Sometimes God calls you to hard places. Well, they are hard to you. And then He makes you wait in those places, so that you can listen to Him. So that He can work, for His glory. 

I have a hard time listening. My self is always speaking to me. When I'm in a hard place, waiting in that difficult place, my self says things such as,

"Don't worry, this will soon end because you'll get some other assignment. 

In the future, when you have your "that home", with your "that" relationship, and your "that" job, that will make this go away."

I've done this multiple times in my life. When things get hard, I drop it. When circumstances are not comfortable, I make plans for my future comfort. 

Earlier this week I was doing an exercise in a Bible study book. It asked a simple question. 

Who are you praying will accept the Lord as their Saviour? Write at least five names down. 

Before you go further, do that thing. Write their names down, and write them down whether you really pray for them or not. Who do you know who doesn't know the Lord? 

This convicted me of something. 90% of the people that I should be praying for, that I know are lost, are people in the difficult place. 

And I don't pray for some of them. 

And the others I don't pray for enough. 

But I'm with them every day. 

They don't know the forgiveness that is found in Jesus. 

I should pray.

And I should stay. 

Being a Christian means sticking with circumstances and people who don't feel like blessings. It means being poured out. It means following Him, to the cross; that is where He went. It means staying, it means praying. 

Now if I was not convicted enough to pray, to make my current circumstances my mission field, tonight I read this below from John MacArthur. 

"I always think of John Patton who went to the New Hebrides Islands to be a missionary. They were inhabited by man-eating cannibals. I mean, you know, that's a tough assignment. I mean, you go to...you know what I would have said. I would have said, "Lord, look, don't send me there, they'll eat me, you know, and you'll waste a good one. I mean, I graduated from seminary, right? I mean, send a guy that dropped out, they'll eat him, who will know? Or maybe he never would have made it anyway. Why send a good one?" But Patton went and he took his wife and they dropped him off and he rode to the shore and they built a little lean-to on the shore and how do you reach natives like that? They're cannibals, they don't speak your language. I mean, what do you do? You don't put up a sign in the sand that says, "BBS starts Saturday, bring your children," you know. What do you do?

Well you pray a lot, right? And night after night they stayed in that little lean-to and prayed and after he had been there a couple of months, his wife gave birth to a baby and the baby died and a few days later his wife died. And Patton said he buried their bodies and slept on the graves to keep the natives from digging them up and eating them. Now he's all alone. That's really coming to the end, isn't it? I mean, that's when the bottom line is drawn..do you stay or do you go?

Well he stayed. And the miracle of his life is that he stayed 35 years. And he said at the end of those 35 years, "I do not know of one single native on these islands who has not made at least a profession of faith in Jesus Christ." And he said, "When I came here I heard the cry of cannibals. As I leave, I hear the ringing of church bells." Is that incredible? But see, that's what can happen if you're willing to make the sacrifice. Not everybody will be a John Patton, but everybody can do the thing that God's called him to do if they're willing to pay the price. So being a testimony in the world, anybody can be a testimony, and you have to realize that there's a price to pay. If you're a Christian and you're really sold out to Christ, you're willing to pay that price. And it's not necessarily a one-time deal though, from now on I'll do it. You fight that battle all along, don't you? Whether you're willing to speak for Christ."