A little of the breadth revealed

I don’t know all the meanings of the scriptural saying “the breadth and length and height and depth,” but the least the phrase can mean is what I glimpsed today—the added dimension of God’s love I learned of through a woman named Lai, who came to my house to look at a room for rent. Lai, a medical doctor from Malaysia, is currently studying at a local seminary in hopes of equipping herself to minister to the soul as well as body.

Lai is a middle child born to a Buddhist and Confucius Chinese family living near Kuala Lumpur. She started to wonder about God as a teenager and discerned that her high school biology teacher was a Christian because “she didn’t teach us evolution.” Her teacher was not allowed to share her beliefs publicly at that private school, so Lai went to her secretly, and the teacher led her to the Lord.

I asked Lai, as we sat at my kitchen table, how her parents reacted. “There was persecution at first,” she said matter-of-factly, “and I immediately thought of Jesus’ words that ‘whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.’”

I was given more insight into what was at stake for her parents: To them, Lai’s refusal of ancestor worship meant that when they died, their daughter would not take care of their departed souls. Lai reminded me of Jesus’ warning that His coming would divide families:

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother …” (Matthew 10:34–35, ESV).

Lai decided before God not to eat food offered to ancestors, in order not to be a “stumbling block” to them. For she reasoned, as a young believer, that if her parents saw her, a professed follower of Christ, eating food offered to the dead, they would think her double-minded about her new faith.

I asked her what she thought about eating food offered to idols now. Lai said she still does not eat it in front of her parents (who have over the years come to respect her decision and to make separate food for her) but that in private she has no scruples against it since an idol is nothing in the world.

Lai wanted very much for her parents to know Jesus, so she started to write articles for the religion section of their local paper, hoping to reach them and others. (Her father would not listen to her direct proselytizing but would read the paper.) This she did for years. They have not yet come to faith, but she has led two of her sisters to Christ.

Lai’s compelling ambition is to tell people about Jesus. God is on the move in Malaysia, a land I’ve never seen and maybe never will. A little of the breadth of God’s salvation was revealed to me today. Imagine all the depths and breadth I do not see.