The room is tiny. With the door open, barely one person can fit inside. BUT, this tiny room has in a sense, a voice. Not a voice that is heard, but a voice that COMMUNICATES just the same!With the door taking up most of one wall, this room has three other walls that make use of every precious bit of space. One long wall and one short wall are filled from floor to ceiling with sturdy shelves holding boxes of books and booklets. One end of the room just inside the door has shelves packed with books not in boxes. All the boxes and books in this room are not like the boxes and books in my house that I can easily forget or not even use for many months. The materials in this room help us regularly and even weekly to COMMUNICATE.
99% of these books make very little or no sense to me. Many of the books appear to me as gibberish. Gibberish as defined by Uncle Webster: unintelligible or meaningless language. Why does the Oasis keep a room full of books that contain unintelligible or meaningless language?
BECAUSE, when placed in front of the right eyes, these books give us a chance to COMMUNICATE in ways we normally cannot. Placed in the right hands, these books are NOT AT ALL gibberish. These books tell of the great news of Jesus. These books are the Word of God in many languages.
This TINY room is a HUGE resource to the work at the Oasis. Each person on the Oasis Team has studied two or more languages, but none of us have LEARNED as many languages as the refugees speak. We meet refugees from many different nations and so there is just not time enough to learn all of these languages AND STILL serve at the Oasis. This TINY ROOM is part of how we COMMUNICATE the WORD OF GOD.
Many times we can communicate with refugees through a common language or occasionally a through a translator. But this TINY ROOM helps us with frequency, proclaim CLEARLY and IN THEIR MOTHER LANGUAGE, the great news of LIFE that is found only in Jesus.
It’s only a TINY ROOM, but it COMMUNICATES HUGE TRUTHS.
Dan Lincoln
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