A Faithful Facilitator // Little People Used by a Big God, Part 2

Now just imagine that you’re a refugee from a war-ravaged African nation, your country is a mess, people are dying and you’re on the run in a jungle from rebel fighters and from forced conscription as a teenager. What could you ever make out of your life under those circumstances?

Superstar syndrome is something that touches just about every corner of the globe. You know larger than life media personalities that somehow, well, so many people secretly aspire to that sort of recognition and status. And when we look in the mirror at our faces, we discover not only aren’t we like that, but we will never be like that. So is there any hope for little people like you and me?

I was talking to a dear friend of mine the other day, Joseph. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa. He is 28 years old, and he has had the most incredibly destructive start to his life. His story begins in Liberia and in 1989, at age 12. He was faced with the ravages of war. Now Joseph is no superstar in the world’s eyes. He is one of the little people, but to me, to me he’s a giant! Have a listen to Joseph’s story

Joseph’s father is a pastor in Liberia. In most parts of the world, pastors don’t earn a lot of money. Well, that’s especially true in Liberia. At age 12, civil war hits and Joseph became a refugee. Now I remember my parents, who were in Europe during World War 2, talking about what it was like being refugees during wartime. I can’t imagine it, I’ve never experienced it, and I pray to God that I never will experience it. But Joseph did.

In the West, we so often see images of African refugees, starving African children. Most of the people who watch those images on the news day after day, week after week, sadly become desensitized. Joseph is one of those. He fled to different countries, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Guyana, Togo, I gather not with his parents. And at one stage in the Ivory Coast, he lived in a car for almost a year with some other kids. Today, fifteen or sixteen years on, he still talks about those days with some difficulty.

When he was in Guinea, he spent days and nights in the forest, hiding, escaping from forced recruitment as a rebel fighter. Remember, he’s twelve or thirteen years old. He was hunted like an animal. He recalls living on a riverbank with lots of other kids his age and then fleeing on to yet another country. I, for one, cannot imagine the trauma of that, can you?

I first met Joseph in June last year at a broadcasting conference in the UK, Stoke on Trent. It was a ‘chance meeting’ and the thing that struck me about Joseph when I first met him, was the sparkle in his eyes. I guess it is accentuated by the deep black skin. When we got talking, I had no idea about his background, or even his current situation.

He heads up a Radio Broadcasting School at a Christian Media Training College in South Africa. He was so excited to meet me. He interviewed me for a radio program. He was excited with what I was doing. He listened to radio programs that I was producing and listened to what we were doing on the internet, and had a look at one of our internet sites, www.whosjesus.com. He’s just an overwhelmingly delightful, enthusiastic young man.

And so the conference finishes, and we head back to our respective homes, he to South Africa, me to Australia. Now don’t know if you have ever done conferences. But how it normally works is, people make all sorts of promises – I’ll keep in touch with you, we’ll catch up, we’ll do this, we’ll do that, at conferences, and ninety nine percent of them never do. So Joseph went back to South Africa, and I thought, ‘Oh well, I might hear from him and I might not’.

Well, Joseph really made a point of connecting with me. Joseph made a point of not only connecting with me but trying to connect me with people of influence that he knew in Africa, with his boss, at the Media Village, where he works, with thirty or forty radio stations right across the continent. And still I had no idea of the circumstances in his life right at that time. It was only much later, in fact, only just recently that the life story of this bright eyed, well-dressed, enthusiastic connector of people, came to light.

Today, as I said, Joseph is connecting us with dozens of radio stations around Africa. So that this program right now is being heard by tens of thousands of people right across Africa. Here’s this little person, a person that most of us will never ever meet, Joseph, having an influence in the lives of tens of thousands of people. Isn’t that exciting?

Well, what’s the point? Joseph is one of the little people. He looks like Tiger Woods, the American golfer. But, I tell you he doesn’t get paid US$130 million a year to wear a certain brand of sports clothes! He’s a little person with a tragic background, and right now, his current circumstances are that he’s not particularly well off at all. I didn’t find that out until somebody else, from Ireland of all places, visited me who knew Joseph, who told me his story.

Joseph works fifteen, sixteen hours a day and then works all weekend, in order to make ends meet. Yet he has that sparkle in his eyes, the sort of sparkle you see from someone who knows Jesus. He could have let his background get him down. He could have let his current finances get him down, but, oh no, this guy has a fire in his heart. He has a sparkle in his eye; he has a smile on his face.

When I met Joseph at that conference in the UK, he was smartly dressed but I would never have guessed what his background was. And he came with the attitude, ‘I’m here to serve’.

God took that young man, and taught me a thing or two. God took that young man and made him a superstar in my life. God took that young man and used him to reach tens of thousands of people, across Africa with his love. This little person, Joseph, is loved by a big God. This little person, Joseph, is used by a big God.

I trust that you find Joseph’s story a blessing and an inspiration. But it’s not the main point of the story, because this is not just Joseph’s story. This is also God’s story. This is a story about a real God who calls His real grace into the real life of a person who was a refugee, of a person who was hunted like an animal, of a person who fled wars.

This is a story about a God who loves Joseph so much that He would pour His own Spirit into Joseph and give him that smile on his face. This is about a God who puts a sparkle in Joseph’s eyes. This is about a God who takes a life from such adversity and says, ‘This Joseph is one of mine, this Joseph is someone that I can use’. This is a story about God’s grace. And as I read through the Bible and I see how different people react to God, how different people interact with God, what I see is God’s story woven through that.

Joseph has a namesake in the Old Testament. There is a Joseph in the Old Testament, in the book of Genesis. You read through the second half of the book of Genesis and you read about Joseph, who is Jacob’s son, who is Isaac’s son, who is Abraham’s son. And Joseph had a life of adversity. And he just carried on and followed God and loved God and God used that Joseph mightily. Just as I believe God is going to use this Joseph, in Africa, mightily.

When we look at our lives sometimes, and we look at our circumstances, we look at the adversity, we look at ourselves and we say, ‘Well, I’m not a superstar, I don’t have what it takes to do superstar type things’. I think we are kidding ourselves. And I think we are missing out on the whole point of God’s story right through the Bible, which is, God takes little people like you, like Joseph, like me, little people who will make a decision just to follow God. Just simply with who they are and what they are and what they have and God uses people like that, mightily. Just as He’s used Joseph.

What about you?