Why Not Me?

Moving through this past week of the Haiti earthquake crisis response there hasn’t been a lot of time to reflect. My role in this for World Gospel Mission is communication with the media and with folks who call in for information or wanting to help. We are a week into this and it is going to be a long haul ahead.

I woke up this morning thinking, why not me? Why, in a world where over 100,000 people were suddenly killed was I spared? They talk about survivor’s guilt, and certainly I am too far removed from the tragedy to be considered a survivor, but when faced with the images that we all have seen this past week, one asks the question, why not me? Or even, what does it all mean?

Some have tried, foolishly, to answer that question. But truly, some things defy any rational explanation. So I think the better question is, “What shall I do?”

This is what the crew I work with has been thinking about that question.

1. If you don’t know anything about Haiti, go to the CIA Factbook or Wikipedia and get some understanding of the country and culture so that you can pray.
2. Share what you have learned with a co-worker, someone in your family, or someone at church.
3. Pray with your family for the victims and talk about the tragedy with your kids.
4. Give in community. Instead of giving in an isolated effort by yourself, give to a fund like WGM’s Crisis Relief Fund with your family, your church, or your work. Transfer some of what you have learned to others and challenge them to action as well.
5. Find out if there are Haitian churches in your city and reach out to people who are probably mourning a loss.
6. Search the Bible and ask the questions about this kind of suffering and why God allows it.

We simply can’t make it all add up when a disaster like this occurs. But hopefully we can all be better people as we consider what we are seeing and then respond. And when we consider that someone should do something to help, I guess the best question we can ask ourselves at that time is “why not me?”

Processing Haiti

Tuesday evening, January 12, 2o10,  World Gospel Mission got word that there was a devastating quake, but with all communication lines available to us cut, we could get no word about the status of three volunteers who are at Radio Lumière until 16 hours later. With that news came a vision of horror as our Haitian engineer described walking for four hours to cover five miles through streets littered with bodies and past piles of rubble that were once houses. We aren’t talking about a collapse here and there, but whole blocks of devastation.

This has hit hard.   The Free Methodist compound in the heart of the city, where Paul and Pat Shingledecker, WGM Caribbean regional directors, lived when they served as missionaries in Haiti,has been heavily damaged. There is a four or five story guesthouse that collapsed there and the sketchy word we have heard is that three Free Methodist missionaries possibly are somewhere in the rubble. A work team had left that compound to head upcountry Monday morning and were able to turn back when the quake happened. They are now trying to remove four stories of concrete rubble by hand to get to the buried victims if they can find them. There is virtually no heavy equipment available in Haiti.

One scene they showed yesterday of video shot by cell phone was striking. Casualties everywhere you looked but one thing missing. Any sign of rescue. No sirens, emergency crews or any help at all.

Doctors Without Borders had six or seven medical centers in the city and report that all were destroyed. The UN complex was devastated. The main hospital collapsed. The main prison partially collapsed and they have been reporting that the prisoners all escaped. Paul tells me that would be all the gangs that they have rounded up in the city in the past. They report all government buildings, which were the oldest buildings in a city of three million that had been built for 50,000, have collapsed. And it just goes on and on.

Yep, I’m shocked. We still have only one e-mail contact who we can try to communicate with. Radio Lumière studios are standing, but at least one tower came down and we have no report of others, so the ability to broadcast at this point we have no information about. Our engineer wrote that he was trying to restore power to the station. That voice of communication, where all other communication has been cut, would be invaluable.

I have been reporting just the basic information that we know for sure on our site and in interviews. Most of what I just wrote here is hearsay at best. I have no idea of the accuracy of it other than what we have heard third or fourth hand. But the mind boggles at the suffering.

So that is what I have been processing…

The Best is Yet to Come

Saturday, May 2, 2009  -  Three am. Eyes open. Today is race day and I’m not racing. Every year on this weekend for the past seven years we have been in Indianapolis at the 500 Festival Mini-marathon. Not this year.

Last May I ran my first-ever half marathon. If you had grabbed me ten years ago and said I should consider running a half-marathon I would have laughed you out of the room! But last May I did it, and averaged 12:45 a mile! I was esctatic!

This year we decided to wait until later in the year to run a race. And boy, was that ever a good idea. Didn’t know then that the USA would have the worst financial crisis since the great depression and that in that we would restructure our headquarters operations at WGM. Didn’t know that our garage would burn down in the night with all our vehicles (five weeks ago) and that every spare minute since then would be spent in clean-up, list making and rebuilding.

As the apple trees bloom in the orchard, a new garage arises from the ruins of the old. It has rained almost daily for the past month, or so it seems. Running? Training for a marathon? Ha! Life has a funny way of handing you surprises.

Right now I would normally have my running gear laid out, bib number ready to pin on my running shirt, timing chip on the just-broken-in shoes, and would likely be awake and thinking about the race. Really, a lot of fun and I am going to miss that today. We’ll shoot for October this year. Have to get in a lot better shape to run that race, believe me.

And you know, while my physical regimen has suffered in the extremes of the past three months, as far as work is concerned we are in good shape to run a race.

Cutting our staff and reorganizing is painful. I hurt for those who lost their job and am praying for their next steps to be ordered by God. Not taking anything away from that, I believe WGM is in a position to run a race as never before, as we move to a focus on supporting our donors, rather than thinking of them as supporters.  That is, we want to help them grow as deep in missions activity as God has planned for them to grow, rather than come to them and talk about ways they can help us with our ministry. Real difference in approach there.

So as racers pull on running gear, and my new garage takes shape in the midst of the glorious new growth of Spring, I reflect on the tenth and final observation that our group made over a year ago. That is, “God is still using WGM, whose best days are still ahead of her, not behind.”

Still Calling

God still calls people

I was standing there minding my own business. Waiting for the plane on a small tropical island where I was serving as a missionary.

“Heading for Tecuc?” I looked at the young man who addressed me and thought, “Now, here’s a guy really having himself a vacation!”

Airports are interesting. You can spot different people a mile away. For instance, in international airports overseas I can pretty much peg the missionaries at a glance. There’s just a look. Usually they are very conservatively dressed. Certainly not fashionably in most cases. In a touristy airport they would be the ones who are dressed modestly in the midst of shorts and sandals. Anyway there’s just a look. So just as I pegged this guy as a tourist out to maximize his fun, no doubt he had pegged me as a missionary.

Brad stood there in his khaki shorts and Hawaiian shirt, sipping a drink from the airport bar. He was headed to the coast for more adventure, he related to me. I told him I was working with an outpatient clinic down the island. We chatted for a while in the tropical heat. My plane landed and started taxiing toward the terminal.

 Brad suddenly blurted. “I suppose I look like I’m having a good time here, sipping this drink. I know I shouldn’t be drinking. I used to be a Christian and really involved in my church, but then I got turned off by the hypocrisy and people telling me I had to act just like them to be a good Christian. It was all just external show.”

I didn’t say anything. I was surprised by the sudden turn in our conversation. He continued. “Actually, I am running from a Call. God called me to preach, but here I am standing in this airport drinking.”

My flight was called and I had to go. As I started down the steps to walk out to the plane Brad shouted my name. “Tim! Pray for me!”

Here’s the thing. God is the same yesterday. the same forever. Ever since the first sin He has been calling. Both in the sense of patiently calling people to Himself and in the sense of calling His followers to a life of service to be “on mission.”

We can’t put the declining percentage of missionaries from North America on God. He’s still calling.

Most likely people like Brad aren’t getting the help they need to make it from baby Christian to mature saint, actively following the call. Yes, Brad has a responsibility in that, but so does the church. And so does World Gospel Mission.

That’s what we’ve been grappling with this past year at WGM. We kind of climbed on the “get the money” bandwagon with a lot of other ministries in the past, focusing on the donor’s money rather than the donor’s growth. We are increasingly aware of our role, our responsibility as a mission to help a Christian move toward deeper understanding of and involvement in missions.”  That hasn’t been our default organizational relationship with donors  in the recent past.

If you don’t believe me, you should listen in on the line every day when I call a donor to simply thank them for their financial participation in  missions with WGM. It is the same almost every single time.

Pretty much the first part of every call is convincing them that this isn’t another disguised lead-in to an appeal for more money. It isn’t until I say, “My only reason for calling today is to say ‘Thank you,” that I can actually hear them relax in the tone of their voice. It is both amusing and deeply disturbing at the same time.

This is what we ministries have done to our donors?

Oh yes, God is still calling. And we have a responsibility as Christians to be helping our brothers and sisters in Christ move forward in their understanding of that call and obedience to it. How are you doing that in your life? Care to share? Post a comment. I’d love to take some pointers from you.

He’s Still Providing

God is still providing

This is number eight in our list of ten ways in which we see God moving in missions. And it is a topic that is quite appropriate for the end of 2008.

2008 has seen a continuation of a falling stock market that has confounded the experts. It has seen the near toppling of the “big three” automakers and the loss of 533,000 jobs in November alone according to CNNMoney.com.

Some of those jobs were lost in the non-profit sector as a number of ministries have had to lay off significant numbers of workers. Maybe you are among those who have been impacted by these financial hard times.

One of my close relatives lost his job in March and is now working two jobs that don’t cover the bills. He and his wife and small child are facing the very likely loss of their home. They’ve been trying to sell it but nobody is in the market. But as I talked to his wife, I was amazed at her complete trust in God through this time. She said that there is really nothing that they can do more than they are doing and so they are just putting their trust in God knowing that he will provide. Wow.

And in my own life I have known that to be true. When my wife lost a teaching position in a community where 58 teachers were laid off this past year, and following a time when we had made a significant financial committment to help care for her father who has Alzheimer’s, I saw God provide for us in other ways that more than made up the difference for us. Amazing. Not that is was easy for Laurie to be out of work for a year. That was agonizing. But yet we really didn’t face real need. Not as so many do. I have to say God more than provided.

And now she has a job working with migrant families and ESL (English as a Second Languate) kids in the local school district. An incredibly rewarding ministry for her. God has provided more than we could have anticipated in terms of her fulfillment!

It’s funny how we USA’ers equate God’s provision with money. When I was in Roatan, Honduras as a missionary I was talking to one of the folks in the small village of 1,500 where we were ministering. This was a subcultural group called the Garifuna people. To give you an idea of how rustic the setting was, a visiting American’s comment upon arrival was “This is National Geographic!” 

Anyway, this fellow from the village was commenting on life. He had worked in New York and on boats and was home for a year’s vacation, living off of what he had made. He had very little by our standards, but was telling me what a good life it was to have all you needed and no need to work for a year. He thought us North Americans were crazy for the crazed consumerism that we pursue. He may have had something there.

Truth is, however you measure provision, God comes through. In fact, God’s economy, His resource, His faithfulness, His love, His truth; all of those things about God haven’t suffered any loss or any change in 2008.

How has God provided for you in 2008?

Are you REALLY a Runner?

This past May, Lamech Mokono, Valentine Orare, Reuben Chebii, and I ran in the 32nd running of the OneAmerica Festival Mini-Marathon in Indianapolis, Indiana. Lamech and Valentine tied for first place. It was quite a race.

Oh, how did I do? Well, Reuben came in third and I came in 20,927 people later. Do I know these Kenyans, you ask? No. How did I come to run a race with them? Well, the answer is obvious. I entered along with the 30,000 other folks who signed up for the race. And you could certainly argue that I didn’t have a realistic chance of beating them, but the fact remains that we ran the same distance on the same course on the same day in May. I guess that makes me a runner!

What other sport can you enter in a race in which your time is put up in the same list as a world class elite athlete? Maybe six feet down that list, but still, the same list!  Talk about participation! It is almost humorous, but in a real sense it is also noteable that running is a sport that has been growing in popularity in the past twenty years.

I decided to look into this matter of the popularity of running. If you google ”baseball,” you get 197 million results. “Hot dog,” 61 million, “apple pie” five and a half million, and Chevrolet, 128 million results. Google “football” and you get 437 million results. But google “running” and you get 486 million results. I rest my case.

OK, I digress. Here’s my thought on this. Around WGM we’ve been discussing if everyone is a missionary, or if only those who leave their home and cross the seas are missionaries. This has created quite a discussion indeed. And that is good. My thought is that we need to de-mystify the term missionary. Rather than focus on how different we are from a missionary, we should focus on how like a missionary we are. Why? Let me tell you a story.

I was about to run my second 5K. It was 5:30 in the morning and I had gone to the lobby of the hotel we were staying in. I was dressed for the race, with my running bib with the number on it pinned to the front of my shirt. Another runner was grabbing a snack and when he saw me he said, “Hi. What corral are you in? In the half-marathon they have starting corrals from A to Z so that slower runners can start in the back and not be in the way of faster runners. In the 5K they have one corral for runners and another for walkers. So I said, “I’m running the 5K.”

“Oh,” he snorted, “That’s not even running!”

And a fine day to you too, sir.

Well, I have to say that if that was the typical reaction of runners to velocity-challenged people like myself, I would likely not be a runner today. But typically runners are a very inclusive lot. More often than not you’ll hear a “Good job!” as you run rather than a discouraging word.

So as we look at missions, we would do well to congratulate folks who get active in missions for being missionaries. No, most likely they aren’t “elite” missionaries, who sell all and head out for lands unknown. We need those elite servants, and we are more likely to get them if the pool of people who are interested in missions could be encouraged to be players rather than spectators.

Am I REALLY a runner. Sure, I am. I’ve been beat in a 5K by a 99 year old granny, but I’m still in the same race with the 14 year old kid who won. So, that makes me a runner!

Say, how many missionaries do you know?

Moved to Pray

God is stirring people’s hearts to prayer

You hear a lot about prayer these days. Even in the secular press. Prayer means a lot of things to a lot of people. Some focus on the act of praying. Some of the method of praying. Some on how many are praying. Almost everyone I have talked to about prayer feels like they don’t pray enough.

I would fall in that group. I’ve seen some amazing answers to prayer in my lifetime. I’ve also had prayers that seemed to go unanswered. But I know that there is room for much improvement in the amount of praying that I do.

More than any other spiritual discipline, this fall I am focusing on prayer. I’ve been reading about it. Most recently, reading Philip Yancey’s book titled “Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?”  , I’ve come to think about prayer more as something that brings us into relationship with God than something that somehow we use or get “good at.” Even the term prayer warrior has the connotation of someone who has become proficient at using prayer to make a difference.

However, my goal for this fall is to become much more disciplined in intercessory prayer. I don’t claim to fully understand it, but I do believe that God has chosen to move on behalf of others when we pray for them. With that in mind, I am trying to become more disciplined in praying for others as I move through my busy schedule.

In our group this spring we noted that people are talking a lot about prayer. World Gospel Mission is sponsoring a concert of prayer starting today that invites people around the world to call in and pray for a different country each day for thirty days. Our first call had 39 participants. I know some of those were groups of people on one phone, so the total is hard to know. But I had hoped for more. I hope it will grow.

So what is prayer in your life? How much and how long do you pray? In what settings? Our “Call to Prayer” editor is keeping a blog of her experience during the concert of prayer. It would be good to hear from others about prayer during these next 29 days.

Unexpected Blessing

God is stirring young people’s desire to serve, give, and have meaning

and is using young people to bring encouragement to existing missionaries

 

They say first impressions are important, and I have to say that when Doug and his wife got off the plane my first impression was, “Uh, oh.”

This was the tropics and Doug was wearing a full-length trench coat. His wife sported a nose ring. The coat was quickly shed and I learned that Doug’s wife spent some time as a volunteer in India. (This was the 1980’s so not everyone was wearing nose jewelry back then.) Doug and his wife were part of a work team that had come for two weeks to our mission station on the tropical island where we were doing church planting.

But then there was the walk along the waterfront as Doug and I were in town buying some supplies later that week. It happened that he was a trained counselor and I was sharing a difficult conversation I had gotten into with a fellow missionary, in which I felt I had been wronged.

Doug turned to me and said, ”Tim, let’s not talk about what your colleague did, you can’t control other people. Let’s talk about your response to this. That is what you can control.” 

Wow! That was just the help I needed to move forward and heal in that situation.

One of the moves of God today is to bring people to the mission field for a short time to give of their time and talent and to taste and see what missions is all about. They drop into a situation where missionaries are right in the middle of their front-lines work and the fresh perspective and enthusiasm they have often brings unexpected blessing to the missionaries they visit.

Gone are the days when missionaries packed belongings in a coffin in case they didn’t return and then spent months and even years without contact with anyone from their native land. It is a new day with new opportunities. This is where God is moving today. What have you observed about this move of God?

I Walked Right By

God is stirring more people to be engaged firsthand in missions

 and typically through the most direct contact possible

 

I didn’t even notice her. Oh, I probably saw her, but she was just another American in a Honduran airport. I was focused on getting my bags checked, grabbing a bite to eat, and getting on the plane for home.

But not Roy. No, he saw an opportunity.

I got the first item on my list done and was headed toward the restaurant for the second when Roy caught my arm.

“Hey, Tim, I want you to meet Maggie. She has been down here helping out in an orphanage and I’m trying to explain to her why she should join WGM.”

So over some Micky D’s fries and a hamburger, we chatted about Maggie’s interest in missions, how her experience in Honduras had gone, and how she might link up with World Gospel Mission, using her nursing skills to bring help and hope to Hondurans.

I happened to be in Honduras with members of our board of directors who chose a week in January to fly to Honduras to see the ministries they oversee as board members firsthand. Roy is the chairman and an amazing evangelist for missions. That experience really made me think.

This post is about how God is moving today in calling people to missions and doing so in a very direct way. Reading a brochure or hearing a missionary and signing on the dotted line for a lifetime of mission service may still happen today, but more and more, people are just connecting directly to the work to see first-hand what God is doing and if it might be for them. That’s what Maggie was doing. Even our board members were connecting directly with the work rather than just being content to receive reports from the field.

So here I am, formerly a missionary in Honduras, back for the first time in years, and it never occurred to me that I might be able to recruit a missionary in Honduras. But when you think of it, why not?

Maggie, the board members, and many others are all doing what God has opened up for us to do today in getting involved in missions. It is now easier than ever before to simply experience missions, both in our local community and abroad. So how would you maximize on this trend to just go and see for ourselves? How can missions adjust to this new movement of God and join Him in the way He is moving people? Are you just walking right by opportunities all the while praying for God to call forth workers into His harvest field?

The Direct Connect

Where God is Moving Series

God is still calling the next generation to missions,

but they are doing it in different ways:

often directly through local church relationships

When I met with the psychologist as part of the candidate process with World Gospel Mission back in 1985, he made a statement that was a new thought to me. He said, “You need to evaluate WGM to see if they are a fit for you just as much as they are evaluating you.”

Wow, I’d never thought of it like that. I was just hoping to be accepted. I had grown up knowing WGM missionaries and really, it was the only agency I seriously considered in pursuing God’s call on my life. I was a child of my generation. When I graduated from college, in your job search you hoped to get on with a good company that would be a solid employer for life. Then all the rules seemed to change.

I’d say that when companies began laying off long time employees for financial survival, certainly it contributed to a fundamental change in the way subsequent generations viewed loyalty to a corporation. Or to a career. In fact, according to a articles I have read on career change, the average college graduate will change careers (not just jobs) seven times in their lifetime.

Not to mention technology! This photo took ten minutes to shoot, edit, and upload to the web so you could enjoy it on my blog. All of what I wrote in the last sentence was impossible to accomplish when I graduated from college. It has all happened in the past twenty years.

So how does that impact missions? God is still calling people to be missionaries. People just are approaching the proposition in a whole new way. Candidates today are looking at benefit packages, wanting to see job descriptions and looking for a mentoring relationship with someone in the mission, not just a brochure and a form to fill out.

I remember as a new missionary at a gathering of missionaries listening as a veteran missionary lamented the fact that young people were not as committed as those of her generation. “When I became a missionary,” she said, “you were called for life to a country. Now young people want to go short-term and switch countries. There just isn’t the committment today.” I sat there thinking, “Really? I feel pretty committed and I have no idea where I’ll be in five years.”

Today we are tempted to say that young people just aren’t responding to a call to ministry when in reality it may be our walls and filters they aren’t responding to.

Churches today are also interested in the Do It Yourself approach. Not necessarily because that is their preference, but they see it as the most effective approach. The world is connected. An emerging church leader addressing a group of mission agencies at a conference sponsored last fall by The Mission Exchange said, “I hope most of you are out of business in 50 years.” He was referring to the duplication of efforts in so many mission agencies. That created quite a discussion!

But the truth is that God’s people are connecting in different way to mission in response to God’s call today. They want to connect much more directly rather than rely on someone to do that for them. We feel it is an area where God is moving. We are challenged to find ways to connect with these folks.

So how about you? Do you see something in this topic that you would be willing to post a comment on?