by Robert F.

Cromer
God,

lillll
I
know as well as the Bishop of Woolwich that you don't have an address
and that a letter to you is silly.
But my heart and mind are bursting with ideas and questions
which, if I write them out, may strike sparks
in other people's hearts and minds.
See, I belong to this church where we say we have a great mission
and we're concerned for otherhpeople—
—people sucked into the guts of the cities and suffocating there—-
and we've just mortgaged our church building for
a hundred thousand dollars
(Lord, it’s worth half a million)
so we can D0 something in ministering to our metropolitan mess.
So

III
what's the problem?
You moved magnificently once in a man named Paul.
If I read it the right way, you prodded him unmercifully
(he called it a thorn in the flesh)
and you made him poke away at the church in Rome where they were saying
to one another,
”Now that we are saved, we can relax and do what we like."

lfllfll
You said, through him,
“Give yourselves to God, as men who have been brought
from death to life,
and surrender your whole being to him
to be used for righteous purposes” (Romans 6:13, TEV).
You drove him all over the whole world hoisting human horizons.
The problem is
I'm tempted to think that doing more for Christ than I ever did before
is enough.
I
know it isn't.
“Surrender your whole being."
See,
God,
part of my being is my income
and I'm going to give more of that to my church
so we can DO this thing we’ve got to do in our city and suburb.
But
would you believe
I've already figured out how much I'll have to give

[IPEN I
and still have enough left over so the pinch won’t be a big hurt.
Heaven knows (forgive the figure of speech)
don’t want a thorn in the flesh.
Except
there's this other thing.
The World Fellowship Offering poster
makes me think about Yokohama and Bangkok and Kinshasa
and Manila
and Jorhat. (That’s up in North East India, Lord; remember?)
There are people there as desperate as those in North Philadelphia.

My mind is full of plans and perplexities.

The World Fellowship Offering has
a three-quarters-of-a-million-dollar goal.
See,
if I
really do surrender my whole being

AN
including this confused mind
I’ll just have to figure out a way to mortgage myself

as we mortgaged the church

and maybe more so
because the whole world hurts and it's yours and therefore mine.
want to do what’s right. But, God—
I

The author is Associate Secretary, Public Relations Division, American Baptist Foreign Mission Societies.

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