Hearing the Music

Journey Through

How great it was to hear from our Missions Team over the past month and be reminded of our part in the great mission story that is unfolding from Heaven! Now the digital, Friday pen is back in my hand and I want to draw your attention to our current journey for a moment. Some of my favorite books as a young lad were Anne DeVries' series Journey Through the Night, which followed a Dutch family in Nazi occupied Holland during WW2. Four hard years. Four years of struggle. I have thought of them often as we have navigated our hard year during the pandemic. It is truly a journey.

I want to specifically encourage you today with two things. The first is that the last several months have seen hopeful progress with regards to our life together. We have been able to safely maintain worship together in ways that particularly respected the most vulnerable. Recently we have reopened nurseries and added indoor singing. Bible studies are being offered via Zoom and in person. Youth activities have resumed. As immunizations rise and Covid cases fall we are looking at increasing service sizes and returning to more and more pre-pandemic programming. I say especially to those who feel fatigued, perhaps feeling that you have been stretched to your breaking point and NEED some fellowship, NEED some help with kids, etc... Take heart. We believe that our journey is heading in a healthy direction. I would also encourage us as a community to hold the line here at the last. Don't give out. We do have obstacles to overcome yet. We do want to do our very best to care for the most vulnerable. We also have our building project to navigate, which regardless of the pandemic would hamper some programming. We are journeying.

The second thing to encourage you with is in regard to our own personal journeys the Lord has us on. Jim Weaver is a team leader with Mission to the World and he created and shared this image. What I love about this image is the way it charts our personal journeys from fear to growth. He of course is zeroing in on our responses to the pandemic, but we could put any challenging aspect of life in the bulls-eye and chart what the journey looks like from fear to growth. Can you find yourself in your journey?

Of course we will never grow in our journeys unless we cling to Jesus. Our text this week reminds us from Jesus' own lips that he is the Way, the Truth and the Life (John 14:6). He is the Path on which we journey. He invites us to believe him and to trust him as he prepares our way to the Father.

So let's hold fast together to Jesus. Let's navigate these months ahead with patience that only he can provide.

_{Photo by Vlad Bagacian on Unsplash}

Flickering Torches

For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.  But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.  We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed;  always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.  For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. . . So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. . . All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.  Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.  We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”   - excerpts from 2 Corinthians 4:6-5:20

Christ has shone in our hearts! In my heart; that is the light I am called to share with the world. It is in that joy, that hope, that I am to follow my Shepherd's endurance. And when I doubt, when my jar of clay looms large, God graciously gives me the Hall of Faith - Hebrews 11, life accounts of Christians through the ages, each of your lives, and, most intimately, my family: all jars of clay through whom I have more clearly and intimately been given the knowledge of the glory of God.  

I thank God for this nuanced, beautiful view of his glory. I pray for each of us as we seek and obey his specific callings in our lives; as his light goes to our families and neighbors, our city and to the world. How has he called me to yield my flickering torch?  

Let us join Jon and Jo Ellis in prayer as they go to teach English in refuge camps in the Middle East; 
Let us join Greg and Ingrid Orr in prayer and finances as they go to Berlin with Pioneer; 
Let us join with Gracehill as we pray for our city;
Let us join Grace’s Table and Safe Haven as, in Jesus' name, they minister to Grand Rapids;
Let us join our children as they learn and grow in faith; 
And let us not lose heart as we are renewed daily by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit in Christ Jesus!

O Light that follow'st all my way, 
I yield my flick’ring torch to thee;
my heart restores its borrowed ray,
that in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
may brighter, fairer be.

O Cross that lilftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
and from the ground there blossoms red 
life that shall endless be.

- stanzas 2 & 4 of O Love, That Wilt Not Let Me Go

Photo by Geert Pieters on Unsplash

Redemptive Redirection

“The light shines in darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.”   John 1:5

During our years in the Balkans working in a predominately Muslim context my wife, Sara, and I prayed we would be used of God in great ways to be bright lights for Christ that would shine into darkness. To be honest, it took years to realize that the most significant advancements were hardly newsletter worthy. In fact, they most often happened during the mundane drudgeries of life. 

Wrong elevators, pointless paperwork, government bureaucracy… What joy! 

One such example of this occurred shortly after we moved from where we had been living in Albania to the capital city of Skopje, North Macedonia. I was on a mission that day to complete the arduous and very unpleasant task of applying for our residence visas. A day of frustrations dealing with government bureaucracy lay ahead, or so I believed. The anticipation of a wild goose chase to hunt down officials in obscure offices to plead for an arbitrary stamp on a meaningless document loomed large. 

Entering the tall, drab government building, I took the rickety elevator to where I thought I needed to go. I ended up wandering into several wrong, dead end corridors and private offices. Only knowing Albanian (the country’s minority language) and not yet knowing Macedonian, this excursion resulted in some awkward moments and growing frustration as time went on. 

Finally, I walked by several men talking in the hallway who appeared to work there. As I passed by, I heard them speaking Albanian. Finally, someone who could help! After introducing myself, I showed them my pile of documents and asked where I needed to go. They were intrigued that I spoke fluent Albanian and a long conversation followed. Two of the men worked for the government and took it upon themselves to guide me to the correct offices, get through paperwork and interpret between the two languages.  I left the building with my task complete along with personal phone numbers and an immediate invitation to coffee.  

Soon after we met for Turkish coffee and I answered many questions about how we ended up working in Albania, learning the language and why we now lived in Skopje. These conversations are delicate in this context with potential land mines everywhere. But the Lord gave me favor and I left the table with a new found devoutly Muslim friend who worked in the government. He told me he needed to introduce me to a man who was the director of an influential academic/political institute for Albanians in Macedonia and Kosovo. Within a few days of my elevator blunder and wrong turns in the labyrinth of government bureaucracy, I was drinking coffee with the institute director with whom I eventually became close friends. Though a Muslim, he later confided to me that he had great respect for the Protestant evangelical work in the Balkans, particularly in the late 19th and early 20thcenturies, and wanted to see that work continue. As time went on, we worked on several large projects together that far exceeded the scope and reach of anything we ever dreamed.  

So what of grand vision and strategic planning for the work of the gospel? Sure. But sometimes nothing beats human incompetence, blunders or just plain getting lost. It’s easier to remember who’s in charge that way. It should probably also remind us that God redeems the drudgeries, frustrations and mundane bits of our lives and can use them to shine His light through us.

Photo by Duy Thanh Nguyen on Unsplash