Those men and women I mentioned never had it easy, Wesley was often assaulted, had a variety of hard produce thrown at him and even the occasional dead cat for good measure. William Booth? Same as Wesley with a number of Salvationists being murdered and assaulted. Bonhoeffer? Hanged at the Flossenburg concentration camp just two weeks before the camp was liberated by US forces in 1945.
I write this not only to you but to myself, I'm as lazy and full of excuses as the next person and even though I acknowledge that I still do very little.
How many of us would have stood up to Hitler and the Nazis like Bonhoeffer did? How many of us would have travelled five thousand miles a year by horseback just to be greeted by aggression and be assaulted regularly just to preach the gospel? We all like to think we would, but the litmus test is what are we doing today? There is more injustice on a wider scale than at any time in history and yet most of us do very little to address it. Of course this could all be seen as rather negative, however all it takes is for us to change is to acknowledge that as Christians we have a duty to love our neighbour as ourself. What this means is expanding our moral circle to include not only ourselves and close family but all human beings, who regardless of size, colour, belief or age are all made in the image of God.
