A missionary goes public

I can't really think of anything to say right now, but I've been meaning to share this piece from Scot McKnight's book The Jesus Creed (p.99):

In the annals of world history of the twentieth century, the most famous missionary in the mind of most was Albert Schweitzer. But many think the missionary with the most complete impact on the world was a man of much less fame: Frank C. Laubach (1884-1970).

Reared in the comforts of the farming communities of Pennsylvania at the hands of a Presbyterian father and a Baptist mother, Frank found faith with another group, the Methodists. But while serving as a Congregationalist missionary in the Philippines, Laubach had an experience while praying on Signal Hill behind his home in Lanao, where he was ministering to the Moros people. Experiencing total failure at the hands of a people who had no place for the gospel, he cried to the Father, "What can I do for hateful people like these: murderers, thieves, dirty filthy betel nut chewers - our enemies?" God answered him. (Laubach wrote):

My lips began to move and it seemed to me that God was speaking. "My child," my lips said, "you have failed because you do not really love these Moros. You feel superior to them because you are white. If you can forget you are an American and think only how I love them, they will respond."

Laubach's life was gradually but dramatically transformed in his understanding of the "others" he was called to love, and his work grew from a private to a public mission. The Jesus Creed formed the center of Laubach's life. Thus, he later confesses: "I choose to look at people through God, using God as my glasses, colored with His love for them."

His little book Letters by a Modern Mystic has sold nearly a million copies. Partly to his credit go the practice of "breath prayers" and the decision to live in the continual presence of God, which he had learned in seminary from Brother Lawrence. He went down from that Signal Hill experience with a mission "to respond to God as a violin responds to the bow of the master," and he believed that such "oneness with God is the most normal condition one can have." He found such oneness, for he confesses in April 1930 that "God was so close and so amazingly lovely that I felt like melting all over with a strange blissful contentment." One of his most potent statements about private, personal conversion is this: "Now I like God's presence so much that when for a half hour or so He slips out of mind - as He does many times a day - I feel as though I had deserted Him, and as though I had lost something very precious in my life."

...I like that.