JESUS AMAU

Even though the schedule was short, we traveled from village to village, sharing the stories of what God had been doing there. I introduced our students one by one, and when I introduced Mola — Mola, who had come to believe in Jesus while reading the Bible with me, Mola who could never be left out of my testimony — everyone was overjoyed.

Together with Mola, our team walked through countless villages.

We walked so much.

We went deeper into more villages, and along every road came more testimonies, more stories overflowing one after another. We even walked together through the place where my wife and I were married.

I wanted to show them more.

I wanted to walk farther together.

And throughout those days, we shared daily times of meditation and reflection as a team. Thinking ahead to the final days we would spend at YWAM, I suggested that we begin practicing listening to the voice of the Lord together.

So we meditated on Scripture.

We shared with one another.

And we intentionally made space to listen for the heart of God.

Even in our exhaustion, we decided to press a little farther.

Every night, our conversations became deeper.

Every night, we chose to press in a little more.

I also carried a growing desire to distribute more evangelistic booklets to more villages, so I asked the missionaries if we could personally travel farther out ourselves. We rented a vehicle, drove from village to village, handed out the booklets, and shared the gospel.

Because distributing the booklets did not require much language, the team threw themselves into it wholeheartedly.

I preached the gospel in Kriol, while the others worked hard to memorize the Kriol evangelism script I had written so they could personally share it with people themselves.

And one day, we climbed into the back of a small truck that could barely hold three people.

As we passed through village after village, we shouted again and again:

“JESUS AMAU!”

“JESUS AMAU!”

Jesus loves you.

And while shouting those words, we scattered the gospel booklets I had illustrated myself — booklets modeled after the children in the southern villages, our kids, our students.

With the wind rushing against us, we proclaimed the gospel toward every passerby and every village we crossed.

Going house to house.

Exactly what I had always wanted to do.

Exactly what I had longed to do together with others.

And now we were finally doing it.

Then the team members themselves began saying things.

That they had never known it could feel this joyful to share Jesus.

That preaching the gospel made them unbelievably happy.

Dan continued filming interviews and capturing footage as he had originally planned. But more than anything else, the moments that stayed with all of us most deeply were those hours spent shouting out the gospel together.

And through the daily times of meditation, the team members began wrestling with the things they had never been able to lay down before.

Their desire for stable futures.

The clothes and possessions they loved.

The determination to build their lives by their own strength.

They began confronting the very things they had been clinging to.

Because during those short days, they encountered the Lord so closely every day. The joy of sharing Him became so overwhelming, and the happiness they found in Him so real, that an even deeper battle began inside them.

Even within such a short schedule, we began going deeper.

And the Lord began revealing deeper things.

Every day, the team wrestled between the joy they had found in the Lord and the things they still could not release back in Korea.

I cannot tell every detailed story that happened there.

But one thing was unmistakably clear:

None of them saw this journey as simply a special experience.

This trip was becoming a turning point for every single one of us.

It was not merely an extraordinary experience.

The Lord Himself was doing something among us.

And as they began sharing Jesus, as they began seeing themselves reflected honestly through the Word and wrestling with what they found there,

the Lord showed us more.

He invited us closer.

And little by little, we began to realize something.

The reason the Lord had gathered these people together so suddenly…

was because His own heart was urgent.