When crosses are carried, buckets overflow

If you haven’t been following the news of ISIS’ advancements through Syria and other countries then perhaps you’ve read the story recently circulating about the 11 missionaries they crucified and beheaded this past August.

I’ve seen the story popping up recently and so maybe it’s just been confirmed or perhaps it’s making the rounds again on the Internet. Either way, it’s a brutal story that leaves me struggling to understand it.

Just a few days before this tragedy, I had read another story about the forthcoming movement of ISIS through Aleppo and the warning to the indigenous Christians in the area to leave. In both stories, the director of the national missionary group also was strongly suggesting they leave, but rather than run, they felt the Lord would be better served by staying and ministering to those fleeing ahead of ISIS.

At the time, the group’s leader acknowledged he did not know what fate awaited them, but he didn’t sound hopeful. Then the news came that they all had been killed, and not just killed but tortured, some raped and then killed in a gruesome manner.

My first reaction was to doubt the story was even true. But my inability to believe quickly moved to the side as I remembered feeling the same the first time I read a Voice of the Martyrs’ (VOM) newsletter, which writes of the hostilities that Christians face worldwide. It seemed so impossible to me that people could be so cruel to others simply because of their faith in Christ.

Then, through my own travels, I began to meet people who had suffered persecution because of their Christian faith. I doubted it no more. The human capacity for sin has existed since the creation of man, and none of us is good enough to overcome it, hence our need for Jesus, who also was tortured and crucified.

But I also have struggled to understand the willingness of Christians to stay in an area that certainly meant death, and part of me wants to doubt that this was Christ’s call in their life.

When crosses are carried, buckets overflow | To Sow a Seed

I’ve spent recent days meditating between Mark 6:11, where Christ says, “Any place that does not receive you or listen to you, as you go out from there, shake the dust off the soles of your feet for a testimony against them” and Matthew 16:24, where He says “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.”

Why did they not shake the dust off their feet and leave? But if they left, then how could they carry their cross?

Richard Wurmbrand, who started VOM following 14 years in a Soviet prison, says in his book 100 Prison Meditations, “Christians are meant to have the same vocation as their King, that of cross-bearers. It is this consciousness of a high calling and of partnership with Jesus which brings gladness in tribulation, which makes Christians enter prisons for their faith with the joy of a bridegroom entering the bridal room.”

In short, we should already have weighed the cost when we said “yes” to Christ, and so then having given our life to Christ, there should be nothing left to weigh. We pick up our cross and go, counting it blessing what the Lord allows in our lives.

I’ll admit, that this prospect is often a very real challenge for me, to not know what faith in Christ might look like in my life or my children’s lives when people are so willing to abandon God and end the lives of those who hold onto Him.

I think that in 14 years of following my savior, He would say my faith has grown, but that it is merely a drop in a bucket that He wishes to fill.

This Sunday, Nov. 1, is a day of prayer for the persecuted church. Take a moment please to join my family and me as we lift up those who have carried, who are carrying and who will carry their cross for Christ. Let us not forget those whose buckets are overflowing.