Whether splashing in the cold waters of Morgan’s Creek with his brother near his hometown of Williamston, S.C., or trying not to fall off a rickety bamboo pole into quicksand in the eastern jungle of Ecuador, missionary Gary Stone finds glimpses of God wherever he looks.
In “What If Everyone Lived Next Door to Jesus?” (2008, Hannibal Books, Texas), Stone, an International Mission Board missionary who has served for 23 years with his wife, Lily, in Ecuador, Australia and Guatemala, serves up stories both humorous and poignant to illustrate a Christianity that aims to get back to the basics: loving others and sharing God’s good news.
In the title chapter, “Living Next Door to Jesus,” Stone tells of a Guatemalan missionary who became upset with a fellow missionary, Don, and went to his house to “give him a piece of my mind!” After the encounter, during which Don apologized and humbly asked to be forgiven, the aggrieved man was asked if he felt better. “No,” he replied, although he’d clearly lost some of his steam. “Living next door to Don is just like living next door to Jesus!”
Stone uses the illustration to ponder what life would be like for those around us if we actually lived like Jesus. “Could it be that those who are observing us realize before we do that we are much too long on sermons and far too short on love?” the author asks. “I can’t help but wonder if maybe we have put our quest for genuine love on the back burner – behind keeping the laws and being on time for all our meetings at church.
“Keeping laws doesn’t mean much if it doesn’t proceed from a heart of love. What we need is a heart that will attract others not by condemnation but by genuine agape-like acceptance, mercy, grace and love, – a radiating love that penetrates the heart of others and makes them want to have what we have.”
In another story, Stone recounts the childhood memory of a man who showed up at his house with a truckload of watermelons for sale. Young Gary stared at the man while his dad bought a watermelon. When he concluded the transaction, the man smiled and said he was going to put the boy in a bag and carry him away in his truck, an idea that struck terror in the boy’s heart.
“I have wondered from time to time if perhaps some of the people with whom we try to share the Lord have the same sensation,” Stone writes, “- that we are engaging them with our smiles while at the same time holding a sack behind our backs.
“There shouldn’t be a ‘bag’ behind our backs. There shouldn’t be any fine print below the dotted line. What we have to share is truly, without doubt, the most wonderful thing in all of life.”
The subtitle of Stone’s book is: “Meditations from a Missionary’s Heart.” Indeed, it is the author’s tenderness that shines through in his stories. While the reader glimpses the occasional exotic vignette (a Mayan animal sacrifice, volcanic ash collecting like snow on the hood of the family’s Land Cruiser), it is Stone’s ability to discover the assurance of God’s love in the ordinary – a dry cleaner’s mistake, a construction worker’s long-lasting footprint, a scene in a movie – that offers a hopeful answer to the question, “What if Everyone Lived Next Door to Jesus?”
To order Stone’s book, visit www.hannibalbooks.com or call 1-800-747-0738.