find the anger boiling up in me after some new provocation or some seemingly innocuous trigger event. At that point I would call on God to be my strength and forgiveness all over again, because He says this is both good and ultimately good for me. I would share how God convinced me his call to forgive seventy times seven (Matthew 18) is satisfied by anyone who simply stays in the game. We are required only to hang in there with Him and with each other, having another go at this forgiveness thing. We are not judged by success or failure, but by persistence. I would tell them the rules do not change even when the very Pacific Islanders I befriended and for whom I obtained employment used their new position to steal a half million dollar inheritance from me. I would acknowledge that I still struggle with this, but by God’s grace I depend on and serve His love and not my own outraged sense of justice.

 

Just before dawn He described the sign that would indicate He – not my ego – was calling me to speak. My friend, Hakon Ennokksen, an indigenous Sami man, was leading the European delegation and they had charge of the program that Wednesday Night. If Hakon would take Diana and me into his delegation – appropriate because of our Scottish ancestry – I would know God wanted me to share and I would do just that. I went looking for Hakon in the breakfast room as soon as it was open, but before I could approach him he spotted me across the room and came running. As he ran he was shouting my name and saying Diana and I must join his delegation for the evening so we could offer our testimony. Message from God received.

 

Some will say I need therapy if I think God speaks to me. I think the Inventer of speech is quite capable of using it, and that He speaks to everyone.

 

What I did was controversial. Some in leadership believed that only people of color should be allowed to speak from the platform any more. Others wondered if we had broken protocol, inasmuch as we were unscheduled. They concluded that – inasmuch as we spoke only on the invitation of the evening’s leadership we were perfectly in order. And the fruit was awesome. More than forty people approached me privately over three days to say that my testimony that the Lord requires only that we stay in the game had set them free in His love.

 

In 2 Corinthians 5:16-20 Paul declares himself and the rest of us a new creation in the love of Christ. He says Abba has done the heavy lifting by reconciling us to Himself through the death of His Son. But the corker is his contention that we activate the new creation in ourselves by progressively receiving that reconciliation and living as His ambassadors of that reconciliation. That drives my prayer for family and friends, for people I meet in restaurants and shopping places (when they are okay with it) and the reason I can’t stop talking about my Best Friend. It is why I write books like Living As, and why I blog and broadcast. It is how I strive to live repentance.

 

James A. Wilson is the author of Living As Ambassadors of Relationships and The Holy Spirit and the End Times – available at local bookstores or by e-mailing him at

praynorthstate@charter.net