I unfortunately can not speak Spanish. I struggled through a few classes in school yet I am no more closer to fluent than when I started.
Yet I had a Chilean instructor on my NOLS course that really challenged me with his culture. He made me realize how little I knew about the world and made me want to learn about different people.
Yesterday I again was influenced by a Chilean. I helped a customer who spoke Spanish. So through my broken Spanish and his rough English we found clothes for his daughter. By the end of our conversation I found out that he was a pastor in Chile. He has been a pastor for 34 years and his dad was pastor before him. He began telling me about how much he loves Jesus and how much Jesus meant to him. As he said this his voice cracked and his eyes water. He was so passionate and so real. Jesus was his world to him. He had such an intimate relationship with Jesus that tears of passion welled up when he spoke of his Savior. I responded “Jesus means the world to me too.” Instantly, I heard my own words and realized how cold, calculated, and callused they felt.
Is my relationship with Jesus that cerebral? God has been talking to me over the past weeks about passion and loving Him with all my heart. All it took was a passionate Chilean pastor’s profession of love for God and mine hanging in the same airspace to see how bad off I am. God never relents when he works on something in my heart.