Nick’s dream was to ride the bulls in the rodeo. For years he lived in his truck, traveling from rodeo to rodeo and riding the meanest, most ordnery bulls that the US had to offer. He was injured many times, breaking ribs, hip and legs as well as other injuries. Once he even rode with a broken ankle, strapped up tight by a local medic, and trying to remember that when he jumped off he should try and land on the other ankle!
He won a national championship, (the start of his winning ride pictured above). The times that he won were good - hotels, baths and steak meals, for him and his friends. They were a tight-knit group and when one was fortunate they all shared in the glory and sudden wealth. After the money was gone, Nick went back to living in his truck. One day he met a Christian cowboy, someone who took Jesus seriously. Nate, against his better judgement, was powerfully drawn to Jesus and decided to trust him. The result was total ostracism by his friends. Once word got around that he had “got religion” none of his former friends would even speak to him. Eventually he left the rodeo circuit and went to the Philippines to serve for a year or two. The challenges of a demanding physical environment, of a variable living standard, of being in a situation where violence can flare unexpectedly were meat and drink to him! He met and married Emma, a Filipina Christian, who had grown up, jumping in and out of trenches and bunkers in the war-torn south where the army had battled Muslim extremist rebels for decades. No strangers to hardship, they decided together to join OMF for long-term service.
Nick and Emma came through our latest Orientation Course, in November. This was the biggest group of new members that OMF has ever had - forty-two people and sixteen children. The youngest was in his early twenties (a footballer who previously played for the Swiss junior national team) and the oldest in his mid-fifties (a colonel in the Canadian Air Force who took early retirement). They each told their stories during the course of the training. Over and over again, the theme was heard, “I believe in Jesus because someone else I know lived for Him and cared enough and was courageous enough to tell me about Him.” Sometimes it was a parent, sometimes a friend, often a stranger. Sometimes people were driven by a search for God and a hunger for purity, sometimes there was terror and hopelessness following the death of a father or a beloved sister or abuse or a broken family, sometimes loneliness and emptiness and a hunger for significance other than materialism, sex and drugs. Sometimes it was a surprise - God breaking in to lives that were complacent and satisfied, where people felt no need at all of anything other than what they had. Sometimes it was the testimony of a consistent life lived well for God, sometimes just a fleeting contact - a talk, a book or a tract, just a Bible verse pressed into a hand.
An Asian colleague lived in agony over the death of her sister in a car crash, in horror and fear at the thought of her own death. One day, while praying and burning incense, she got up and walked over to the image that she prayed to until she was nose to nose with it. “I screamed at it”, she said, “but I realized it could not hear my words. Its blank eyes could not see my pain. It could not help me - in fact every day we had to help it - feed it and clothe it.” This startling image of a young girl, tortured by grief and fear, head to head with a household god, screaming at his impotence in the face of her raw human experience was an echo of the powerful words of Psalm 115. Trying to live by anything other than God is to “feed on ashes”. As we listened, it was a reminder again of how God meets us as individuals - endlessly creative and resourceful in His powerful, potent work of reconciling us who were His enemies to Himself.
