As the train began to pull out of the station, the Christians standing on the platform unbuttoned their coats and pulled out hundreds of gospel tracts. Quickly they tossed the tracts, handfuls at a time, through the open train windows to the Russian troops inside.
The Russian soldiers, some of them no more than sixteen years old, laughed and whistled, especially at the attractive young women throwing things through the window. They grabbed at the tracts, wondering what was being thrown into an army train. When the political officer boarded the car, the soldiers quickly stuffed the tracts in their pockets. Soon enough they would read the strange booklet and find out more about this “King.”
Back on the train platform, the Christians gathered, laughing nervously. When police officers took one aside, he opened his coat willingly because there was nothing inside. All of the tracts he had brought to the Romanian train station were now on the train, headed to the heart of Communist Russia.
The train-car evangelism was just one of the methods that Richard Wurmbrand taught the youth of his church to reach Russians for Christ. These “allies” were stealing all of his country’s wealth and murdering many of its people, yet Richard welcomed the soldiers. In each soldier he saw a mission field and sought a chance to harvest a soul.
A mission is not so much a place as it is an attitude—one’s approach toward life. A missionary is simply someone who embodies this determination and single focus and expresses it in everyday living. Richard Wurmbrand was a man on mission, and his fervor spread through the ranks of young people who recognized his purposefulness. In that sense, we are all missionaries—ambassadors for Christ—wherever we are serving. Being on mission means you are always on the alert for new opportunities to further God’s kingdom. At the watercoolers at work. At the grocery store. On the commuter train or bus. At school. The everyday world is your mission field when you are determined to further God’s kingdom.
