Sunday was a good day at church. We had a unique guest speaker, Pr. Karim Baidaoui from Disciples of the Way Lutheran Outreach. Pr. Karim is from Morocco, raised as a Muslim to a Jewish mother and Muslim father, now a Lutheran Pastor. You can’t make this kind of stuff up. As I suspect everyone else was, I was expecting him to share grand stories of his conversion, his life immediately after conversion, the challenges of being Muslim, of being Christian and so on.
Whereas there were some stories that would perk our ears, for the most part he was reserved in those stories. Instead, what I saw, was a pastor excited to proclaim how God’s salvation is the unbelievable free gift of Jesus Christ. And how that salvation, that gift, puts a fire in our lives for our neighbor. No matter how different that neighbor is.
“Fan into flame the gift,” is how Pr. Karim described it from 2 Timothy 1:6. There are gifts that we receive that are good to look at, hang on a wall perhaps. Then there are gifts that are meant to be used. The grace of God is a gift indeed, but one that is not to sit idle, rather to be put to work within all of us.
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