What Am I Looking For?

Take a minute and read this short article at msnbc.com: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/26720566/. Now, here's a question, how does reading this article affect the way you would pray for the missionaries from your denomination or para-church organization who are serving in the Congo? How do you share the gospel with a culture that believes in witchcraft so much that a rumor could start at a soccer game that one of the players was using it on the field? How do you offer Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, when the police's response to the chaos is to protect, not the people, but their own leader, and fire guns into the air? How do you talk about hope in a place that's been a battlefield for civil war?

See, here's the thing: when I read articles in the news it's easy for me to dismiss them as far-off places, and not realize that there are probably missionaries who have followed God's calling on their life to go to these places and share the gospel with the people that live there. It's easy for me to read articles like this as news and forget that really they give me a wonderful prayer guide for countries, cities, and regions of the world I've never been too. Just imagine, that in this couple paragraph article, I have all the information I need to intercede before the Lord on behalf of missionaries I'll probably never even meet! And that's true of almost any story from any country in the world. In too many cases, though, I'm not looking and so I don't see.