Marcello

It was very challenging to hear the stories again that I heard long ago ... almost at the beginning of my own Christian walk. The picture above is from a postcard Marcello gave me the first time I met him. It was to remind me to pray for the country of his heart and the people he loved. He still loves those people and still has a heart for that country more than thirteen years later.

I had many thoughts listening to Marcello tell his story. That he was a man who spoke with his life. I know these stories to be true and have known about his brave quests for a long time (and been challenged by them). God has watched over him all this time and it is ultimately because God does care about the forgotten church in the middle east. I saw this again last year when I was reading the scholar Kenneth Bailey. He says "there are more Arabic-speaking Christians in the Middle East than Jews in the entire world. This demographic fact is generally unknown in the West, where all Arabs are often assumed to be Muslims. The result is that even though there were Arab Christians in the Upper Room on Pentecost (Acts 2:11), millions of Arab Christians today are almost invisible to the Western world."

The one thing I don't want to, especially after hearing Marcello speak, is forget our brothers and sisters in this part of the world. That really is a huge way for us to grow is by becoming more aware of the rest of the earth.