Return address?

"What do you mean I can't send the letters?" I asked the postal worker in Croatia for the third time! Obviously he was not understanding me, that I do not have a local address and if the letters are returned for some reason, I want them to come to my house in Macedonia, not some address in Croatia. "Oh you are just trying to force us to mail these letters to Macedonia!" the old fellow replied.

I thought to myself, he is not getting how ludicrous this whole scenario has become. He is suggesting that I am paying a premium airmail price to send these 14 letters to America, just so that I can get them into Macedonia?? It would clearly be much much cheaper to send the letters directly to Macedonia!

I have lived in four different countries, and have visited 30 plus, and have mailed letters from at least 15 different countries . . . and I have never ever in my whole experience had a post office refuse to mail a letter for me, because the return address was in some other country than the post office itself! And just when I thought that I had had every possible experience that a person could have in a post office.

It was a good lesson for me . . . one, that I have not yet experienced all that can be experienced in a post office, and two that there are different perspectives on the nature and work of post offices around the world. Spiritually I also have not experienced all of the Kingdom of God has to offer or that God even has for me personally, and two, there are different perspectives on the nature and work of the Kingdom of God within the Kingdom of God.

As I have been teaching Biblical Theology of Missions this week at the Evangelical Theological seminary in Croatia, I have been appalled at how small a percentage of the students feel the slightest urgency to evangelize a lost world. Even when I confront them with the overwhelming numbers of lost people in the world and how difficult it is to reach them . . . they seem to be utterly content in their salvation without the smallest concern about someone else's salvation. Today in the class discussion I realized that this phenomena is most likely connected to the fact that these churches in the Balkan Peninsula were planted with a local vision only, never a global vision. Now the question for me as their teacher-mentor is . . . how to interject into their personal lives and the life of their churches, a global vision? Can that even be done? I certainly seem to be using the wrong return address.

I wonder if the Bosnians will send my letters for me later this afternoon?