Talk @ Radley Chapel Mid week :: Gayle Williams

Imagine if helping someone out, let’s say explaining to them what’s for prep, or helping them to understand something they missed, involved a 10% chance of losing a pound on your shop account. Would you still do it?
Or how about, Imagine if community service on Wednesday actually cost you extra. Let’s you had a 50% chance that you’d get kicked out of your rugby team as a result. Would you bother doing community service?
How about if you wanted to help out children with disabilities to learn to live with their disabilities, but it involved living with no protection in a war zone, in a culture where people like you are murdered every week. Would any of us do that?
Perhaps you’ve guessed today’s famous Christian already. Gayle Williams said yes to that last question. Only two weeks ago the British aid worker was alive, working with the poorest and most unfortunate of the children in Afghanistan, young boys and girls who had lost limbs to landmines and bombs, teaching them the basic skills needed to survive in a harsh and violent land.
10 days ago she was murdered by the Taleban while walking along a quiet, tree-lined street in Kabul on her way to work.
Gayle Williams dedication was remarkable. She lived to serve the people of Afghanistan. Her mother said, "Gayle was serving a people that she loved, and felt God called her to be there for such a time as this,"
Unlike many aid workers, she believed in living among the people she served, staying in a modest private house, shunning an armed escort in favour of using her own two feet. She made an easy target for the two gunmen who had been lying in wait for her.
Gayle Williams was committed to serve a country not her own and prepared to pay the price. Committed to such an extent she had already made clear her wish to be buried there. In the 19 th century missionaries would head off from England to Africa with their possessions packed in a coffin. There was no doubt they would not be coming back. and I suppose Gayle Williams was the modern equivalent.
But why? What would drive a person to such immense sacrifice. Many of us, I suppose would find it hard to live our whole lives abroad in France, let alone a 3rd world muslim culture, let alone one where life is far more precarious commodity. Why did she do it?
The Chairman of her Charity, Mike Lyth said: "We are Christian - that is what gives us the motivation to go into a dangerous and difficult country to try to help”
The words we have just read in our reading, I imagine were quite familiar to Ms Williams. “
5Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
6Who, being in very nature[a] God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
7but made himself nothing,
………
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death—
even death on a cross!

Why did she do it? I can see at least three reasons in those verses. A role model and reason and a resource for her sacrifice.
A role model in Jesus Christ. Gayle Williams’ Lord had relinquished the glory of heaven to come down to earth for mankind. Couldn’t she relinquish the comforts of her materially wealthy and secure existence for the people of Afghanistan. I wonder couldn’t we?
A reason. Another famous missionary once said, “If Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him”. I wonder can we identify with that?
A resource. Surely very few men or women could pluck up the courage to do this alone. Her mother again. Gayle “died doing what she felt the Lord had called her [to] and she is definitely with him”. God had called her and equipped her to do the job. She found it not in herself but in Christ to do this thing.