I can hardly believe it, but in just a few short days, I will be on my flight to Peru and soon after that, on a boat going deep into the Amazon jungle.  Wow, it gives me a rush just thinking about it!  Truthfully, it hasn’t quite set in that I will be in another country as far away from civilization as one can be.  No cell phone towers.  No Wi-Fi.  No Google or Facebook.  Just God, nature, and His sheep, some of which have gone astray.  Oh yeah, and mosquitoes…lots of mosquitoes.  Even though it hasn’t fully hit me yet, I’m getting very excited about this trip.  I’m excited for the opportunity to be a blessing to others who have no means of paying me back.  I’m really looking forward to being disconnected from civilization, far from the buzz of Blackberries, constant emails, and the busyness of American culture.  But I am most excited to see what God is going to do through my group on this trip to bless this Amazonian tribe. 

I know that relying on my plans and my methods and my strengths alone will never bless those people as much as God’s plans, God’s methods, and God’s strength can.  And so my desire is to have a surrendered heart to Him, being obedient to His leadings and promptings, and to follow the ways and will of my Master.  My prayer is to be filled with the mighty Holy Spirit and allow Him to work through me “to do immeasurably more than I can ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20-21). 

Usually, the over-planning, over-analytical, perfectionist in me would scream and balk at going down there without a game plan on exactly how I should evangelize and interact with the natives.  But I “strangely” feel a sense of contentment with just going down there with the only game plan to “love God with all [my] heart and with all [my] soul and with all [my] strength and with all [my] mind” and “love my neighbor as myself” (Luke 10:27).  And then sit back and be amazed and blessed to see God working mightily. 

NewLife has blessed me tremendously in every step of the way with this mission trip.  This church has decided to sponsor me and send me out, supporting me financially, through prayer, and through love.  I am incredibly grateful and blessed to be part of such a loving community!  And so I humbly ask if you would continue to lift me up in prayer, both in preparation for leaving for Peru and the duration of the mission trip.  I have identified seven prayer requests for me, but I encourage you to not be limited or constrained by these seven items.  Pray as you feel led! 

1) Pray that I may be filled and empowered by the Holy Spirit to do immeasurably more than I could ask or imagine while I am serving in Peru and that God may receive all the glory and credit for it.  Pray that it may be so obvious that it is God working through me and that it is not by my own strength. 

2) Pray that I have a loving and compassionate heart for the natives.

3) Pray that I may be a bold example of Christ.

4) Pray that the language barrier may not be an issue in sharing with them God’s love.

5) Pray for spiritual protection for our group and the natives.

6) Pray for safe travel to and from Peru and throughout the jungle for our group. Pray for safety and good health as well.

7) Pray that I have a surrendered heart to God, allowing Him to transform my heart and deepen my relationship with Him. Pray that this experience may help me to understand His grace better and to be humbled and grateful for what He has blessed me with.

Thank you once again for all the love and support!  I look forward to sharing with you all the amazing and awesome things God will do on this trip and the experiences I will have in Peru.  Keep fighting for Him who is righteous, faithful, and full of unconditional love for us!  God bless!

 What I’m going to share below is graphic and beyond words in its horror. I don’t share it to be sensationalistic, but to ask a simple question: What do you do with this? How do you personally handle the knowledge that there is this kind of evil in the world? How does it affect your thinking, your actions, and your faith? Please consider, and share your thoughts below.

 The following is taken from the Eternal Perspective Ministries blog, June 10th, 2011: http://www.epm.org/blog/2011/Jun/10/horrors-in-sudan. It is a report from one of their partner ministries, Make Way Partners, which works to end human trafficking and sexual slavery. One of the places Make Way Partners works is Sudan, with New Life ministry, a home to nearly 550 orphans. Apparently, Southern Sudan’s “Independence Day” is coming on July 9th, and as that day approaches, the Islamic government, which has seized control of northern Sudan, is furiously attacking Southern Sudan, using the Lord’s Resistance Army out of  Uganda to terrorize Southern Sudan. The director of New Life Ministries, Lual Atak, shares what happened in a village close to the orphanage. This is not for the faint of heart, but is the reality of what these children and people face daily:

 “It is really so very terrible! They gathered all the little children together and started killing their people right in front of their eyes. The children were so terrorized. The LRA then made the children begin killing their own parents. After the slaughter, the boys were forced to carry large metal barrels, and the girls were forced to fetch water to fill the barrels. They then had to build fires around the barrels. While the water began to boil, the children were forced to hack up their parents and fellows bodies and throw their dismembered parts in the boiling water. After sometime, the children were forced to eat their own parents and fellows flesh…once the LRA knew the children were so traumatized they would do anything, kill anyone, and not try to run away, they left the village with their new soldiers and sex slaves.”

I’ll ask you again. What do you do with what you have just read? How do you personally handle the knowledge that there is this kind of evil in the world? How does it affect your thinking, your actions, and your faith? If you consider yourself a Christian, what do you believe is the right Christian response, both in thought and deed, to the evil of the world? Please consider, and share your thoughts below.

Today’s post is a favorite story of mine, taken out of Jim Cymbala’s Fresh Power. Cymbala is the pastor of the Brooklyn Tabernacle Church, and has written many wonderful books about the power of God to transform lives. This story is a testimony to the verse listed above, and is especially encouraging for all who give their life in service of the gospel.

Back in 1921, a missionary couple named David and Svea Flood went with their two year-old son from Sweden to the heart of Africa – to what was then called the Belgian Congo. They met up with another young Scandinavian couple, the Ericksons, and the four of them sought God for direction. In those days of much tenderness and devotion and sacrifice, they felt led of the Lord to set out from the main mission station and take the gospel to a remote area.

This was a huge step of faith. At the village of N’dolera they were rebuffed by the chief, who would not let them enter his town for fear of alienating the local gods. The two couples opted to go half a mile up the slope and build their own mud huts.

They prayed for a spiritual breakthrough, but there was none. The only contact with the villagers was a young boy, who was allowed to sell them chickens and eggs twice a week. Svea Flood – a tiny woman only four feet, eight inches tall – decided that if this was the only African she could talk to, she would try to lead the boy to Jesus. And in fact, she succeeded.

But there were no other encouragements. Meanwhile, malaria continued to strike one member of the little band after another. In time the Ericksons decided they had had enough suffering and left to return to the central mission station. David and Svea Flood remained near N’dolera to go on alone.

Then, of all things, Svea found herself pregnant in the middle of the primitive wilderness. When the time came for her to give birth, the village chief softened enough to allow a midwife to help her. A little girl was born, whom they named Aina. The delivery, however, was exhausting, and Svea Flood was already weak from bouts of malaria. The birth process was a heavy blow to her stamina. She lasted only another seventeen days.

Inside David Flood, something snapped in that moment. He dug a crude grave, buried his twenty-seven year-old wife, and then took his children back down the mountain to the mission station. Giving his newborn daughter to the Ericksons, he snarled, “I’m going back to Sweden. I’ve lost my wife, and I obviously can’t take care of this baby. God has ruined my life.” With that, he headed for the port, rejecting not only his calling, but God himself.

Within eight months both the Ericksons were stricken with a mysterious malady and died within days of each other. The baby was then turned over to some American missionaries, who adjusted her Swedish name to “Aggie” and eventually brought her back to the United States at age three.

This family loved the little girl and were afraid that if they tried to return to Africa, some legal obstacle might separate her from them. So they decided to stay in their home country and switch from missionary work to pastoral ministry. And that is how Aggie grew up in South Dakota. As a young woman, she attended North Central Bible College in Minneapolis. There she met and married a young man named Dewey Hurst.

Years passed. The Hursts enjoyed a fruitful ministry. Aggie gave birth first to a daughter, then a son. In time her husband became president of a Christian college in the Seattle area, and Aggie was intrigued to find so much Scandinavian heritage there.

One day, a Swedish religious magazine appeared in her mailbox. She had no idea who had sent it, and of course she couldn’t read the words. But as she turned the pages, all of a sudden a photo stopped her cold. There in a primitive setting was a grave with a white cross – and on the cross were the words SVEA FLOOD.

Aggie jumped in her car and went straight for a college faculty member who, she knew, could translate the article. “What does this say?” she demanded. The instructor summarized the story: It was about missionaries who had come to N’dolera long ago… the birth of a white baby… the death of the young mother… the one little African boy who had been led to Christ… and how, after the whites has all left, the boy had grown up and finally persuaded the chief to let him build a school in the village. The article said that gradually he won all his students to Christ… the children led their parents to Christ… even the chief had become a Christian. Today there were six hundred Christian believers in that one village…

All because of the sacrifice of David and Svea Flood.

For the Hursts’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, the college presented them with the gift of a vacation to Sweden. There Aggie sought to find her real father. An old man now, David Flood had remarried, fathered four more children, and generally dissipated his life with alcohol. He had recently suffered a stroke. Still bitter, he had one rule in his family: “Never mention the name of God – because God took everything from me.”

After an emotional reunion with her half brothers and half sister, Aggie brought up the subject of seeing her father. The others hesitated. “You can talk to him,” they replied, “even though he’s very ill now. But you need to know that whenever he hears the name of God, he flies into a rage.”

Aggie was not to be deterred. She walked into the squalid apartment, with liquor bottles everywhere, and approached the seventy-three year-old man lying in a rumpled bed.

“Papa?” she said tentatively.

He turned and began to cry. “Aina,” he said. “I never meant to give you away.”

“It’s all right, Papa,” she replied, taking him gently in her arms. “God took care of me.”

The man instantly stiffened. The tears stopped.

“God forgot all of us. Our lives have been like this because of him.” He turned his face back to the wall.

Aggie stroked his face and then continued, undaunted. “Papa, I’ve got a little story to tell you, and it’s a true one. You didn’t go to Africa in vain. Mama didn’t die in vain. The little boy you won to the Lord grew up to win that whole village to Jesus Christ. The one seed you planted just kept growing and growing. Today there are six hundred African people serving the Lord because you were faithful to the call of God in your life… “Papa, Jesus loves you. He has never hated you.”

The old man turned back to look into his daughter’s eyes. His body relaxed. He began to talk. And by the end of the afternoon, he had come back to the God he had resented for so many decades.

Over the next few days, father and daughter enjoyed warm moments together. Aggie and her husband soon had to return to America – and within a few weeks, David Flood had gone into eternity.

A few years later, the Hursts were attending a high-level evangelism conference in London, England, when a report was given from the nation of Zaire (the former Belgian Congo). The superintendent of the national church, representing some 110,000 baptized believers, spoke eloquently of the gospel’s spread in his nation. Aggie could not help going to ask him afterward if he had ever heard of David and Svea Flood.

“Yes, madam,” the man replied in French, his words being translated into English. “It was Svea Flood who led me to Jesus Christ. I was the boy who brought food to your parents before you were born. In fact, to this day your mother’s grave and her memory are honored by all of us.”

He embraced her in a long, sobbing hug. Then he continued, “You must come to Africa to see, because your mother is the most famous person in our history.”

In time that is exactly what Aggie Hurst and her husband did. They were welcomed by cheering throngs of villagers. She even met the man who had been hired by her father many years before to carry her back down the mountain in a hammock-cradle.

The most dramatic moment, of course, was when the pastor escorted Aggie to see her mother’s white cross for herself. She knelt in the soil to pray and give thanks. Later that day, in the church, the pastor read from John 12:24: “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” He then followed with Psalm 126:5: “Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.”

This past week, I’ve been reading through The Hole in our Gospel by Richard Stearns, the President of World Vision. World Vision is an excellent Christian humanitarian organization dedicated to working with children, families, and their communities worldwide to reach their full potential by tackling the causes of poverty and injustice. The title of his book references his contention that if your faith in Jesus has no positive outward expression, but is simply a personal and private matter, than there is a hole in your gospel. God’s vision is a community of people who have been transformed by the gospel, transforming the world into the kingdom of God.

The book is remarkable as well as challenging. I was especially moved by the story of how Richard left his job as the CEO of Lenox, the manufacturer of fine china and tableware, in order to take his position with World Vision. As I read Richard’s story, I was particularly struck at how persistent, yet gentle, God was in calling Richard to his position at World Vision, and how fearful and unequipped and undeserving Richard felt for the role. I have found that it is so easy to look at people in a position of leadership and influence and assume that they are among the strong and confident ones who have always had it together, while the rest of us normal people struggle and fail and never feel up to the challenge. That is why it is always so encouraging to hear someone like Richard be honest about his resistance to the life God wanted for him, but how God nevertheless continued to lovingly lead him.

Richard’s story went something like this – when the former president of World Vision was retiring, different people, independent of each other, kept telling Richard that they believed he would be the next president of World Vision. Over and over, Richard said no. After all, he didn’t know anything about global poverty or fund-raising. Furthermore, he had worked hard to get to the top of the corporate ladder, and his family was living in the home of their dreams, sending their kids to a school that they loved. He was a solid Christian, a leader in his church and community, and living a good and Godly life. But despite all of this, all the signs seemed to be pointing to working the front lines of the fight against global poverty and injustice.

Richard shared how, even as he kept saying no, he would think of the story of the rich young ruler in Matthew 19. He could feel God challenging him to not hold anything back in his discipleship to Jesus. And so he finally relented to allowing his name to be considered as a candidate. Sure enough, the board of directors unanimously decided on Richard as the next president of World Vision, and arranged to fly him out to Seattle to visit World Vision headquarters. Amazingly, on the very day he was to fly out to Seattle, a large British tableware company contacted him and offered him $50 million to leave Lenox and become their CEO.

After the board of directors selected him to be their next president, Richard spent two days at the World Vision headquarters in interviews and meetings. After that, he was so emotionally spent and fearful that he went home, and, at 4 PM, put on his pajamas, crawled into bed, pulled the covers over his head, and began to cry and pray, asking God to pick someone else (From all of us who have done the same thing or wanted to just stay in bed and hide from the world, thank you Richard for your honesty). Later that weekend, he called World Vision and told them that he was not qualified, and let them know that he was turning down the job. The board was heartbroken, and reiterated their belief that he was the right man for the job.

But then, later that week, Richard was at a missions conference at his church, where the speaker closed his message by saying that he believed God was calling someone in that sanctuary to not just give money but to go and serve, that there were hungry and suffering children all over the world who needed help. That evening, after the kids were in bed, Richard and his wife broke down sobbing, finally ready to give in to God. He remembered thinking, “What if there are children who will suffer somehow because I failed to obey God?” Richard knew he could no longer run from what was obviously God’s desire for his life, and so he called World Vision back and accepted the position.

There are so many lessons that come out of Richard’s story. Let me share one that has played over and over in my mind recently: if we wait until we have it all together to serve God, we will be waiting our whole life. So many of us disqualify ourselves because we know the truth about who we are. We know that we are weak, afraid, and not qualified like we think we should be to serve or to lead. And so we stay on the sidelines until we feel we are better qualified. But the truth is that we are never qualified. We never have it all together. It has always been by the grace of God, not by our own merit. God does not call the qualified, but qualifies the called. He regularly puts us in situations that are beyond our abilities, so that we might learn to depend on Him and not ourselves. And that truth is so important to understand, because many people like to say “God never gives us more than we can handle.” No – Paul does say “he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear.” (1 Corinthians 10:13), but that is in reference to temptation, not trials. The Bible never says that God will never give us more than we can handle. On the contrary, I believe that God routinely gives us more than we can handle on our own, so that we learn to depend on Him (and on others, for that matter), instead of thinking that we are self-sufficient.

Whether God is calling you to reach out to your neighbor or to combat injustice in another country, do not say no simply because you do not feel qualified. Listen to his call, and trust that if he has called you, he will equip you with what you need to succeed.

What do you learn from Richard’s story?

In our pluralistic society, it is one thing to have faith in the God of the Bible and to commit your life to being a disciple of Jesus Christ.  But it is another thing entirely to be a missionary and to spend your life trying to live out Jesus’ words in Matthew 28:18-20, to go and make people of other nations, cultures, and faiths disciples of Jesus Christ.  Seeking to “convert” people, while true to the last words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, will win you few friends in the world, where thinking your religion is superior to another is in many minds one small step away from being a terrorist. 

 But if Jesus was right, and if His life, death, and resurrection is the only cure for our broken world, then we have a lot to learn from those fearless men and women who devote their lives to reaching those who have never heard of Jesus, even if they may be anonymous or even hated in the eyes of the world.  One such man was Ralph Winter, a great man of God who died this past week at the age of 84.  I would encourage you to learn more about this man and his contributions to the modern missions movement and to the kingdom of God (you can learn a lot about him at www.ralphwinter.org).  Let me briefly share two of the ways Ralph Winter impacted the kingdom of God.

 The first was Winter’s realization that most missions organizations were wrongly assuming that simply by establishing a church in a country, that they had brought the gospel to that nation.  What Winter realized as he listened to missionary after missionary come through his classes at Fuller Seminary was that most countries of the world were comprised of so many different people groups with their own languages and different ethnicities, that each instead of treating them all as the same, missionaries would need to see each people group individually.  Most countries were not a “melting pot” like America where people groups would assimilate into the larger nation.  As a result, Winter began to promote the idea of “unreached people groups,” in order to communicate to churches and mission organizations that reaching a nation for Christ was more than just setting up a church, but building a church in each different people group. 

The second contribution was that once Winter realized the need to promote missions to every tribe, tongue, and nation, he took a giant step of faith at age 51 towards creating a missionary training organization that would work towards fulfilling Jesus’ Great Commission.  Beginning with no backers, no mailing list, and only $100, but armed with a great, Biblical vision, he began what would eventually become the US Center for World Missions, of which he served as General Director from 1976-1990, and William Carey International University.  Of this decision, Winter writes:  “After we made the decision to leave Fuller we did not at any point in the next thirteen years, during which we paid off the campus, feel that God had promised us success. We only felt that the value of the goal was sufficient justification to go all out, sink or swim. I coined the phrase, ‘You do not evaluate a risk by the probability of success but by the worthiness of the goal.’ We were willing to fail because the goal we sensed was so urgent and strategic.”  From that humble beginning, the Center eventually became self-sufficient, enrolling over 6,000 new students a year and drawing upon over 900 professors and teachers from all over the country, and sending missionaries all over the world.

I encourage you once again to learn about the life of Ralph Winter, and to learn about other men and women who devoted their lives to missions, keeping in mind Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 15:58:  Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.