Better Than Walking On Water
Related by Martin E. Marty in Context (July, 2010).
Now here’s Tony Campolo, a Jesus-man if we ever saw one, in a 1996 broadcast, describing what we can do since we can’t walk on water:
“We can’t duplicate the power of Jesus. We can’t walk on water. I don’t have the ability to raise the dead, neither do you. But we do have the opportunity to express the love of Jesus. When it comes to the bottom line, Jesus was more committed to expressing love than showing off his power.”
“I was in Haiti and, walking to the entrance of my hotel, was intercepted by three girls. The oldest could not have been more than 15. The one in the middle said, ‘Mister, for $10 I’ll do anything you want me to do. I’ll do it all night long. Do you know what I mean?’ I did know what she meant. I turned to the next one and I said, ‘What about you, could I have you for $10?’ She said yes. I asked the same of the third girl. She tried to mask her contempt for me with a smile, but it’s hard to look sexy when you’re 15 and hungry.
I said, ‘I’m in room 210, you be up there in just 10 minutes, I have $30 and I’m going to pay for all three of you to be with me all night long.’ I rushed up to the room, called down to the concierge desk and said, ‘I want every Disney video that you’ve go in stock.’ I called down to the restaurant and said, ‘Do you still make banana splits, because I want banana splits with extra ice cream, extra everything.’
The little girls arrived and the ice cream and the videos arrived. We sat at the edge of the bed and watched the videos and laughed until about one in the morning. That’s when the last one fell asleep across the bed. As I saw those little girls stretched out asleep on the bed, I thought to myself, tomorrow they will be back on the streets, selling their little bodies. Nothing’s changed. I didn’t know enough Creole to tell them about God’s love, but the word of the Spirit said this: for one night, for one night, you can be little girls again.
Now, you may be thinking, ‘You’re not going to compare that with Jesus walking on water.’ No. But if Jesus were to make a decision as to which is the greater work, walking on water or giving one night of childhood back to three little girls who had it robbed from them, which do you think Jesus would consider the greater?”
Tony Campolo serves as a Board Member of CET. He also is founder of Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education (EAPE), a widely used speaker, and author of 34 books, including his recent Red Letter Christians (Regal, 2008) utilized in our last conference.
