It's Not Karma – It's God!

Our next-door neighbors were 40-somethings with four kids. He was a divorced single with two boys. And she, too, was divorced and single with a boy and a girl. We met him when he moved in to live with her.

Over a period of several months we shared casual conversations and our relationship grew to be more open and friendly. He was a skilled builder and I was planning a project to build an overhang on the back of our house. So it made perfect sense for me to ask his advice. Not only did he give me some very helpful information, he offered to come over and assist me in the build.

Saturday morning we met in my back yard and began to lay out the job. As we did, he casually announced to me that "it must be Karma that we're here working together. "Karma?" I said. "Why do you say it's Karma?" Immediately he began to tell me about a very deep personal problem he was struggling with.

I put down my tools and said, "Let's take a coffee break and you can explain this problem in detail (it must have been 'Karma' that I thought to brew some coffee before work started). We went to the kitchen. I poured coffee and pulled out donuts - and he poured out his problem.

When he finished, I said, "Wow! That's a real hard problem. I don't know what to do about it." Then I said, "You know, sometimes when I have a problem like that, I give it to Jesus. Sometimes the problem is so overwhelming that I can't even find the right words to say to Him. So I just hold out the feeling of my need in my hands and life it up for Him to see. And at times He'll answer me."

He seemed interested, so I asked, "Do you want to do that right now?" And he said, "Yeah, I'd like to try that!" So we both bowed our heads. And as we sat there in silence, a palpable sense of God's presence came over us. We sat there until the sense of His presence had lifted. I looked up. His head was bowed and his eyes were still closed. And then he looked up. Neither one of us said anything. We just went back to work.

Three days later there was a knock on my front door. I opened it and the man was there. He said, "He talked to me." "Who talked to you?" I asked. He replied, "Jesus." I asked, "What did he say?" He said, "Forgive your ex-wife." I replied, "That sounds just like him."

We stood there and talked about other things. And later that month he turned his life over to Jesus.

It's been five years since my next-door neighbor in California became my brother in Christ. Since then, he married the woman who had been living with him. They asked me to do the wedding ceremony. And together they are serving Jesus in their local church and in our old neighborhood. They read their Bibles, not just to get information, but also to let God's word form them into people He wants them to be. And they're telling others about Jesus, too.

While we were still living next door to them, the man and his wife reached out to a couple across the street, cultivating a friendship with them. And one night, sitting around a campfire, that family across the street became followers of Jesus, too.

Recently, in one of the church council meetings at my new church, a council member asked, "What does evangelism look like at First Covenant?" That led our associate pastor Nathan Toots to ask, "How are you doing evangelism?"

Are you connecting to people who don't know Jesus? Are you building a friendship with them? Are you praying that God will open a door for you to invite them to put their lives in Jesus' hands?

This is not Karma. It's Christianity 101.

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