What does the persecuted church count as supernatural? Pastor Andre is joined by the show's first guest, his friend Dan, who has spent the last seven years working with the persecuted church, to test a common belief: that if God is still acting supernaturally in the world, he is doing it on the front lines. Dan's answer is yes, but it's a bit more nuanced than that. Christians under pressure see more of God, he suggests, and a lot of it is probably to do with our hunger, with whether we are looking for it, and with the things that get in the way.In this conversation Andre and Dan ask what we reach for when we say supernatural. We go big, they agree, and Andre suggests we gravitate towards whatever makes life easier now: healing, money, our best life now. Dan's biggest learning from spending time with persecuted Christians is their heavenly perspective: it's going to be okay, one day I'm going to be with Jesus. He remembers a North Korean Christian who told him, you don't realise Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have, and he passes on the story of a pastor who was told to convert or die and would not, whose family were absolutely devastated and yet pleased that his faith was still intact till the end. For Andre, the fact that someone is able to endure to the end is a profoundly supernatural thing, not a natural ability, and that is as true for Christians here as it is there. Christians can feel disenchanted with their faith, he says, because they fail to see the extraordinary work of God in the ordinary moments. Dan has a name for it: the everyday supernatural.Along the way: a pastor held at gunpoint who shared the gospel with his captors, and who says he has never found God to let him down; Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and the fourth man in the fire; Andre's own conversion, when it was as if God grabbed him by the scruff of the neck; his warning that the great temptation for Christians in the West is to hear stories like these and begin to target Muslims as the enemy, when Paul says our struggle is not against flesh and blood; evangelists whose attackers heard what could only be described as the sound of heaven, dropped their weapons and ran; and Dan's challenge that the persecuted church's experience is far more consistent with the New Testament than ours. God moving in miraculous ways is the norm, he puts it to Andre. We're just out of step with it.The conversation ends on forgiveness. Dan tells of a friend who prayed the Lord's Prayer whilst being attacked and forgave the people attacking him in the moment. Andre is careful to say that this is not about telling a victim they must forgive or else; these are people convinced that to be a Christian in this world is to be an agent of love. He recalls C.S. Lewis on miracles, doing quickly what the Father does slowly: forgiveness that happensinstantly is miraculous, and no less miraculous for being slow. Where the supernatural and the natural meet, Dan says, is loving our enemies.REFERENCED ALONG THE WAY- Open Doors: the list of the 50 hardest places to follow Jesus, cited by Dan- C.S. Lewis on miracles, as Andre recalls him- Scripture: Colossians (Paul's prayer for strength to endure), Daniel 3 (Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and the fourth man in the fire, the story named on air), Ephesians 6:12 (quoted), Ephesians 2, the Lord's Prayer, Matthew 5 (quoted: love and pray for those who persecute you)This conversation includes accounts of violence against Christians. Names and places in these stories are left out of these notes for the safety of the people in them.Website: https://between-two-realms.pages.dev/Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@Between-Two-Realms?sub_confirmation=1#persecutedchurch #forgiveness #supernatural #christianliving #christianpodcast