it was a uh conference where you go and hear missionaries speak,

to hear about the “good”

work our church is doing in other places.

Now I go to these conferences because
I am told to go to these conferences—

I get a little letter in the mail from the powers that be saying

you should go to this, and I go, I don’t

think about it much—I just go.

And here I am at this conference at the Orlando Marriott,

and I’m eating my free continental breakfast,

and I’m listening to a missionary speak.

This missionary that’s talking,

he works overseas in one of those countries

that we hear about on the news,

but if you were asked where it was

or what that country was all about, you probably

wouldn’t be able to point to it on a map.

And this missionary, he’s trying to start a church there

like the church we have here

in a place—a country—where there’s

a lot of fighting, a lot of violence, a lot of chaos,

gun fights and bombs and

and

and

he talks

about one day,

he’s in a market,

people going about their business,

shopping, buying food,

and a bomb goes off—I think it was a car bomb.

A grocery store lights on fire.

And people run, they scatter off into—

there’s a boy, sixteen, seventeen years old, a young man,

and instead of running away from the burning grocery store,

he runs into it.

He runs into the fire.

And some time passes,

the store is still on fire,

and eventually the boy comes out of the store,

and his whole body is shielding a girl,
   maybe seven years old, this girl—

he’s helped her to safety, saved her from the burning building,

but

his own body, is on fire. His clothes are burning,

his arms are burning, his face is

burning, his skin is melting.

He helps the girl to safety,

and she’s okay. But

he,

the boy,

is dying.

And there’s no one to put out his fire.

And he lies down on the street,

body gone into shock,

and he burns until he’s dead.

The missionary tells us that the boy—

that that was his sister that he ran into the store to save.

And the missionary tells us that this boy—he
   didn’t know him personally,

but talked to the boy’s family enough to know

that the boy was not a Christian.

He did not believe in the God we believe in.

He did not believe in Jesus,

or the Holy Spirit.

He believed in a different set of beliefs,

and attended a church that did not talk about the cross,

and prayed a different set of prayers than the prayers we pray.

And the missionary said, “Isn’t it a shame

that we lost that boy, what a man of Christ he might have been.”