A missionary in New Guinea returned to his home after several years of service.
His friend said to him, "Jones, tell me what you found at your station in New Guinea."
"Found! I found something that looked more hopeless than if I had been sent into the jungle to a lot of tigers."
"Why, those people were so degraded that they seemed utterly devoid of moral sense. They were worse than beasts. If a mother were carrying her little baby, and the baby began to cry, she would throw it into the ditch and let it die. If a man saw his father break his leg, he would leave him upon the roadside to die. They had no compassion whatever. They did not know what it meant."
"Well, what did you do for people like that? Did you preach to them?"
"Preach? No! I lived."
"Lived? How did you live?"
"When I saw a baby crying, I picked it up and comforted it. When I saw a man with a broken leg, I mended it. When I saw people in distress, I took them in and pitied them. I took care of them. I lived that way. And those poeple began to come to me and say, 'What does this mean? What are you doing this for?' Then I had my chance and I preached the Gospel."
"Did you succeed?"
"When I left, I left a church!"
-Sunday School Times
"The best way to teach converts is to live before them. How we ourselves meet trouble is a much more potent lesson to them than explaining from the pulpit how they should meet it...Our most potent lessons are unconscious ones; they are, in actuality, allowing the Lord to live out His life through us." -Isobel Kuhn
