I Met a lot of Nice Friends

I was told from the get-go that I would have a hard time concentrating so reading was out. I could do puzzles and scrapbooking but that was really not my thing. But I tried to figure out a way to reach out to my nurses and nurses’ aides to hear what I wanted to share about Christianity. I soon discovered that these workers were from different countries. Four were from Persia, several from the Philippines one from the Caribbean, another from Ethiopia and a number from India. And the list went on.

I started with those from Persia and asked them if they had ever heard of the Magi? None had. Then, I mentioned the Wise Men at Christmas time. They had heard about this. That opened the door to telling them how Persia got the Christian message about Christ.

I had fun with a number of other countries such as India. Having been there on four different occasions, this opened the door. Then I told them some things that I had found in Don Richardson’s book, Eternity in their Hearts. Don is a former missionary and a cultural anthropologist. He says,

“Evolutionary theorists hold that the concept of one Supreme Being was reached only after proceeding through more lowly beliefs such as fetishes, nature gods, and polytheism. They now find evidence of the exact opposite, i.e., that the more ‘primitive’ tribes have more advanced ideas about one true God—monotheism! Thus, despite scholarly views to the contrary, historical and other records reject animism as the ‘original’ religion and they indicate that people have known of the one true God from the very beginning.” This is contrary to everything we are taught in our culture and most cultures like India!

One example. Let’s go back to India to Hindu writings. Now can you imagine any system more different to Christianity than Hinduism? We believe in one God and classical Hinduism believes in over 300 million gods. We believe in one life and they believe in reincarnation. We believe in grace and they believe in karma. But is it possible that even in Hinduism there is some reference to one true God and a coming Messiah? Well, if we look back far enough, this is exactly what we find. Hindu scripture is made of several different types of writings and in the oldest of their scriptures is the Vedas. And in the oldest of the Vedas are the Rigvedas, in fact, they are the oldest surviving writings on earth. And before them are the Upanishads, the very oldest of them and the very oldest of the Vedas are not polytheistic at all! They are monotheistic! They believe just in one true God, the God of creation.

But, there arose in India a priestly caste that ended up with just a bit of power. And as we all know, power tends to corrupt. And these leaders wanted absolute power so they devised a system where they could control people—rather than just than letting them go to God and trust him for salvation. And so they told the people that they needed to rely on them to tell them what to do to get God to smile upon their lives. And they said that when you die, you don’t go to heaven immediately. Instead, you advance through a series of lives and if you are good enough in this life and you give us, your priests, enough money—then maybe you will be good enough to get to heaven. And this is how they were able to control the people and this is how their ancient system of religion was corrupted. And one can see this pattern over and over again in all kinds of ancient cultures.

So, I just hinted at this stuff in various cultures that I had learned from this book and at this point, I had their interest, got their email addresses and told them that I would write to them with more specifics of their country whether in Africa or China. It was fun and I enjoyed my attempt at sharing Christ so very much and made over a dozen friends in the process. So, what did I do in the hospital, I tried to be like Paul in prison, sharing Christ as the opportunity arose.