“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father.” John 14:12 NAS
Catalyst – an event or a person who brings about change.
Hundreds of years ago missionary Adoniram Judson was in a Burmese jail. In that jail, he met some Karen tribesmen, fellow prisoners, and he began to share the story of Jesus with them. They lit up, recognizing immediately a story that had been passed down to them through their ancestors. The story of creation, the fall of man, a flood, the promise of a savior. That they were incomplete, and that they would be completed when “white foreigners” were to come across the sea from the west on “white wings” (sails). In that story, was the promise that the white man would have a scroll that would tell them the way to heaven. The name of their supreme God was Y’wa. Today, most of the Karen tribe are Christian.
Many decades ago, a young Albanian nun went to Calcutta to teach in a Catholic school. While there, she encountered the overwhelming suffering of endless numbers of sick and poor people, many of whom would live and die in the streets of that city. She began to bring the dying in off the streets, clean their wounds, give them food and water. It was an impossible task, one she began with only 5 rupees and no helpers. And a movement of the love of Jesus was born that is now spoken about all over the earth. Today there are 4,500 Sisters of Charity working in 600 mission stations in 133 countries!
Several decades ago, a young missionary couple in their early 30’s heard the call of God to leave their work on their mission field in Guatemala and return to their hometown in Pittsburgh, to open a Bible Training Center and raise up a generation of world changers who would take ‘The Word to the World in the 80’s.’ Mark and Ellie Geppert left a thriving ministry and helped in planting a church and a mission school in a failing steel town in an abandoned supermarket with 5 acres of cracked paved parking. And in the decade that followed, streams of broke, busted and disgusted men and women can flowing through those doors, to receive 2 years of Holy Spirit filled, doctrinally sound, faith empowering teaching, that changed them forever. There, a missions movement was born that has swept the world and changed nations through those graduates.
When we open our hearts and fully surrender our lives to the power of the living God and HIS plans for our lives, the living seed of the Creator comes in and changes us…from the inside out. Faith to go through closed doors. Love to climb high mountains to reach the unreached. Wisdom and grace to know how to ‘be’ among a people we do not know. Passion for the Presence of the One we love most of all. These things make us Divine Catalysts: Agents of Change. People who enter a place, a country, a group, a job, a situation….and bring LIGHT and CHANGE and HOPE and HEALING. God Carriers. Catalysts. Change Agents.
Lord. Have Your way!
~ Debbie Ecker
