After the joy of the Easter celebration and our constant reminder of the gift of grace we have – that because Christ lives we shall live too; we are also reminded of the sinful world and the fallen nature of all things that will be brought under the Lordship of Christ one way of another.  The evidence of the evil forces that Christ defeated lashing in out in grief and anger and rage is all around us and we can be inured to it if we are not careful.  My concern for our missionaries was such that I checked with our regional director and just after sending him the questions of safety, one of the missionaries sent the letter I shared yesterday.  That was good news indeed.  Today, I found out that though all our missionaries are safe one of the daughters of a missionary there found out that one of her little class mates was killed in a blast.

It is a cruel irony that even the smallest of our little witnesses to others about the love of Jesus has to be affected by violence directly aimed at those who trust in that love.  This child will live with this senseless evil for as long as she lives.  I had a classmate who was killed in a car accident when I was in grade school and I still think of the day our teacher told us the news.  We weren’t used to seeing teachers cry.

So as I said yesterday mission work has it’s own set of challenges and problems and difficulties.  There are those who think that we are presumptuous, racist, paternalistic and colonialist by sending missionaries around the world in the first place.  Then there are those who say that they have there religion and we have ours and to try and force our beliefs on others is a disgrace.  When we got to the place where we had to start apologizing for the Great Commission we Christians should have stood up and made a mighty witness but of course we didn’t want to make a fuss and so here we are today in s situation where the most persecuted people on the face of the earth are Christians.

Please continue your prayers for our missionaries all around the world.  You can also support them by going to https://www.lcms.org/givenow/globalmission