Half Empty or Half Full?

I’ve always been intrigued by how different people can see the same thing, and yet arrive at different conclusions. It’s like the old adage, “Is the glass half full or half empty?” Christians around the world are faced with a similar challenge today. The world is like a fruit basket turned over.

For many centuries now, Western Christians have scattered all over the globe. Along the way they have spread vast trading empires from the 18th century East India Trading Company to the far-flung impact of Coca-Cola, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook. We are a global force, or at least a global seasoning that has flavored all the countries and cultures of the world.

Today the ends of the earth are coursing back in our direction. Arabs, Indians, Chinese, Turks, Bengalis, and Afghans are now flowing into our global gateway cities. The San Francisco Bay Area is now home to 80,000 Afghan immigrants. More than 15,000 Kurdish immigrants fill neighborhoods in Nashville, Tennessee. As many as two million Muslims now call Metro New York City home. Houston, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Toronto, Vancouver, Dallas, and Chicago have all been enriched by ethnic restaurants, worldviews, and traditions – enriched, that is, if you see the glass as half full.

As foreign missionaries who have spent years in India, Thailand, China, Egypt, and Tunisia, my wife and I can’t help but see this immigration as a blessing. Just look at the savings! After spending countless dollars and hours securing visas, boarding airplanes, learning languages just to be able to take the gospel to the ends of the earth, now the ends of the earth have come to us! What a blessing! God is saving us a fortune in time, effort, and dollars by bringing ambassadors from the world’s least-reached people groups into our cities, where we can love them, minister to them, and bring to them the wonderful news of God’s saving grace in Jesus Christ!

Half-empty viewers see it differently. They retreat to the suburbs, to gated communities, and Christian enclaves where they can shield themselves from the threat of non-Christian cultures with all their messy traditions and, well, lostness. To be honest, these half-emptiers aren’t crazy. Their distaste for non-Christian religions, worldviews, languages, and cultures is a logical, natural response. After all, a half-full glass is also, undeniably, half empty as well.

I suppose it comes down to faith. Faith after all is “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not (yet) see” (Hebrews 11:1). Seeing the glass half full is seeing what is not yet, but what could be. What could be is a stream of lost, unreached individuals coming to our global gateway cities where they will be greeted by the gospel. Seeing the glass half full is seeing new disciples of Christ from Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish traditions enriching our Western communities of faith. Seeing the glass half full is seeing these new disciples of Christ taking the life-changing message of Jesus Christ back to their home communities on the other side of the globe, and igniting a global gospel awakening that Jesus called the Kingdom of God.

How about you? How do you see the changing world around you? Do you see it through the lens of how things used to be, how things have changed, or how things could be? Global Gates is anchored to the future hope, the faith in how things could be, if only we will seize the day that God has set before us. Global Gaters see the glass half full, and work to the day when that glass will be filled up with the gospel, filled to the brim, and overflowing.

David Garrison
Director, Global Gates