Three Cups of Tea

"I can't read it," he said. "I can't read anything. This is the greatest sadness in my life. I'll do anything so the children of my village never have to know this feeling. I'll pay any price so they have the education they deserve."
"Sitting there beside him," Mortenson says, "I realized that everything, all the difficulties I'd gone through, from the time I'd promised to build the school, through the long struggle to complete it, was nothing compared to the sacrifices he was prepared to make for his people. Here was this illiterate man, who's hardly ever left his little village in the Karakoram," Mortenson says, "Yet he was the wisest man I'd ever met."

Imagine never reading. How much you'd miss in life! I just read Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin and, as they asked at the end of their book, I want to get the information out there! Read this book! It will change your way of thinking about so many things: about the privilege of education, about reading, about Muslims, about Afghanistan, about Pakistan, about the thousands, perhaps millions of people in the world who don't have the privileges we enjoy and take for granted.

Greg is an amazing person. Here's how Twaha describes him: "We were all worried about Dr. Greg sleeping inside with the smoke and the animals, but he seemed to take no notice of these things. We saw he had peculiar habits, very different from other Europeans. He made no demands for good food and environment. He ate whatever my mother put before him and slept together with us in the smoke like a Balti. Due to Dr. Greg's excellent manners and he never tells a lie, my parents and I came to love him very much."

Now, shouldn't we who are sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ follow such an example? I don't know Greg's spiritual condition, but I know he follows Jesus' example in every aspect of his life. Shouldn't I do the same?