It’s 9:30 at night and I just sat down to listen to the challenge for today. I was hoping to get to it this morning or over lunch but I woke up at 6 and read Romans since I need to read 10 chapters by tomorrow for our discipleship group. I got to work around 7 and worked straight until 6 without stopping for lunch, got home had supper with the family and helped clean up. Then spent time with the kids wrestling, playing dominos, and finished with Reading in Romans with my boys and ended up discussing “What is permissible is not always beneficial.”
The person of peace is a concept I have read and learned about and even experimented in finding. Figuring out the person of peace can be tricky. Just like in discipleship we hone in on one person to soon and end up ignoring the ones that are hungry and ready for it. We can make the same mistake in looking for the person of peace. We sometimes are so drawn to one person because of their personality when in reality they really aren’t that interested. One of those situations happened with some friends I made at a local restaurant. I had my focus on the cousin of the owner the whole time that he was the person of peace and the one I should reach because he was fun and less intimidating than the owner. For 6 months I was intentional to talk to him and have him over. Then one day when I went to give him a chinese-english bible at the restaurant he had left. I was crushed, I thought he was the person of peace. 3 months later I was at the restaurant and I saw a bible sitting up by the register. I asked my friend at the restaurant “Are you reading this?” She said “Yes it is very good.” I had given the bible to the owner’s son a year earlier and the owner’s girlfriend had read the whole bible on her own! God was still working, just not how I had planned or thought. I have since realized the owner is actually the person of peace. He was just a lot busier and more intimidating to talk about. But in all actuality he was the one who held the key to the community of workers there.
Another example of finding a person of peace is when we went on a vacation to a resort. At the resort there were many different international students working there. Before and during the trip we prayed for opportunities throughout the weekend to share Jesus. During the weekend we had many different conversations with different workers and many of them were spiritual. The last day I was there one of the guys “my person of peace” really opened up to me and invited me to their apartment where I met his 7 other friends and got to hang out with them all for a few hours. He wasn’t the one I was initially intrigued by the most but he is the one who was the most open. After the night they all invited me to their country to hang out. I have kept in contact with him over facebook and continue to pray for him.
I am going to prayer walk this week and hope for more conversations that could lead me to a person of peace in our community.
