Today, I am reading and commenting on  Deuteronomy 29-31.

Moses told the Israelites that the command he was giving them in his final address to them was not too difficult for them, and the commands which God has given us are not too difficult for us.  We do not need to commission someone to go to some far away place which requires special skills to get there.  God has placed His word in our hearts and in our minds. I was going to go a different direction with this, but as I typed that I was reminded of two stories I read many years ago.  The first was about a man in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon.  He was placed in a “re-education camp” by his government and tortured in many ways because he was more educated than they wished him to be.  He was constantly bombarded with ideas promoting how wonderful the government which was torturing him was.  He desperately desired  reading material, but it was denied to him.  He cried out to God for something (although as I recall the story he did not know God) to read.  One of his tortures was to be required to clean out the latrines by hand.  While cleaning the latrines, he found pages which his captors had torn from a book and used as toilet paper.  He carefully cleaned those pages and read them, hiding them in his cell.  Those pages had been torn from a Bible and provided him hope and inspiration.  If I remember the story correctly, it was in this way that he became a Christian.

The other story was about a group of anthropologists who went to the most remote part of the world they could imagine to record a society “uncorrupted” by Western Civilization.  They went to a remote spot in the jungles of Burma, which  had no recorded contact with civilization. The people there spoke a language which the anthropologists did not understand.  While there they recorded the songs sung by these people.  Upon their return, they spoke of their experiences among these people and played their recordings.  Imagine their surprise when the listening audience called in and said they knew the songs being sung.  They were old hymns they remembered from their childhood.  It turns out that in 1949-50 a group of missionaries in China had fled across the border into Burma.  Those missionaries died there in remote Burma, but not before planting the Gospel among this remote tribe.

The point of both of these stories is that God is not remote from us, those who seek Him will find Him., even those who do not know Who it is that they seek.  We do not need to go to some remote part of the world to find God’s will for us, but if we do go there, we will find God is already there waiting for us.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.