1
FACES ON A WALL
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Sri Lanka lies like a jewel off
the southern coast of India, a beautiful bauble of unmolested natural charms,
lapped by the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, cradled in her arms like a
precious multicoloured opal.
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She was once known as Ceylon,
before the years of harsh political reality and modern world tensions. For
centuries the island has been a bastion of Buddhism, a land where seventy per
cent of the populace worship Buddha and the rest take care not to offend him.
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Only two persons out of every
thousand are Christians.
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In Colombo, the capital city on
the southern coast of Sri Lanka, live most of the island nation's people. It
is a city approaching the modern age with its share of skyscrapers and
international flights and tourism and crime.
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But it was here in Colombo, in the
middle 1950s, long before the advent of this modern age, when Sri Lanka was
still Ceylon, when the island was still draped in its Buddhist past, that a
loving God reached down through the shroud to touch a singular young man -
and through him a nation, a continent, a world.
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In a tough section of town there
was a tiny Bible school, where a few Christians gathered to learn what they
could of God's Word. They called their school the Ceylon Bible Institute, but
it was hardly that; actually it was little more than a collection of old
desks and chairs and tiny rooms where students studied and prayed and ate and
slept.
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One of the students, a firebrand
named Colton Wickramaratne, had come from a village far outside Colombo and
had managed to make a name for himself almost as soon as he arrived.
He was a go-getter, always anxious
to do more for the Lord, excited about moving forward, and ruffling feathers
here and there as he went. Colton brought other problems with him too. For
one thing, he was always struggling financially, and, to top it all, his
English was bad. Finally the school's harried administrators put him on
probation for six months and remanded him to the custody of a local
missionary family.
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It was here that Colton finally
took time to listen to God. Captive in his room, he spent long days in
prayer. There, the Holy Spirit settled in and began a maturing work in
Colton's life, establishing within this diminutive dynamo the strength of
character his life's work would require. Day by day, Colton determined to
draw closer to the heart of God. Hour after hour, their relationship
deepened, as the Bible student opened himself more and more to the Father.
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One evening as Colton sat in the
missionary's home, alone in prayer, he felt a shift in the air, an unusual
movement of the Spirit. Something told him it was different, but he couldn't
explain why. He opened his eyes - as if to see the presence of God - but
everything appeared to be the same: the same skinny bed, the rickety dresser
with a ragged rug in front of it and an old lamp on top of it ... an ancient
mirror hanging on the wall.
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The
wall.
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Colton felt his eyes drawn to it.
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It was no longer the dull blank
wall it had been. Instead he saw an arrangement
of unfamiliar faces looking back at him. Colton stared at the faces,
astounded, silent. He did not recognize any of them. They were all obviously
Westerners, white-faced men - except for one, a girl with dark lovely
features, an Asian.
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"These eight people,"
the Spirit of God said to him silently, "will touch Asia with the
gospel. These eight people will be instrumental in a great Asian revival to
come."
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Colton watched, wide-eyed, as God
continued to speak to his heart.
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"You
will meet each of these people," the inner voice continued. "But
you are not to tell anyone what you have seen ... until you meet the eighth
and final person."
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Colton squinted to remember every
detail, but then the faces were gone as suddenly as they had appeared.
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Deeply shaken, the young man fell
to his knees and wept before the Lord, worshipping with a reverence he had
never felt in his life. He knew he had been in the presence of the Almighty,
and that the Almighty had deposited something so precious within him that even
Colton could not yet estimate its value.
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Colton Wickramaratne grew by
bounds as a Bible student, taking on a small church and nurturing its growth.
Over the next ten years he ascended to a place of leadership among the
Full-Gospel pastors of Sri Lanka.
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One by one, during a period of
about ten years, the people he had seen in the vision began turning up,
sometimes in unlikely places. He had never met any of the eight people before
the vision, and now each new encounter filled Colton with awe. Still, he
never said a word about the vision to any of them, for he had not yet met all
eight.
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It
was after he met the seventh person that things changed. While the first
seven people had appeared over the space of ten years, the eighth face did
not. The young woman still did not present herself. Another ten years
elapsed. Had God forgotten?
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Colton's work went on, and his
ministry progressed. He was now a recognized leader in the Asian religious
world. But, he could not forget the face! He found himself looking for the
eighth face in crowded churches, in airports, and on street corners. Still
she did not appear.
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Sometimes he wondered if he would
recognize her at all; it had been so many years since the vision. Now, twenty
years after the experience, he sometimes wondered if he would really ever be
able to tell anyone about the experience.
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And sometimes - in moments of
weakness - he wondered if he had ever really seen the eighth face at all.
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1 FACES ON A WALL
