Lula, our daughter Mimi, and I are now back in Hamburg after driving from Michigan (where Mimi graduated from Hope College in Holland), to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where we managed to clear out our house in only one week. Thank you, Lord! Traveling through the central U.S. on our vacation, what struck me particularly, though, was that so many people came to our aid when we told them that we are missionaries. In fact, quite a few of them regarded themselves as missionaries—regularly taking time off from their day jobs to carry out their “real” vocation of testifying about Jesus around the globe. One man, who owns a siding company, told me that he has been to Africa 25 times to tell people about Jesus. Another man, a professional auto mechanic, donated over $1,000 of labor and materials to service the truck of another daughter of ours. With a smile he showed me a picture on his phone, which you can see here. He tries to do everything for the glory of God, he explained. In a third case, yet another business owner will do some work on our house for free because he wants to share out of the Lord’s abundance. How did we run into so many faithful Christians? For one thing, God sent them. At the same time, it is quite apparent that a living faith in Jesus Christ is very much alive in many corners of the United States, and this is so encouraging. You can see it across many denominations—with some Christians financing their own short-term mission trips; with the LCMS—due to the generosity of its donors—acting as the de facto organizational and financial backbone of conservative Lutheranism around the globe; and now, on a different note, with the Roman Catholic Church in the United States about to play a major role in worldwide Catholicism through Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV. We sometimes decry that Christianity in America has retreated in the past fifty years and in some ways that is true. But, especially living abroad and able to occasionally compare America with other regions that used to be Christian, at least from my point of view, Christianity in the U.S. is still quite robust. Thank God!
The Tiews in Germany 