Heroes Of The Faith - Intro

I'm starting a new mini series which will run sporadically over the coming months about some of the amazing folk who I/we consider to be the real heroes of our faith.

It would be really easy to do just such a series on the likes of the amazing George Műller, Hudson Taylor, C.T. Studd or Jim Elliot to name a few that come to mind. However just about all that can be said about these heroes has been said and I'm not pretending to have any new insight into their extraordinary lives. If you're interested in the lives of some of these heroes and church history generally pop over to the Church History Blog by Lex Loizedes, it's a great read!

No, I'm interested in the regular folk who faithfully live their lives day by day in very trying circumstances without a word of complaint about the situations they find themselves in. Most of these people live in abject poverty in a way that would horrify the average Christian. We find ourselves horrified quite often and we're probably amongst the most desensitized to such poverty. In short this series is about the people who impress us with their extraordinary lives.

We've been working in Chris Nissen Park for 6 years now and Macassar for 2 and in that time we've been blessed by meeting some truly amazing people who get on with their lives and helping others despite having very trying circumstances of their own. What has triggered this series is the fact that whilst we've known some amazing folk in CNP, by and large the community is very close and very supportive so people tend not to suffer as acutely as they seem to in Macassar. This may be because it's such a small community whilst Macassar is far bigger with around 60,000 people in it so it's much harder for people to be as supportive as they would be in CNP. Also, our church community is much more spread out in Macassar so it's not always easy for folk to look out for one another. As we're getting to know more and more folk we're finding ourselves very moved by the stories we're hearing and as we share some of them here we hope they might inspire you too.

Disclaimer: I guess a bit of housekeeping is in order so here goes... I'll be keeping this series as anonymous as possible as I don't want to rob anyone of their treasure in heaven but more importantly I don't want to embarrass anyone. If per-chance you do recognise anyone here, please handle the information sensitively, respect people's dignity and most importantly keep it to yourself.