My siblings and I used to put on a Christmas play our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents would “ooh and ahh” over. We were all ten and under at the time, so it definitely wasn’t any good, but like all loving adults do, they sat through it anyway. My great grandparents weren’t Christians. Truth be told, they didn’t even like Christians. Yet, there they were, dutifully watching our show. This shocked a lot of the family because my great grandpa had notoriously thrown a preacher off his front porch once and told him to never come back.

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I’m not sure if people go door-to-door witnessing here in Alaska, but where I’m from, some of the churches do a thing called “soul winning” where churches send people out to knock on the doors of strangers and ask them where they’d end up if they died today. I guess my great grandpa didn’t keep his curtains closed to deter visitors that particular afternoon, because his house was on the day’s route, and that’s how he found himself being asked to think about death. Telling a soul-winning stranger to get lost doesn’t sound nice, but in reality, my great grandpa was one of the kindest, hardest working, and most generous men you’ll ever meet. He was a rural farm boy who grew up to serve in the trenches of World War II. He stormed the beaches of Normandy, helped with liberation efforts throughout Europe, and came home with a purple heart from being wounded in action. He forever walked with a limp after that, and despite the extensive medical and surgical interventions of the day, his face permanently told the story of having been embedded with shrapnel from a bomb explosion he escaped by the grace of God alone.  

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When he came home scarred, broken, and carrying stories he didn’t begin to tell until years later, he and my great grandma worked hard to put their lives back together one small piece at a time. He came home a completely changed man and began to rekindle relationships with his small children, return to the hard work of farming the land, and reintegrate into a world that understood very little of what he’d seen and experienced.  So, when a well-meaning, yet ignorant, man showed up at his doorstep to “force religion down his throat” by asking him where he’d spend eternity if he died that day, my great-grandpa, who’d slept in fox holes and saw more death and brutality than many of us ever will in our lifetimes, told him exactly what you’d expect: “Get lost.”  

My great grandpa died when I was 19 years old. Shortly before he passed away, he called someone he’d watched faithfully sow the seeds of Jesus throughout the years and asked him to tell him more. My great grandpa finally decided to trust the God he’d been unsure of since his days in the fox holes. And the person he called? It was the preacher he’d thrown off his porch. The preacher had continued to try to reach my great grandpa for decades, and finally, my great grandpa was ready to listen. It took time. It took the man changing his abrasive tactics and learning to intentionally get to know someone who’d once told him to get lost, but he didn’t give up. He learned to listen more than he spoke. He learned to let go of trying to persuade my great grandpa, and instead, simply showed up and lived the gospel in front of him. He established a relationship of trust, and in doing so, he gained a brother in Christ.

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My great-grandpa’s story taught me a vital lesson – how you share the gospel matters. You see, this well-meaning man out knocking on doors didn’t know my great-grandpa’s context. Initially, he didn’t bother to get to know him at all, and that made a difference in how well his intentions were received. I’m sure it sometimes works to simply knock on someone’s door and ask a question about their eternity, but more often than not, the door is opened when the person we’re trying to reach stops becoming a soul we’re trying to “win” and becomes a person of value worth getting to know for the sake of their eternity. The first tactic startles and the second honors, and I believe there’s value in the difference. We honor others when we take time to see their value in light of eternity. That’s true in how we talk to them about Jesus and how we act, even when the stakes don’t seem as high. In today’s world, that might look less like the interaction between my great grandpa and the pastor on his doorstep and more like a Facebook post with a back-and-forth interaction. Just because something is done behind the safety of a keyboard doesn’t mean people aren’t watching. Do we think about honoring others with our online responses as much as our in-person interactions?

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James 1:19 says, “You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry” (NLT). Are we intentionally slowing down to listen to each other or are we rushing in with our own words instead? Are we reactively jumping in to comment on a social media thread we disagree with, or do we choose to be slow to anger and gracious in our responses? We tell a story with our lives, whether that’s in person or online. Is the story we’re telling looking like Jesus?