Do you ever sit around just thinking and find yourself thinking a really random and weird thought? I had one of those thoughts the other day. Don’t ask me how I got there, but as I was just sitting and thinking, it occurred to me that there were people around the world that I could never verbally communicate with.

I can speak two languages, but if they don’t know those two and I don’t know the languages they speak, then we could not talk and understand one another. I found that thought kind of disturbing. How would I tell them about Christ?

Then I remembered something I read in Henry Drummond’s The Greatest Thing in the World.

In the heart of Africa, among the great lakes, I have come across black men and women who remembered the only white man they ever saw before — David Livingstone; and as you cross his footsteps in that dark continent, men’s faces light up as they speak of the kind Doctor who passed there years ago. They could not understand him; but they felt the Love that beat in his heart. – Henry Drummond, The Greatest Thing in the World, 1891.

I thought of the many times that I communicated the love of God to another person without words ever crossing my lips. A look, a smile, a touch that said “You are loved.” But done in faith that it was not communicating an earthly love that I might have for them, but communicating the heavenly love of the Father.

I once visited Brussels, Belgium. There I found many people that I could not verbally communicate with. There were many that seemed to have no life in their eyes. There were many people begging on the streets whose bodies were broken, who looked lost and without hope. As I dropped money into their cups, I made a point of looking into their eyes, smiling at them and when possible lightly touching them. All the while yielding to His love in me, so He could love them through me.

I remember one woman in particular, sitting just outside a church I was visiting. While in Brussels I visited as many churches as I could get to. This one was in a very quite neighborhood, with no shops around. No tourists in sight except me. I sat in the church by myself as I read my Bible and quietly prayed. When I left the church it was just me and this woman sitting at the door with a cup in her hand. I felt the love of God overwhelm me. I looked at her and loved her. Our eyes seemed frozen in time upon one another. Something transpired between us. Something was said between us. But not a word was uttered.

You can take nothing greater to the heathen world than the impress and reflection of the Love of God upon your own character. That is the universal language. It will take you years to speak in Chinese, or in the dialects of India. From the day you land, that language of Love, understood by all, will be pouring forth its conscious eloquence. – Henry Drummond, The Greatest Thing in the World, 1891.

And Jesus, looking upon him, loved him… (Mark 10:21, Amplified)

You may never travel to a far away country. You may never mingle among people who don’t speak the same language. But daily you pass people at work, in the malls, on the streets, who could use a smile and a look that says, “You are loved.”