Goat-Herder's Salvation

I was reading in John the other day and came across this verse:

"If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin. Now, howeer, they have no excuse." John 15:22

I took out my pen and wrote it down in my journal, then sat and thought about it and wrote this:

What does this mean God? Does that mean that if they don't know about you, they don't sin? But God, you say that all have sinned, that all of us have been taken from your prescense. What if you haven't spoken to the starving children in Africa, what is you haven't made yourself know to the people living in the slums of India? What then? What do we do with that? If you are a God of love, could you damn someone who never had a chance? You say that to be saved, we must love you with all of our hearts, with all our minds, and with all of our understanding, but what if an African boy has never heard of you and dies, would'nt he have loved you with all of his understanding? How can you love someone you don't know? Would you make yourself known to them? Would you make yourself know to them? Surely you would not abandon to death someone who has never know your love. Give me peace about that God, that you love them.

That question stayed in my mind all night lone. It made me think maybe doing missions was a waste, that maybe people didn't need to know about Him. It was really a place of doubt for me, just that thought, the thought that God would kill someone who never had a chance.

"What if I had been born in Africa?" I wondered, "Would I go to hell just for that innocent ignorance?"

I didn't know what to think, but finally came to the place of just saying, "God, you are love, so whatever you do about this will be from that love."

And with that I went to sleep.

I woke up the next morning and that question STILL lingered in the back of my mind.

"What is the deal?" I asked myself.

It held it's place in my mind all though the monring and afternoon. It was like the distant dripping of water, slowly rolling off the faucet and splashing into the sink, gradually driving me mad.

When I got home from a jog later that day, I started reading in Revelation, picking up from the night before in about chapter 8. Why am I reading Revelation? Good question.

Well, as many of you know for the last month or two I've been writing a book called "Caelum" aka "the mythology of heaven" which is basically a story-poem about heaven. There are angels and demons and other things in it so I wanted to do some research in Revelation, the strangest book in the bible. I'll tell more about it in the weeks and months to come. So, as I was reading in revelation, I stumbled upon Revelation 9:20:

But the people who did not die in these plagues still refused to repent of their evil deeds and turn to God. They continued to worship demons and idols made of gold, silver, bronze, stone, and wood—idols that can neither see nor hear nor walk!

God gave them a chance, even at the end of the world. How much more then would he give the chance to those who don't even think there is a god? Maybe there will be a salvation for the little goat herder at the end, maybe not, but at the and of the day, where does that leave us? If it is at a place of "Phew, thank God we don't have to worry about being missionaries", then this post has not met its intended mark. What I'm trying to convey here is that, for me, putting this question to rest, or at lease in a stalemate has freed me to love the people around me. It has freed me from the guilt of not being a missionary to starving kids in Africa or of being a 'Billy Graham' type evangelist. I can now see that there is a world full of people who are hurt, who need healing, who need love. On every street corner this is someone who carries a wound. Maybe the girl behind the Starbucks counter was raped, maybe the man on the bus got beat by his father. And these are the ones that we fail to see because of that burning question, the question of the goat-herder's salvation.