The conversation started when she waved at two of our young men who were on the other side of Huntingwood Blvd sharing the gospel with our neighbours.  “The lady wanted to enquire about a passerby, but we couldn’t help her.  So we started telling her about why we were here.”   It was then that the neighbour across the street from us discovered that we were a church. “I see people at that building all the time,” she said, “but I didn’t know what it was.”

Jesus called believers in Christ “a city on a hill that cannot be hid” (Matthew 5:14). This past Sunday, that light shone into the home of a neighbour who had lived for years in a house across from the church but had never known we existed except for a building at a particular postal code.  As I listened to the story, it dawned on me why the Lord called us to “go” (Matthew 28:19).  It is possible that the very people who walk through our parking lot as a short-cut, or the kids who come peddling their little bicycles under the watchful eye of their parents, or the people who hurriedly walk on the sidewalk in front of our church are like the neighbour our young men encountered.  They don’t know who we are, let alone know who Christ is. It adds, if possible, to the profundity of Paul’s statement, “The god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers so that they would not see” (2 Corinthians 4:4).

So the call for us is to go to the lost.  Pave the way with prayer; take up the equipment of preparation; commit the time to reach out to those who are around you.  Who knows, if the first time someone hears the love of Christ is from your lips?