A Shovel and a Pile of Sand

It all begins with a shovel and a pile of sand. For every five wheelbarrows that you fill with sand, you fill three more with rocks. Dump it all in a pile with two bags of cement, and you are ready to start mixing. There is no cement truck at the worksite, so you use shovels to turn the dirt over and over and over again. Adding water as you go, you mix and mix and mix until you get a lumpy, soggy pile of cement. Next, you shovel it into the metal machine, which will press it down and squeeze it out. The end result of this forty-five minutes process of manual labor? Thirty cement blocks.

Today's job was a little different for me. Instead of singing to kids or talking to women at casa materna, I sweated and panted as I shoveled my arms off to make cement blocks. Rather than cooking dinner or helping with laundry around the mission, I got my shoes muddy and my fingernails dirty. At first this manual labor seemed insignificant compared to spending time with people, which is what I normally like to do. But today I learned that this is not true.

In order for children to hear about Jesus, they first have to go to school. In order for children to go to school, they must have a decent building to protect them from the weather. But to have a good building, you have to have sturdy cement blocks, and in order to have sturdy cement blocks, you have to make them...one shovel-full at a time.

It is the same with evangelism. So often, we forget about making blocks and want to go right to the preaching in the church building. Instead of working to plant seeds, we want to jump in right at harvest season. If people are ready to be saved, we want to be there to hear them pray the prayer. Jesus says that the "harvest is plentiful" so we tend to think of sharing the gospel as something that we do to convert people. But Richard Stearns points out something different in his book, The Hole in Our Gospel.

"But what about the fruit that hasn't ripened?...Think about all the things that must happen before there can be a good harvest of crops. First someone has to go and prepare the land. This is backbreaking work that involves felling trees, pulling massive stumps out of the ground, extracting roots and boulders from the field, and moving them aside. But there's no harvest yet."

He goes on to talk about tilling the soil, spreading fertilizer, forming rows, planting seeds, picking weeds, and even building a fence around the crops. The harvest only comes after a lot of other hard work.

So sharing the gospel is so much more than just getting people to confess and repent and proclaim Jesus as Lord. Sometimes it is not even planting seeds, but tilling the soil in preparation to plant the seeds. Sharing the good news is about building relationships, encouraging the weak, standing up for the oppressed, offering to lend a hand, or being there to listen and love. It all begins with a shovel and a pile of sand.