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Have you heard the expression “Boots on the Ground?” Well our Live Dead Missionaries are the boots on the Silk Road. Here we’d like to take a moment and allow one of them to share a snapshot of their life with you. Some names and details have been changed, but this is a true story from this colorful, vibrant, and sometimes surprising region.

We had been working on learning the language of our target people group while living in a city in a different country in the Silk Road region.

There were people from our unreached people group scattered around our city of millions. The progress we had made in the language was hard fought for but was still a work in progress.

We received a phone call from a friend of ours working in a local church. Surprisingly, a couple from our people group had shown up the last Sunday and was looking for information. After receiving his telephone number I finally called this man, Musa, on our wedding anniversary.

He invited us to come visit him for lunch in a small cafe across the city where he was working as a dishwasher.

We didn’t know what to expect, but boarded a train and then a bus and went looking for this small cafe miles away from our house. When we arrived we sat down with Musa in his place of work and quickly noticed the austere Islamic decorations and the long beards on the other employees. At a time like that you are very aware of the fact that in our country missionaries are considered to be of the same ilk as terrorists.

Without much as far as pleasantries Musa asked us the question that had been pressing on his mind.

“If Jesus is the Savior, why did God send Muhammad?”

That’s not normally the first or second question we like to answer with someone we don’t know.

Speaking Musa’s own language (and also knowing that no one would understand our conversation but Musa) we told him that, “As Christians we don’t think God sent Muhammad.” We have since learned that Musa is quite intelligent and here his cleverness showed through and he asked, “So, you’re saying it’s a lie?” Much later he told us that when we had responded, “yes”, that it was then that he decided to follow the Lord.

Just the Beginning

Musa’s story is much more involved than merely this conversation, but Musa’s life was changed by the power of the gospel. Since that time he’s shared with well over a hundred other Muslims from various countries. After our long day of public transportation across the city we were too tired to celebrate our wedding anniversary that night. But, seeing the first person from our people group that we had shared with come to the Lord was enough of a celebration.

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