Fr. Steve over at Word on Fire has written a great article on the art of “unintentional evangelism”, instances where people unwittingly shared the message of God. In the article, Fr. Steve points to Pontius Pilate who, by hanging a sign on the Cross reading “King of the Jews”, became the first evangelist of Jesus’ passion. Also, Longinus, the Roman soldier who speared Jesus on the Cross, considered his piercing to be a mere formality of execution, nothing more than verification of Jesus’ death. But unwittingly, he signaled the birth of the Church. The thrust of his spear sparked the greatest movement in world history.
These historical twistings are actually quite common. God regularly bends events toward Himself. A modern example is the Christian blogger, Jon Acuff, who surprisingly found a spike in his blog traffic after writing a post on the malignancy of pornography. Because Jon’s blog is fairly popular, it climbed near the top of Google’s search result for the phrase “porn”. Soon, numerous people began arriving at his blog after Googling ‘porn’. So what began as a lustful pursuit ended as a brush with God.
Who knows what happened to those people, searching for porn and finding grace, but the situation paints a clear picture of God’s irony. In all of these examples, evil’s apparent victory is stripped to reveal God’s triumph. What looks like death and defeat is really life and the last laugh.
So write, speak, and live both warily and expectantly. Your actions may speak differently than you intend. Your words may communicate a different message than you plan. And God may use the oddest sparks to set the world on fire.