The Stories Of Isa

This is taken from the book, "SPEAKING OF JESUS: THE ART OF NOT-EVANGELISM" by Carl Medearis, quoted from chapter 10

I was staying with friends at a hotel in Basra, Iraq, in the spring of 2003. While there we managed to attract the curiosity of the hotel staff. They were curious about this team of international people staying at their hotel. Since a war was well underway, they were all the more intrigued because we weren't wearing camouflage and toting M4 carbines. During the day, out in the the streets, we had given out all of our texts - Arabic translations of the gospel of Luke. We were checking in for another day and as we stood in the lobby near the front desk, the hospitality manager leaned across the counter and looked at me.

"Why have you come here?" he asked in English. "Are you with the American Army?"

"No," I said, "we followed Jesus to Basra, so we are trying to find out what He is doing here."

He took in his breath with a hiss. "Isa?" he asked, using the Muslims name for Jesus. "Isa is in Basra?"

"We think so," my friend Samir said, "and He wants us to help out in any way we can."

The manager made something like a gasping sound and snatched the phone off the cradle. He rattled off a quick sentence in Arabic, hung up, and came around in front of the desk. "If you please," he said, "stay right here. I know you must be very busy, but I had to call my brother. He loves to hear about Isa."

Samir and I looked at each other. Isa was in Basra after all.

Within a few second three other men joined us, all in their twenties and thirties, wearing the dark blue uniform suit of the hotel staff. For a moment I wondered if they were going to ask us to leave. Then one of the men, with black hair and a thickening mustache, rushed forward and shook my hand. He moved down the line shaking hands vigorously, his eyes lit up like candles.

"You know about Isa?" he asked, returning to me.

"Yes," I said in Arabic. "We followed Him here."

"Oh my." His hands shot to his face. "When I was a young boy, a man came through our city and he was telling stories about Isa to the people."

The rest of the group and the hotel staff move closer, listening intently.

"When this man left he gave my father a cassette tape with recordings of the stories of Isa, the miracles and teachings of Isa, the people He talked to, and how He lived."

"Wow," I said.

"Every night for ten years my father would play the tape for me and my brothers and sisters. He played it until the tape did not work anymore." He stopped for a second, caught his breath. "I love these stories of Isa and I miss them."

"Well," I said, "we -"

He cut me off, excited. "I have heard from my father and the old men of the city, they say that there are books, sacred books, ancient books that tell the stories of Isa, as they happened, by the friends of Isa. Is this true?"

"Yes," I said, "and as a matter of fact, we have been giving them out all day."

He almost fainted. I could see his face color, the pale, then color again. He was vibrating with excitement. "Oh please," he said as he gripped my hand, "you must find one for me, you must give me one. I have to have one."

"All right," I said, and turned toward the elevator, "I'll see if I've got one left."

As I rode the elevator up to my room I realized I was shaking with excitement ........................... I tore my room apart. I ripped open my suitcases and threw my clothes all over the room ........ Finally after scrabbling around in my luggage like a miner digging for ore, I found one. A gospel of Luke. In Arabic the title was something like "the gospel of Luke, a follower of Jesus." I snatched it, raced out of the room and rushed for the lobby.

I will never forget his face when I handed it to him. With tears on his cheeks he held it reverently, lifted it up to his forehead, and closed his eyes. He lowered it to his lips, gave it a kiss, and then slowly opened it to look at the print. He lovingly ran his fingers over the pages, and then bolted for the lobby desk. He picked up the phone, dialed rapidly, and spoke even faster. When he hung up he looked at me and said, "I had to call my father; he will know if these are the same stories of Isa as I heard before."

We waited for a few moments and after some time an aging Iraqi man showed up - gray beard and all. He looked at us a little suspiciously at first and made his way over to his son, who was literally popping up and down with excitement.

"Papa," he said, "these men have come here because they are followers of Isa. I told them about the stories of Isa on the tape, and asked them if they had heard of the writings of the stories and they gave me one of them."

The old man came closer, picked up the gospel and lifted it to his face. He read the title, thumbed through the pages, pausing to read here and there, and then he stopped, lifted the book to his lips and kissed it, tears in the corners of his eyes. "Yes," he said, "this is it. These are the stories of Isa." He wrung our hands, hugging us to his body, so grateful that he shook.

It's that way in many places in the Middle East. I have been flooded, mobbed, and nearly crowded into the trunk of my car just for handing out these stories of Jesus to people who yearn for Him, as they should.

(I am hearing reports of many Muslims meeting Jesus. Papa God is at work in the earth. If you fixate on the darkness you may miss what He is doing! Don't worry about the darkness. LET YOUR LIGHT SHINE. It can be seen much better in the dark.)