What happens when God disrupts your vision and redirects your focus to places no one wants to go? Mark and Dalene Good share their remarkable 30-year journey as missionaries, from Bangladesh to France and now to the overlooked Benelux region of Europe.
These veteran church planters take us through a spiritual eye exam, challenging us to develop the three dimensions of spiritual vision: eyesight (seeing what God sees), insight (feeling what God feels), and foresight (knowing what to do about it). Through powerful stories like Clara, a trafficked woman who experienced God's intervention when a client tried to strangle her, and Julie, a skeptical French student who eventually asked to study the Bible, we glimpse the spiritual hunger beneath Europe's secular exterior.
The spiritual crisis in Europe is more severe than most realize. In France, where secularism was born, faith in God has been replaced with faith in self, leading to epidemic levels of mental health struggles. "We were never designed to be God," Mark explains. "We were never designed to wear the weight of having to be God in our lives, and it's literally crushing people to death." In Luxembourg, merely 0.25% of the population knows Jesus, while Belgium's Dutch-speaking region has only 40 small churches averaging 15 people each, mostly led by aging pastors with no successors.
This message parallels Paul's vision in Acts 16, where a Macedonian man begged him to "come over and help us." Just as Macedonia was an overlooked military buffer zone in Paul's day, Benelux occupies a similar position today – overrun in wars, not a destination anyone chooses, yet desperately in need of the gospel. If we could hear Europeans' spiritual cry, Mark suggests, it would be "an SOS with two exclamation points."
What barriers is God asking you to cross? Whether it's praying more intentionally for unreached peoples, giving sacrificially to missions, or stepping out in faith to share Christ with a neighbor, the Goods' testimony reminds us that when we obey God's redirections, He provides everything we need for the journey.
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