There's Something You Need to Know

In 2010 Penn Jillette, the atheist half of Penn and Teller, posted a late-night video about a fan who handed him a Gideon New Testament after a show. He said the man was kind, sane, looked him in the eye, and cared enough to tell him. Then he asked the question that should shame every Christian who has ever kept quiet at a dinner table: how much do you have to hate somebody to believe in everlasting life and not tell them?

Andy Meakin didn’t have that problem. He was a water engineer from Beckenham working the slums of Addis Ababa, a husband and a father of three, not a preacher. On November 23, 1996, three drunk hijackers took Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961, the engines quit over the Indian Ocean, and the plane began falling at two thousand feet a minute. Andy unbuckled, stood up in the aisle, and said, “Many of us might die in this crash, so there’s something you need to know.” He was still on his feet telling people about Jesus Christ when the plane hit the water off the Comoros. He was one of the 125 who died. Survivors say as many as twenty people called on God before the water came.

“How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?” Romans 10:14