Can Anything Good Come From the Internet?

The other day I asked for book recommendations, and someone mentioned Brother Andrew. I got a ton of good recommendations, and this was just one of them. I’m checking him out online, and I plan to see if I can find his biggest book, God’s Smuggler, locally.

I know almost nothing about this man. People suggested I read his books because I said I enjoyed Corrie ten Boom so much. His story is somewhat similar. He was born in Holland, and he converted to Christianity while recuperating from a war wound. Then he dedicated his life to spreading the Gospel. He is famous for smuggling Bibles into countries where Christian materials were banned. He used to drive through customs checkpoints with Bibles on the seat beside him, in open view, and God saw to it that he wasn’t hindered. Wonderful stuff. I can’t wait to take a look at it. It’s easy to read the Bible, and it’s easy to pray, and it’s easy to go to church. In my view, from what little experience I have as a serious Christian, the thing that divides your life between real Christianity and phoning it in is proving you trust God, by your actions. When you’re not doing this, you’re really almost dormant. When you are doing it, God seems to come alive. Obviously, that’s a trick of perspective. It’s like saying the world seems brighter when you open your eyes. But it’s true.

While Googling Brother Andrew, I just found an exciting website. It’s exciting because it deals with an issue that has been bothering me. I gripe a lot about the way Muslims behave these days, and I support the war on terror. But I never get around to mentioning something else that has been on my mind. These people need evangelism. They think they’re doing right; they are completely lost. They are being used. We have to fight them militarily, but hard as it may be to say, we should also be trying to help them out of their ignorance. I believe that, but I have done virtually nothing about it. And I am not alone, among conservatives. Maybe this is a sort of Achilles heel for us; it’s so easy to talk about nuking them and turning their cities to rubble that we may have forgotten we are talking about human beings. The leftist approach of unconditional forgiveness, appeasement, and self-blame is completely wrong. But Christians should be reaching out to these people. The terrible obstacles that have been thrown up should be a clue that this is something the enemy really doesn’t want us doing, and that it will have a powerful effect.

It turns out that Brother Andrew has a website called Secret Believers. I’ll bet a lot of you knew about it way before I did. It’s a site that helps believers in Muslim countries. They can’t get up on Sunday morning and go to church, but maybe they can use the Internet to help them find their way. This is fantastic. Things like this redeem the Internet. They almost make up for the constant flood of porn.

According to Charity Navigator, almost 80% of donations to Open Doors, the parent organization for Secret Believers, goes to programs. Not administration or fundraising. That’s pretty good. A really efficient charity will be in the high 80s.

I guess people wonder why I have been drawn back to my faith. Why I say I can’t get away from it. I generally keep that kind of information private, largely because I have never succeeded in convincing a single person that God existed. I really don’t have the gift, and I have found sharing my experiences with unbelievers to be a colossal waste of time. But I am getting older, and I care less and less what people think, so I have started to feel more willing to talk about reasons why I believe. I can’t pin it on one or two things. It’s a big three-dimensional matrix of facts and observations, and when you add them together, the sum is faith. It amounts to proof.

I was thinking about one of the reasons yesterday. Back when my mother was alive, she dealt with a person who had become delusional due to drug abuse. And this person was in my mother’s house. And this person hallucinated. Some of my memories of this are a little fuzzy, but as I recall, this person saw little beings on a TV screen, communicating with her and doing various things. She had names for them and so on. It was a complex hallucination. Maybe “hallucination” is the wrong word, since it implies the perception of something that isn’t real. Later, away from the TV, she claimed they were trying to contact her using the phone wires. By making little noises. The phones were on the hook, you understand. But this person heard the noises.

My mother told me about that not too long after it happened. But much, much later, she admitted something to me. She said that when this person claimed the beings were trying to contact her from the phone wires, she was in the same room. And she heard their voices, too. Coming from the phone wires.

It probably doesn’t mean much to you, but you don’t know my mother. She was an honest woman, and she didn’t make up stories to get attention. She was clearly reluctant to let anyone know about it.

That’s just one of many pieces of the matrix. One of the few that don’t come from my personal experience. If it were true, would it prove God existed? No, but it is consistent with the notion that there are evil beings assigned to certain families, to vex, separate, and destroy. I think my family has always had more than its share. When I was very young, I used to wake in the middle of the night and see hideous creatures crawling over the bed and across the ceiling and up and down the walls, and I have never been totally convinced they weren’t real.

One nice thing about hearing things like this from me is that you are reading the words of a person who has absolutely nothing to gain from this. I have no yacht to maintain. No pink silk suits. No private jet. No giant church with forty-foot ceilings. No airtime bills to pay. I will not lay hands on you. I do not want to send you a free book in exchange for a love gift. I may be the worst Christian in my entire zip code. In an odd way, maybe that makes me more credible.

Anyway, Secret Believers looks very interesting. If you know anything about it, let me know. It’s hard to imagine a better cause to give money to.

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Here’s a link to some mp3s of Brother Andrew’s sermons. I’m listening to “Unhindered.” Very good, so far. Funny, he hasn’t said anything about me sending him a thousand dollars and God making me rich as a reward.