Author: Miss Cellanea

God looked down…

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This week I’ve learned some more about spiritual warfare. All of us in training have thought, prayed, and read about how the Father fights his battles, and what to do when we look around and find ourselves in the place of a foot soldier. God is, right now as I type, at war with the Enemy. Because of these battles, persecution pushes back on the growth of new believers around the world. Many hearts are hardened to Father’s stories of repentance, grace, and salvation. Strong believers fall daily into sins they knew to flee and avoid. But also because of these battles, the lost are freed from the Enemy’s traps. Father triumphs over people who would oppose the spread of the Truth. Strong believers are daily freed from sins which would eat them alive, given the chance. Satan is already bound and has no power except that which God gives him. And we who believe have victory in Christ.

We’ve studied this week about how Father wins his battles on our behalf through our weakness. Think back to stories of actual battles in the Old Testament. Whenever Father shows himself to be the Lord of Hosts, the Lord Almighty, it is when his people are vulnerable. Father won for Gideon when his men had all deserted but a few, and those left were either in the band or banging together pots and pans. Not the most effective battle strategy, last time I checked. Father won for Joshua when the people marched around the city more times than they cared to count and then shouted like maniacs. The Israelites escaped the Egyptians by waiting like sitting ducks on the shores of the Red Sea while chariots and horses charged at then. Hezekiah’s troops won by never even leaving the city of siege. All they did was quake in their leather sandals as men hurled insults over their walls. In all of these stories, the people Father fights and wins for look… utterly ridiculous. They have no room to claim a piece of the victory. God clearly did ALL the work. His people only had to stand up, vulnerable but trusting, waiting for God to act to win their battles. That’s how spiritual battles are won. That’s what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12. God’s power is perfected in our weakness. If we go into spiritual warfare knowing the God who we represent, and knowing we don’t stand a chance against the enemy in our own power, God fights for us, to show off his power. We just have to be ready and trusting for him to work.

As a story example (I do love stories), let’s look at David. David the boy stood up to a giant who defied the armies of the Lord. He refused armor. He refused good weapons. He refused sly tactics or anything that would help him win against the giant in his own power. He stood, a little boy with no shred of armor, and boldly opposed the enemy. He knew he had no power of his own, but that the Lord would fight and win for him. But David the king became a little more trusting in his own might. When war threatened, David did not always turn to his God to fight for him. One time he took a census of all the young men who could be warriors. The Lord punished David for taking stock of his resources and relying on his own power to save him from enemies. One of our teachers told us always to seek to be David the boy in the midst of spiritual warfare. Realize your failures and faults and call on the Lord of Hosts to fight for you. When we are like David the king and try in our own might to win, it’s then that we fail. If we leave no room for God to show off, he simply won’t do it. It isn’t in his nature to force himself upon us.

I have been overwhelmed the past few weeks by all of the mission work I don’t know how to do, all the things I can do wrong, all the ways I could get in the way of the Father doing mighty things. I haven’t as much been focused on myself, as I have been widening my focus and seeing how little I am and how much work there is to be done. But I have also seen how great our Father is, that he would use someone like me, with issues of fear, pride, doubt, self-absorption, not enough experience, and social skills leaving something to be desired. He doesn’t need me. In fact, I will most certainly cause more problems that he has to solve. But he chooses to use me. Incredible. Absolutely incredible. He shows himself powerful, the victor of the spiritual wars raging around us, when he uses someone as foolish and naïve as I am.

One of my favorite missioanries I’ve read about is Gladys Aylward. The woman was a firecracker. When she shot sparks the world around her lit up. She grew up in London, a little slip of a woman, not an inch over five feet tall. She took what schooling she could, read everything she could get her hands on, and didn’t stop trying to make it to China when mission boards declined her for her ‘inability to learn language.’

She scrimped and saved her earnings as a housemaid, sold her hope chest, and bought a one-way ticket to take her to China. She traveled just as she was, single, unprotected, and unsure of what lay at the other end, over war-torn train tracks and through frozen wastelands. When she finally did make it to China, the woman had an incredible ministry. She adopted orphans, stopped prison riots, marched a hundred children out of a warring country, and made friends and disciples of criminals and government officials alike. She lived an incredible life, and the Kingdom was grown immensely for it.

Father didn’t ask of Gladys a seminary education, a linguist’s background, an anthropology degree, or a hundred converts before he used her. He asked only her obedience. And in her weakness, God showed himself mighty in power. He provided Gladys with the skills she needed. He took her background and what training she did have and he used her mightily. I don’t mean to belittle her abilities, or mine, by comparison, but I do mean to point out that any effectiveness she had, Father gave her for the sake of His Name. He supplied her with people skills and language learning, and discernment and faith. HE made her into something special. And everyone knew that the God who stood behind this little 5-foot foreigner was powerful indeed.

God has begun to equip me with skills to use for his glory. I don’t mean to smother you in false modesty, though. I truly have so much to learn and so many places to fall before even this two-year assignment is through. Let me always be David the boy, standing naked of armor, small and unprotected, with only a leather strap and a stone before a fortress of a man. Let me continue to look absurdly comical as I face the Enemy and bring the Light into his darkness. For it is then that God’s power is unmistakable. Let me be weak, for His power is made perfect in weakness. When I am weak, the God who used a tiny single woman from London, triumphed over Goliath, won for Gideon’s men, and toppled the walls of Jericho stands behind me to win the battle for His sake.

Gladys Aylward said, near the end of her life: I wasn’t God’s first choice for what I’ve done for China. There was somebody else…I don’t know who it was—God’s first choice. It must have been a man—a wonderful man. A well-educated man. I don’t know what happened. Perhaps he died. Perhaps he wasn’t willing…And God looked down…and saw Gladys Aylward…And God said — “Well, she’s willing.” There are other people far more equipped than me to carry out the work I am going to do. Maybe they have seminary degrees, winning personalities, or already know the language I will butcher for the next two years. But God looked down… and he saw Caroline. And he said, “Well, she’s willing.” I know God will triumph in my smallness and inadequacies. And I know he asks of me nothing less than tireless obedience. The Lord has many better options—people more suited to his work—but I’m it. I’m the one he’s sending.

Pray for me, brothers and sisters, as I pray the same for you, that I would always see myself as little boy David standing before a giant. Pray that I would neverforget that battles are won only through the power of the God who stands behind me—the God who fights for me.

In His Embrace

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Names are important in the Bible. They don’t just denote a person; they describe the person before he or she even gets a story explaining who they are or how they act. Just think of all the naming stories in the Bible. Jesus and John the Baptist’s names are given straight from the mouths of angels. Mothers frequently name their children in reference to their situations or the Lord’s action on their behalf (Hannah, Rachel, Leah, Eve and Sarah, for example). Think even of the creation story and how the Lord names the things he creates and they come into being because the name uttered from his mouth is so powerful. Or remember when Adam named the animals, in that action both knowing their natures and exercising humanity’s dominion over them. Point is, names matter.

And the prophets are no exception. Isaiah means The Lord Saves. Ezekiel means God Strengthens. These guys’ names encapsulate the message they bring and the nature of the messenger. So I was reading Habakkuk… and I read in a commentary that his name was probably a Babylonian word that meant ‘potted plant.’ I don’t know if you’ve read that book lately, but there’s nothing about potted plants in there. Absolutely nothing. If you wanted to really stretch it (we’re talking contortionist-like stretching), you could say that the end of the book, when Habakkuk talks about flourishing no matter the circumstances, is about living well away from your homeland—flourishing like a potted plant. But… I don’t really buy that. And anyway, I found another explanation of Habakkuk’s name recently that I like better. Who knows, maybe after you hear my theory you’ll think it’s just as much of a stretch as potted plants, but I’ll give you the goods and let you decide.

I’m no Hebrew scholar, so I use websites (like Biblehub.com) to help me when I want to know a word. Habakkuk’s name, directly transliterated from Hebrew looks something like Chabaquq (put a little phlegm in your throat for that first consonant sound). There’s another Hebrew word quite similar to Habakkuk’s name. In fact, the actual construction of the name intensifies the meaning of the word it seems to be built on. The Hebrew word chabaq (don’t forget the phlegm) means to embrace, or to hug. If you know me, you know that when I found that out, it felt like Christmas. Haha 🙂

I really struggled a few years back when I returned from a month-long trip to Romania. I had grown very attached to people I didn’t know if I’d ever see again, and I had fallen in with a culture which expressed everyday affection through lots of hugs and kisses. When greeting a new person—stranger, relative, friend, foster-parent, believer, communist insurgent, it didn’t matter who—you gave them two real kisses, one for each cheek, and a big warm bear-hug. And it was a completely normal thing to hold someone’s hand, no matter how well you knew them. I was a touchy person before that trip, but when I returned, I felt starved for human contact. I came home from immersion in a body of believers who expressed their connectedness through physical affirmation. And no one did that here. In the States people look at you weird if you hold a friend’s hand and you aren’t dating them. They tend to back off when you go in for a hug unless you’re a very close friend. And kisses are reserved only for the most intimate relationships: family or significant others.

So when I returned from Romania I worked hard to fall back into this distanced way of life. And many of my friends and family worked hard to give me extra hugs or extra meaningful ones. As I grieved for a people I felt like I had lost and for the physical connection to loved-ones around me, I decided to do a word study in scripture for words like hug, kiss, and embrace. My search came up pretty dry. I barely found anything in the Old Testament, and in the New most references were to the prodigal son story or to holy kisses among the believers. And some of the OT references were talking about kisses from prostitutes or from Solomon’s personified Folly. Not too encouraging. I wanted to find instances of God personified, physically caring for his people and showing his love to them tangibly. I couldn’t find it. I guess that goes to show what happens when you come up with your own idea and dig through scripture trying to find things to prove your own point.

I will say this, though. As the Body, we are connected, and we should care enough about each other to hug our brothers and sisters and welcome them in close to us. I have noticed since my return from Romania that we, as the American church, often don’t like to let people in. It’s a fairly universal thing that no one likes to reveal themselves at their ugliest, but we’re extra good at hiding those parts of us in America. We don’t like accountability, confession, or vulnerability with each other. So we don’t comfort each other like we should because we don’t know each other’s struggles. We’re all hesitant to share our difficulties for fear that people will see us broken and judge us for not quite having this Christian thing worked out. But I’ll let you in on a secret: we are all of us broken, every one, and the Body is supposed to care for its members by sharing burdens and joys alike. Scripture does back me up on this point. Maybe we should take a cue from those holy kisses in the NT and, if not physically enacting that culture’s expression of the Body’s intimate bond, we should at least welcome each other deep into our lives.

Now, with some distance on the situation, I realize that the NT rarely speaks of God personified, because he came in the person of Jesus. There was no need to personify Him anymore. We had the Incarnation. And the OT was just the beginning of the revelation. God wanted to show himself to his people as a Mighty commander of armies, a fierce judge, a creator of cosmic scale. He wanted his people to know him for his holiness and his power, not his desire for a personal relationship with Him. That option died at the Fall, and was not available again until Jesus came. So, of course I wasn’t going to find passages going on about a loving father who embraces his children or kisses their heads as they sit in his lap. In the Old Covenant mind, God is holy, awe-inspiring, terrible, and unapproachable. Sin is gruesome and not allowed in his presence. He was a gracious God, but instead of tender scenes with the Father, the OT depicts scenes like those of Is. 6, where the last thing anyone wanted to do was get anywhere near YHWH.

So, now back to my point, after what was perhaps too protracted of a back-story. Habakkuk’s name uses as its root the Hebrew word for ‘embrace.’ If prophets’ names describe what God does to or for his people and his prophets, what is a book on judgment doing coming out of the mouth of a man named Huggy (not to be confused with the diapers)? I think Habakkuk is one of the most brilliant names for a prophet given in the OT for not a few reasons.

First of all, think of what a hug is. When you hug someone you welcome them into your private, personal, intimate space. It’s a defenseless gesture, too; neither you nor the other person can protect yourself. And in real embraces, not those silly Christian side-hugs, you learn a lot about the person. You can tell if someone’s muscles are tensed because they’re angry, stressed, defensive, or shocked. You can tell how fast they’re breathing and how fast their heart is beating. You know immediately after a hug if a person is agitated or calmed. Often, you can feel a person relax into a hug as they let themselves be comforted by someone who cares about them. In embracing someone, you come intentionally and fully into their presence.

That still doesn’t explain Habakkuk though. He was a watchman on a wall, not an over-zealous Walmart greeter. But I think it does explain him. In Habakkuk’s book, he asks God a question about justice among his people. He sees the poor among them mistreated and neglected. He asks God why and how he can allow such injustice to go on. Habakkuk got a little more than he asked for. God tells Habakkuk that He’ll do an amazing thing among his people (1:5). But then God goes on to explain that his definition of amazing means suffering and exile and war and even more injustice. God will bring a nation against the Israelites to conquer them and exile them from their homeland in judgment against the injustice Habakkuk remarked on. Habakkuk responds, not questioning God’s right to do as he pleases, but questioning why God would use a nation even more wicked than the Israelites, and why he would dole out punishment indiscriminately to the righteous and unrighteous. He ends his question with a beautiful statement (2:1) of his trust in God’s judgment and humble acceptance of whatever answer God will give him. In time God responds, affirming his holiness and power, and reminding Habakkuk that he has an ordered plan in all of this; that in the end He will punish the wicked for their deeds. If the Lord’s answer wasn’t breathtaking, Habakkuk’s response certainly is.

He offers a prayer to God in chapter 3. His humility is striking. He conjures up awe and communicates the Lord’s terrific power as he explains that he and his people will accept whatever comes from the Lord’s hand. His closure in verses 16-19 is the kind of beautiful that makes a grown man cry. The whole book is wonderful, and I encourage you to read it when you have a few minutes. But these four verses are well worth committing to memory. Habakkuk says that no matter what happens—even when the food runs out and calamity comes—he will rejoice in the Lord. He’ll take joy in the One who saves him. He won’t just accept it. He’ll be happy it about it, the deep-down kind of happy. I’ve often wondered before what wells of trust and understanding of God’s character he pulls this confession from. How can he be broken over the suffering he sees, know that the Lord will bring even more, and commit to be full of joy over it?

Because of his name. Because, even though Habakkuk spent his time in a watchtower instead of a temple, he spent his time in the Lord’s presence. His whole book is a book of prayer—of speaking with the Lord, watching the Lord, waiting on the Lord, listening to the Lord, understanding the Lord. He spent his time fully and intentionally engaged in the Lord’s presence.

In His embrace.

His name is perfect. Habakkuk spent time with the Lord in prayer and understood His character, will, and plan all the better because of it. And Habakkuk knows that he will rejoice in the future, no matter what comes, because he will still be in the Lord’s embrace. He says so. In 3:19, after his wonderful confession, he says that the Lord is his strength. He’s spent so much time in the Lord’s embrace he knows that’s where true strength and comfort come from. And in the end, he trusts the Father who wraps him in an embrace, because He knows the character and the heartbeat of his God. He breathes the Father’s breath after him. He understands why. And he trusts the One who protects him in His arms.

I pray for you, brothers and sisters, as I hope you will pray for me, that you will learn to live fully and intentionally engaged in the Father’s presence through prayer. That you will, like Habakkuk, live wrapped in your Father’s embrace, breathing his breath after him and fully contented in his character.

On Suffering

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Before I came to training, I was reading through Job. There wasn’t much rhyme or reason to it, but I just felt one of those undeniable urges to read one of the more obscure Old Testament books of wisdom on suffering. Maybe it doesn’t bode well for my time on the field. If I needed preparation for suffering that early before my deployment, maybe there’s some insurmountable obstacle awaiting me. I don’t know. And, frankly, I’d prefer to worry about it later, when it’s actually here.

It occurred to me in one of my less-self-centered moments to think that maybe my suffering preparation and study was not for me, but for people I’ll work with. That’s probably true, considering they’ll be kids and girls who endure suffering beyond what I could even imagine: slavery, abandonment, physical abuse, abject poverty, and sexual abuse. They, of all people, understand the depths of suffering. They, of all people, wonder why a God who is supposed to love them let these terrible things happen. And they, of all people, deserve an answer from us. But oftentimes, instead of an answer, we come preaching past them, patting their heads, and telling them “go in peace; keep warm and well fed” (James 2:15-17). I am just as guilty as the next person, and do not hear me saying there are none who care for the least of these. Many do, and do it well. But all the same, many of us, myself included, are much more comfortable to look past suffering rather than engage the sufferer and share with them a God who bears their burdens.

As I read Job, I recalled the story and began to empathize with a man who experienced a pain disproportionate to his righteous walk of life. His well-educated friends, who assumed they understood the prestigious theologies and doctrines of their day, sat with him in stunned silence for a while. Perhaps they were stunned that a man so great had incurred the wrath of God. Perhaps they found their theologies inadequate and had to concoct some new answer to this unexpected situation. Perhaps they genuinely grieved with their friend. But when they opened their mouths, everything hit the fan. Your suffering is God’s punishment for wrongdoers, they said. God will hear prayers of repentance, they said. God will listen to the voice of a man humbled in heart and broken in spirit, they said. Repent and your life will be easy. A lot of what they said is actually a truth in itself, just misapplied in Job’s situation. Not everything though. Not everything by a long shot. But they brewed up their solutions and delivered them to a man who would have genuinely preferred for someone to instead scrape the sores on his skin with a broken clay pot.

They paid no heed to the suffering body in front of them and spoke instead to a soul they considered trapped in it. They misapplied theology and doctrines to corroborate their poor understanding of God. Perhaps they meant well. So do we. So did Machiaveli. So did Hitler. So did lots of people. But meaning well isn’t enough.

If our theology prompts us to talk at sufferers instead of getting down in the dirt and scraping their sores for them, it is severely broken.

Job’s friends didn’t comfort their friend. They didn’t tell him of the God who binds up the broken-hearted. They didn’t speak of a God who fills the empty with good things. They didn’t share with Job about a God who makes the blind see, the deaf hear, and the lame walk. But we should. We should share with the suffering people around us about just who exactly our God is and what he is capable of. But we can’t stop there. Yes, God filled Job again with blessings. And he taught Job that he delights in righteousness—that he is blessed by it. But he never told Job the reason for his suffering. And yes, God didn’t leave Hannah barren. Elijah saw the Lord bring rain after drought. Paul did arrive in Rome with the message of the gospel. But Moses didn’t get to enter the Promised Land. Abraham was over a hundred years old when he had a son, and he didn’t see the nation that came from his boy. Not a one of David’s sons was the promised messiah, the king of kings. If we teach that God heals, but he instead chooses to delay the keeping of his promise, what then? Have we lied to those we taught about a healer God?

It took me until this week to see the New Testament’s answer to Job’s questions.

A dear friend encouraged me before I left for training with Hebrews 13:5b. I started rooting around and discovered a nugget of truth I had never seen before. I hope you’ve hung on with me this long and can read the punchline. I read through and pondered Hebrews 12:4-17. It’s always been a hard book for me, and I feel like I rarely understand the connections the author makes. But this time I got it. I saw the answer to Job’s question. I saw the answers to my own. And I saw the answers we should offer to those suffering all around us.

The Hebrews author first speaks of all suffering as a punishment, or discipline from God (12:7). This confused me, because Job’s suffering was definitely not punishment. That was the point of the whole book. You take that away and you lose not only Job’s integrity, but the whole reason God invited Satan to test Job. If you call Job’s suffering punishment, his friends were right and you call God’s judgment of Job a mistake. So, naturally, I kept fishing around in the text. I realize that the difficulty hinged on my definition of punishment. See, I thought punishment was intentional infliction of harm by the punisher on the punishee for the purpose of discouraging further instances of the offence. I looked up the Greek word for ‘punish’ there, expecting it to be softer. Nope. The Greek word translated ‘punishes’ in verse 6 means ‘to whip.’ So all of our suffering, we are to consider a whipping from God. That’s what those verses literally mean.

It took me some prayer to realize the meaning isn’t in the literal details. ‘Punish’ and ‘discipline’ are the correct translations. Why? Because when a loving father punishes his son, he gives a gift. He takes a moment of pain, shame, or inconvenience—a moment when the son is visited by the consequences of his actions—and brings about a good thing. He seizes a teaching moment in the midst of suffering so that the son can learn something important. Something redeeming. Something healing and guiding. That definition isn’t one you can learn from a Greek dictionary. It comes from experience, and people, like my dad, who’s always been good at taking any opportunity to teach us about everything from retaining walls to fossils to the circulatory system to God-honoring people skills.

And God’s discipline, at least the kind delivered to righteous sufferers (the believers, the young children, etc.) is all aimed at teaching one thing. Here’s the point—the main idea it took me this long to make. The purpose of Job’s suffering, of our suffering, of the suffering of precious little children and girls enslaved before they’re old enough to get rid of their teddy bears? The purpose of that suffering is to teach us that only God can satisfy. In our pain, we look for a cure. In our emptiness, we look for the one who fills us with good things. C. S. Lewis says, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world” (Mere Christianity). Our ever-hungering desires teach us that something perfect exists to completely satisfy them. No friend, significant other, or spouse can fulfill our needs for unconditional love, companionship, or being valued. No medicine can ever fully heal our bodies, cure our pain, and stop us from slowly dying. No amount of hopping between cultures, reading about them, or drooling over then can satisfy our craving for perfect, multifaceted culture of Heaven. No dream job will ever make us feel completely useful, talented, valued, and capable.

No. Our hunger, desires, grief, and loss point us to the One thing who can satisfy them. We realize our body is broken, and only One can make it whole. We realize that even if our yearnings for people lost to us are satisfied, only One person can satisfy all our needs for relationship. God’s discipline shakes us up, turns our desires on their heads, and makes a difficult situation into a gift of teaching, endurance, and faith. Through our grief we realize that we are offered a gift much greater than that which we lost. Through our suffering we realize that we are offered a satisfaction much better than that which we are deprived of.

Our God offers us a satisfaction of greater magnitude than the loss of our suffering.

I’ve always loved Hebrews 12:12-13: “Therefore strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. Make level paths for your feet, so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed.” But with this new understanding of the previous verses, it has an even richer meaning. It harks back to verses like Isaiah 35:3 and Proverbs 4:26, both of which speak of a healing and redemption much more holistic than physical cure. Verse 13 says to make level paths—to be careful and make sure your way is a righteous one—so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed. A man may be lame yet spiritually healed. A man may also be lame and spiritually disabled. But if he follows the straight path with his life, or the narrow way, as Jesus calls it, his lameness does not disable him. In his soul he is healed and whole, and he merely waits for Christ’s return for his body to follow. But a lame man who walks the uneven way, or the wide road leading to destruction, he disables himself. He spends his days in bitterness and when Christ returns, he faces eternal destruction. He will be forever lame. So verses 12 and 13 present two choices in the face of suffering: letting suffering disable us, or letting suffering heal us.

I think it is also our duty to respond correctly to our suffering. Verses 14-17 explain this in-depth. We can either respond to the gift of suffering by looking to the God who satisfies our desires, or we can turn away from him and try to satisfy ourselves in other ways. This is the practical application of the message we must take to the suffering. Our suffering is wasted and useless if we do not let it point us to our Savior. But if we allow God to have his way in his discipline, we choose to cultivate holiness (v. 14a). And if we choose holiness—to be healed and look to the one who satisfies our desires better than any of his creation ever could—God truly does turn our suffering into a gift. It is a gift not only to us, but also to those around us. As believers, our suffering is often incarnational ministry. Jesus sent us out and promised we would suffer just as he had (Jn 20:20-21). That kind of holy suffering, the kind which plays out in the life of someone who chooses to be teachable, glorifies the Lord. It lets others see God in our lives (v.14b).

If we choose to wallow in our suffering, or if we simply do not know who to look to for our needs and fulfillment, we miss God’s grace in suffering, which is a terrible thing. We choose the wrong response, and we do not benefit from the gift God offers us out of our suffering. Not only that, but we become bitter (v. 15). People ask why they suffer and turn on a God whom they see as impassive and uncaring only because, in their suffering, they look for healing and regrowth and redemption in the wrong places. They look to the wrong things, people, and relationships to put them back together again. They feel cheated by God because they do not realize the gift he gives and think that he has taken away only to let them fill the gaping hole with something less than fitting. When instead, if they could only see his grace, he would fill them to overflowing with abundant life. See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and define many (v. 15).

The next comment the author of Hebrews makes has always thrown me for a loop. I never had the slightest idea how Esau came into this topic, or how his story even applied. I knew sale of his birthright for a bowl of stew was a great lapse in judgment, but an act of godlessness? That’s a stretch. But when we understand the passage in light of context and in light of the understanding of suffering as God’s discipline, as God’s gift, Esau makes perfect sense. I just told you about the two choices we have in suffering: to become bitter by searching for lesser things to fill us, or to cultivate holyiness by allowing God to use our suffering for his glory and to let others see Him in us. Using Esau’s story here to elaborate on the point is brilliant. You can see the hand of a great storyteller. You see, Esau, too, had those options.

In the small suffering of his hunger, he could choose to change out the gift of his father (his birthright) for some paltry, momentary satisfaction, or he could hold out and accept his father’s gift and receive all that his father intended to give him: land he did not amass, fields he did not plant, blessings he did not deserve; the place of Jacob, the honored son who went on to become the father of the Israelite nation; eternal membership in the kingdom of God’s people. Esau had two options laid before him. He chose in his suffering to take the easier, wider, unlevel road. It led him only to pain, sin, ignominy, and, ultimately, the place of an obscure, hated nation of Edomites. He exchanged his glory for shame (Hos 4:7). He let his suffering rule him and instead chose the route of lesser satisfaction and fulfillment. He became a bitter root that poisoned a whole nation of people. He turned against God because he thought God had disappointed him, rather than looking to his own impatience, self-reliance, and greed as the source of the problem. And his bitterness, as it says in verse 15, grew up as a root to trouble and defile many.

So what do we do with all of this? How should it change how we live, teach, and care? God turns our suffering into discipline. He takes a difficult situation and turns it into a gift by teaching us, and by revealing that only He can perfectly satisfy our longings. We can choose to accept his gift of discipline and thereby cultivate holiness and glorify God to others. Or, we can choose to ignore his discipline and our suffering becomes only a device to grow bitterness in us. Like a root. Picture what roots do to concrete, asphalt, and ancient cities. They slowly crush and destroy, strangling out all life. Who would choose to receive that out of their suffering?

People who know of no other option.

The only answer to “what do we do with this?” is clear. We let our suffering glorify God. And we tenderly approach the other sufferers around us with a better option. God created them to be his sons and daughters, and he calls them to him. It is their birthright—their promised privilege—to become a member of God’s people.             If.             If they only choose to know the One who opens his hand and satisfies the desires of every living thing (Ps. 145:16). It’s a beautiful promise. And it is our blessing and honor, brothers and sisters, to carry it to the suffering around us.

“Jesus Tastes like Cardboard”

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I have always been fascinated with the Lord’s Supper. I was such a literally-thinking child that I used to understand it more as a sort of Eucharist—like I was actually eating Christ’s body and blood. Once my parents ironed that one out, I still thought it was an interesting thing. I’ve always been a bit imaginative, and a romantic. So when we, at our Baptist church, had a sort of ritual—where everyone had to be so quiet they could barely breathe and perform certain actions at prescribed times—I liked the feel of it, and the differentiation from the usual routine of three hymns, offering, a special, and a sermon. As a little girl, the Lord’s Supper reminded me of big words and dust, of mysticism and ‘the ancients.’ And I always got a warm feeling I couldn’t quite describe. I felt connected… to generations of Christians in Roman catacombs and European crypts and New England Churchyards.

And though I may not have understood the entire purpose of the procedure, I wasn’t too far off. I know today that the Lord’s Supper, or Communion, binds us together as a community. We share in and remember the sacrifice that Jesus gave for us. We remind ourselves that we are connected to each other by the same grace and the same savior. We feel intensely the bond between the future and the present. The young and the old. The saints, the apostles, the poets, the priests, the kings, the peasants, the natives, and the immigrants. In the words of C. S. Lewis, we remember our affinity with the Church as she truly is: “spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners” (Screwtape Letters).

I have never lost my fascination with Communion. I wrote a couple of papers on its theology and practice in college, and I have experienced it in a handful of different ways with people from vastly different places in the world. I have come to see Communion, at least in my life, as a mile-marker, or a thermometer. It measures and records where I am with God, where I am physically, and what I am learning. There was a time when I experienced Communion as a solemn, solitary thing. I felt legalistically that I must confess every sin from my past and leave no stone unturned to be worthy to eat my wafer and swig my grape juice. I didn’t have the whole picture, but I was learning about the fear of the Lord, and about a holiness so pure and so complete as to be unapproachable. Later, I learned of our Father’s unfathomable forgiveness and grace, and of how he ate the Last Supper with his friends as brothers. I began to take Communion at more ease, understanding, while it is still a holy observance, my worthiness of it was never the point.

As I began to respond to God’s call to missions, I experienced Communion in different cultures. I served for a summer in inner-city Houston during high school, storying the Word, learning about people less fortunate than I, and discovering how to engage them as Jesus would. There I visited a church with friends I had closely bonded with. In Remembrance, we ate pinches off of a single loaf of real bread and took sips from a single cup. I was learning how people can be different from each other and worship in contrasting ways, yet be closely bonded and serve the same God wholeheartedly. Communion had its first savor of friendship for me. Jesus’ blood and body tasted… friendly. Like the communal parts of his message. It reminded me of the time long ago when 5,000 assorted and sundry people shared five loaves of bread as they listened to the Teacher.

I tell you these stories not to say that I have always had super-spiritual Communions and always prepared myself enough. I would be lying if I told you I had never gotten bored or failed to dig in down to my elbows and really remember the pain Jesus went through for my fellow believers and me. I went to a small, private, Christian college, and as a freshman, it was my Sunday ritual to grab a group of friends and go visit a new church. One time I took two friends to a yellowing, musty church downtown. We walked into the old, cavernous building and claimed a pew with a brilliant red velvet cushion, one of the vacant pews in the back third of the church that puffed with dust when we sat down. We sang the oldest hymns in the hymnal with words only a few could understand. Then we heard a brief sermon and accepted a pale, lifeless-looking wafer and a tiny plastic cup with half a swallow of grape juice. After we ate and drank, one of my friends, who didn’t grow up going to church, said in a carrying whisper, “Jesus tastes like cardboard!” I didn’t realize then the profound, if unintentional, wisdom of her words. The Jesus we often serve up in our dying, creaky, old churches tastes dry, boring, and stale. But the Jesus in the pages of my Bible is anything but cardboard. He has humor, and sarcasm, and severity, and intensity, and compassion, and irritation, and penetrating wisdom, and authoritative teachings. He is full of abundant life. The Jesus we share in our communion should be that Jesus. He should taste like life and love and repentance and wholeness. Not cardboard.

My favorite Communion to date occurred in Romania, wedged in-between members of the family that took me in for a month while I worked with the Roma people. I felt a tangible connectedness with people I could barely speak to as we sat rubbing shoulders and laughing with joy. I felt the warm, vibrant love of Christ pulsing between us like a circulatory system while we were squished together into the tiny building. To this day I don’t have words to describe the connectedness I felt. We cut up a loaf of bread just like those we used at each meal and all took a piece. We passed a bottle around and all drank from it. That day Jesus’ sacrifice tasted like family. And the mysterious bond of unity God gives his people across time and place. I was learning about the grace we share and the body broken for all of us. In Philippians 1:7, Paul says “… whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God’s grace with me.” No matter our location or situation, we as the Church are united by God’s grace—a single Body broken for the Church body. From that day on, Communion has never been a solitary thing for me.

Yesterday I had what will probably be my last communion with my home Church family for at least the next two years. And this time I took it with 9 people squeezed onto a 5-person pew. My family all sat to my left and I sat with a child on either side in my arms and one on my lap. I could smell their minty gum breath and the oils in the hair of the girl on my lap and the unwashed clothes they came to church in. They don’t have parents or a big sister or brother who’ll bring them to church. My family and I were happy to have them. I know that in time they’ll grow up and get to taste the Lord’s Supper for themselves and learn about what it means. I know that because of their inclusion in our church family, their lives have already changed and they have begun maturing. And as I ate Communion wedged between and under those beautiful blessings, Jesus tasted like the hope of a different life, the peace that can calm even a child from a broken home, and the unsurpassable love of our Savior. Jesus didn’t taste like cardboard. He tasted like let the little children come, and the joy of the kingdom of God. My prayer for you, reader, is that wherever you are, and whatever your communion looks like, that your Jesus wouldn’t taste like cardboard. Let him work in your life and shine through so that when the people you rub shoulders with partake of the Jesus in your life, he would taste like family, like love, like miracles and acceptance and salvation and joy and healing. And let us strive together toward this goal, in communion with each other and with our God.

Higher Ways

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Isaiah 55:8-9

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD.

“As the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are my ways higher than your ways

and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

My littlest brother has a processing disorder. In the main, that means that it takes his brain a little more effort to make logical jumps the rest of us make with ease. He has quite a bit of trouble with the ideas of time and sequence. Sometimes he simply can’t process a new piece of information and he has to grasp it later, when he learns it in smaller pieces over a longer stretch of time. I love him to death, and I’ve learned a lot from him. He doesn’t always see the world the way we do, and often it’s refreshing or revealing to hear him talk on a subject—it teaches me many times about childlike faith.

The newest information my brother has been trying to process has been a bit out of his reach: my big sister is going overseas for two years. I’ve recently come back from a 4-day trip to Virginia to spend time looking at overseas ministry jobs, and for the first time I feel confident enough to tell people that the Father is finally taking me to live and love among a foreign people for an extended period of time. My brother can’t quite wrap his mind around a two-year length of time. So, when I was helping him with his homeschooling the other day, he kept asking me small questions—in the middle of his math, his reading, his history. “So, will you miss Christmas?” “What about holidays?” “Will you be gone for my birthday?” Yes, I’d tell him. Plane tickets are expensive, so once I leave I won’t be able to come back for a while. But I’ll Skype you! And we’ll write letters and look at each others’ pictures. And it will only be two years for now. Once he asked, “Caroline, why do you have to go? Why can’t you stay here, or just go for a few weeks?” I tried to explain, but I could tell from his furrowed eyebrows that he didn’t understand. He is a believer, and he likes telling people what he believes. He’s even been on a short trip to South Asia, where he made fast friends with other little kids and loved helping with crafts and storytelling. But he didn’t know why anyone would need to spend more time than a few days away from their home, like I am planning to do.

Later, when we did my brother’s history, we read about the Aztecs and briefly touched on their penchant for human sacrifice. I looked up from the book I was reading to him, and his eyes were wide with shock. “Why did they do that?” he asked. Lots of reasons: they were scared, bad things were happening, they thought the spirits would treat them better. “But… people died! Why…?” They… they didn’t know God. They didn’t know—couldn’t know—that He could forgive them, help them, heal them. That’s why I’m going somewhere else for 2 years, I told him. Lots of people don’t even know about God and how good He is. And they do terrible things sometimes because they don’t know how to live with God. Sometimes it takes years for them to learn otherwise. My brother thought about that for a while. I let him think, and we kept doing his schoolwork. I knew I had his approval a couple of hours later when he stopped writing, looked up at me, and said, “I guess this New Year’s we’ll just have to celebrate with you for three years at once.”

As I told a friend this story over the phone, I realized that we understand God just about as well as my brother understood me. God’s thoughts are not our thoughts; His ways are higher than ours. What God sees as time-all-at-once eternity, we can only see in little snatches and glimpses. What God sees as three-dimensional, we can only see from one point on a line. Sometimes it takes us hours, days, years even, to process a small piece of information He’s shown us. Our failure or success to understand Him doesn’t change His plan, but many times He graciously waits on us to catch up to involve us.

I’ve written before that I’ve known God’s call on my life to overseas ministry since I was a child. I’ve written that things up to a certain point were very easy. But then I started hitting snags in the path, and roadblocks, and detours. My application for two-year service was denied about a year ago for health reasons. After a difficult journey in which I learned about God’s enduring faithfulness, my application was approved—in His time. But because of the delay, I ended up spending a summer and a semester at home: unemployed; living with my parents while my little sister went off to college; and taking care of goats, chickens, brothers, and dirty dishes and laundry. I would not have readily picked this time of in-between for myself. But God has taught me things. He has taught me things that will be useful overseas and that continue to prepare me for a life of service wherever I live. Beyond the practical lessons of how to butcher and cook a chicken, how to not be gored by an angry goat, I’ve learned about patience. And waiting.

Those slow and silent times in the woods cutting limbs for goats, those early-morning trips outside to squawking chickens and screaming goats, and the repetitive liturgy of folding the same pairs of underwear and jeans and mating socks for the people I love have built up in me to teach something I couldn’t have learned if God had told me all at once. God’s ways are Higher Ways. And there is a certain holiness in daily faithfulness. The way that God teaches and trains me is His prerogative. And if it involves screaming goats and dirty dishes, let it be so. In mid-November I will receive a call detailing my two-year assignment. In January I will begin training. In late March I will get on a plane. I’ll take language lessons and stumble through cultural mistakes and tell my favorite stories til I’m blue in the face. And I couldn’t have picked a better road to get here. His ways are higher than mine.

Aches and Joy

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It’s normal to ache after a trip home from overseas. The long plane rides, confusing time changes, and complete change in environment, food, and everything else make the body go into a bit of shock. But those aches aren’t the ones that bother me as much. The ones that hurt me the most are the spiritual and emotional aches that sometimes physically hurt down deep in the bones.

I just watched the sun set out over the pond from my bedroom window. And the first thought in my delirious, jet-lagged mind was of my friends in Cambodia. The same sun will rise on them in just a few hours. The same sun. And the same grace. I already miss them, and I miss my team as well. I am so used to our patterns of interacting and being that I floundered a bit. The tears came and went, but the ache stayed in my throat. I’ve been told that this kind of ache is all part of ministry, that after a while you stop getting as attached and leaving people behind is easier. Maybe I believe it. But this ache in my throat says no.

When Paul listed all of his trials and all of the scars he bore in 2 Cor., the one he lists last, on top of everything, is his daily burden for the churches. Because of that, I am comforted. I know that I ache and cry like a leaky waterspout because I have a bit of my Father’s heart for his work among the nations. I believe that He weeps for them, as people groups, as cultures, and as individuals just as the Son wept over Jerusalem. He knows each of the people he created by name and he desires their worship and their relationship with Him. And I know that Paul, too, as calloused and seasoned as he was, still bore the burden of remembering the churches he’d left behind. Only a sorrow as deep as that could birth an anger as intense as what we see in some of his letters. He burned for the communities he’d left and was deeply angry at any who would lead them astray.

But Paul also had other emotions for the people he’d left behind. One look at Philippians shows that Paul was filled to overflowing with joy. He loved his work and the people he worked with. And because of his connection with them through Christ, he could be abundantly joyful. We share in the same grace, he said. We have the same savior, and we have the same love poured out on us like an ocean. Though we may worship in different ways or languages, and though we may be so far apart that we will never see the sun at the same time, we all look to the same Son, who died the same death to give us the same grace.

I’ve probably said this to all of you before, and it’s probably old news to you, but every time I think about it, the thought wells up in me with a fresh joy and appreciation for the Father’s faithfulness. He knew that his children would sometimes be apart from those they love, so He gave to the Body of believers one single Body, broken for all. That Holy, blessed Body unites us. We function as unit—as a body with many members working together. We aren’t perfect, but we have the grace of this provision. We all serve the same Father. And just as I can look at the sun and know the same sun will soon rise on my friends, I can look to the Father and know that He is leading us all to participate in his good and perfect will—in a beautiful and intricate Great Dance, weaving in and out between each other to accomplish his purposes and sing for his glory.

Bless the Lord, O my soul

O my soul.

Worship His holy Name;

Sing like never before,

O my soul,

I’ll worship Your holy Name.

Tears

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The hardest part of overseas trips for me has never been the food, the language, or the culture; it has always been the departure. And it hit me today that I’ll be on a plane in 48 hours. Don’t get me wrong, I miss my friends and family from home. But as we drove through the city today in a tuk tuk I almost cried at the thought that these may be my last few moments of the familiar smells and cries from vendors. As the smoggy wind blew through my hair and I wiped the road grit out of my eyes I was not annoyed—I felt embraced by the culture, the people, and the familiar scenery. Do I feel called to this culture long-term? Not necessarily. Will I miss my time and my friends here? Absolutely.

Not too long ago in a place closer to me now than my own home, a Gypsy pastor consoled me as I wept for the people who will forever have a piece of my heart. He said to me, ‘Sister Caroline, no matter how hard it is, leaving is part of ministry. Even Paul talked about how he was burdened for the believing communities he left behind.’ I have never forgotten his words, and I am reminded how true they are in times like these. The longer I serve in this kind of overseas ministry, the more people I will have to leave behind, the more dear hearts I will add to my prayer list, and the more chrch bodies I will carry in my own heart. There will always be bittersweet goodbyes without a promise of meeting again. And because of who the Father has made me to be, my heart will always ache for His work and His people that I leave behind. We have not witnessed any salvations on this trip, but we have planted many seeds. I have told quite a few stories, and I know I am leaving behind friends who may or may not continue in their seeking for the Truth. My heart breaks for them, and every time it does I wonder why I find this ministry so appealing.

But then I read Philippians, and I am always encouraged by Paul’s words. He got it. He knew what it was to leave a place and to wonder what would happen in his absence. He was burdened for those he discipled and those they in turn would disciple to take their places. I am reminded of the Father’s gift of his global community. “We all share in the same grace,” he says in the first chapter, and that unites us. I will always be connected to the Body because we are one in the Son. I will always have someone, whether they speak English, or Khmer, or Romanian, or Spanish, to mutually encourage and lift up. And that is a blessing beyond anything I could ever ask. Our Father knew leaving a community would be difficult, so he connected us in a beautiful way that blows my mind. We all serve the same Lord, no matter what language we use to do it.

And this trip is different from the last, because I will be able to take back a little of the country with me. Father has given us a wonderful team of five students and a professor who’ve shared experiences and trials and triumphs. We’ll always be able to recall fighting over the last scrap of toilet paper, tasting the smelliest fruit in the world, having late-night hair stylings, and laughing with our jmen so much that we cried. We’ll be able to remember together laughing and haggling at the markets and sweating with our knees laced together in a tuk tuk. We will be able to grieve for this culture together and its people’s hardships, and we’ll be able to lift of the students we have come to know and love.

So much has happened with them in the short two weeks we’ve known them. We’ve done everything from karaoke night, arcade games, and sharing more than questionable food, to visiting market, going to the zoo, playing endless games of mafia, and storying until we’re blue in the face. As hard as it is to believe, we’ve built relationships with people whose language is foreign to us, whose culture sometimes astounds us, and who live halfway around the world from our homes. Sunday we had another worship time and 7 of our students came. The entire things was orchestrated by Father, but they heard a short message on the wide and narrow paths and houses built on sand and rock, they sang their favorite songs Waves of Mercy and 10,000 Reasons, and then they heard the story of the crucifixion and resurrection. I was brought to tears as I storied about the beautiful love of our savior, and I was amazed at the whole-hearted response from the students. They followed along with emotion on their usually reserved faces, and a few times there were even exclamations at parts of the story. I was amazed to see Father at work through our team and I was blown away by his grace when I saw the students’ reaction to the greatest story in the Word.

And after all of that, we have to leave. We have to go back to school and hectic schedules and health problems and stressors. But we have the same Father to go back to as well. If he is Lord in Southeast Asia, he is Lord in our hometowns. He promises that His Words will not return to him empty, so we know that our teachings here have not fallen on deaf ears. We know that someday He will bring a harvest, even if we are not here to see it. He has taught us much, and we will take much home with us. Please continue to lift up our team as we prepare to leave and return to our ‘normal lives.’ Pray that we would not be overcome with sorrow as we experience our last meal of Lok Lat, our last time with the students, and our last time in the crowded market. And as I read Philippians, I am reminded of Paul’s overwhelming joy that answered to his sorrow and burden for the community. He was completely and utterly filled to the brim with joy because the Lord is faithful, and he will finish the work he has begun. For that we will praise him, and our tears will be tears of joy.

Feeding the Hungry

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We spent the last week teaching English with our university students. We teach them English and make connections to our favorite Stories and they teach us about their culture and beliefs. We’ve been on outings with them to Tuol Sleng and the Killing Fields, the Phnom Tamau Zoo, and a riverboat on the Mekong to celebrate the new year. We teach three classes every weekday, and we want to make friends with the students so we can tell them about things that are important to us. And they are wonderful. Our two guys (affectionately dubbed ‘the brothers’ by our M) have really bonded with a group of guys, and we continually lift up the students so that Father would prepare their hearts for his Message. Our guys and the guy students have done a lot together—icecream, karaoke, arcade games, and shared meals.

We have gone shopping with our girls, had icecream and ‘American fast food,’ and just had them over to our house to talk. Father has really blessed us, because we have all connected with students whose hearts have been undergoing preparation for the Message for a long time. The two girls I am closest to (we’ll call them Padma and Rita) have been over to our house many times already. I’ve started a story set with them, and they are both so hungry for the stories I’ve shared. Between the two of them, they have heard C2C, Jn. 13:1-14:14, creation of the spirit world (that story was in Khmenglish), Elijah and Ahab at Mt. Carmel, and Noah’s flood. With all of that, they’ve learned about sin and our need for the Son. They’ve learned that our Father is more powerful than anything they encounter, and that he does not desire them to live in fear. They have learned that the Father is holy and that we are not, and they have learned that all paths do not lead to heaven. They are so hungry for what they are learning. It blows my mind. We take for granted that we can pick up the Word and read any story any time. These girls know nothing about the stories I love, and if they had time, they would sit with me all day to learn. I love them with all of my heart, and I lift them up daily. I love the assurance that none of this is my doing. So many requests to the Father have been answered, and He has been hard at work preparing minds and hearts. He has called us here to feed the hungry; to bring good news to the broken, and to provide for the poor. Is. 55 is one of my favorite chapters in the Word, and I love seeing it work out in my daily life here.

Father has really brought our team together since we’ve been here too. That has been a blessing greater than my words can ever say. We have all become close friends, and we love spending time together. Often on short term trips friction within the team can be used by Satan to retard Father’s work, but we have not had to deal with that. Father has heard what we have lifted up and woven us together as a wonderful team. We learn from each other and balance each other’s weaknesses and strengths. We are functioning as the Body, and it is a beautiful thing. It almost brings me to tears when I think about it. And speaking of tears, a few were shed last night when we dropped Dr. Carlton off at the airport. He is leaving early and the team and I will be ‘on our own’ for the rest of our trip. I cried a tiny bit before I could rein it back in, but I cried for many reasons, and my heart still sings and hurts when I think about it. First, I cried because I’m a girl and I’m hormonal. Second, I cried because of the good friends who came to see him off, and because of those who didn’t. And I cried because of his legacy.

Dr. Carlton and his wife Mrs. Gloria have been an influential part of my life since they moved to OBU almost two years ago. I love them both so much, and I have learned so much from them. They are both hilarious, and one of the things they have taught me is how important it is to laugh as you work on the Field. Dr. Carlton has taught me to story, taught me to be an M, trained me and encouraged me in the classroom, and invested in my life just as he has with his other students. Mrs. Gloria and I have met (along with my roommates) to talk many times about life, love, and all things related to being an M or simply living a life full of the Son. I admire them so much, and they both have invested deeply in me, just as they have with countless others. On this trip I have gotten to see a little bit of their legacy, and I have been overwhelmed with their commitment and dedication to Father’s work and Father’s people.

During the whole trip I have worked alongside students developing a passion for overseas work that they wouldn’t have were it not for the Carltons. I have met Shepherd after Shepherd who was trained and taught by Dr. Carlton. I have seen people and the work of people who were trained to plant new communities of believers. And I have watched many tearful reunions and listened to many stories about the years of work the Carltons invested in this country and its people. I am so honored to be serving our Father alongside such heroes of our faith. And I don’t just say that to lift them up on a pedestal or praise them. They would be the first to deny that they had any hand in the exponential growth of believers—they would give all the credit to Father, where credit is due. Dr. Carlton shared an impromptu motto with us the day he left that I think is worth sharing with all of you: Life is fun. Have a blast. Tell people about Jsus.  As we have done on this short trip, the Carltons have done just that and fed the hungry for many years; I ask the Father to bless them for their work.

One of our goals for this trip is to establish a legacy of believing university students. We want to make connections and disciple so that when we leave, the students who are hungry for the Message can continue to meet with the Ms. I told you I have been storying with my girls, but this Sunday we got to model what a gathering of believers looks like. We asked Father earnestly to bring students to hear his Word and to see our joy in Him, and He did not disappoint. At the risk of sounding like an American, I’ll tell you that we were blown away by the numbers; but not just by the numbers. We had EIGHT students come to worship with us, and every one of them was engaged and hungry for the meat of the Word. It was INCREDIBLE! I was so amazed and blessed and overwhelmed by Father’s faithfulness!

We sang Every Move I Make (which we taught them in class on American Song day) and some other songs we love (and miss while we are here). I storied about Elijah, Ahab, and the showdown at Mt. Carmel to help correct the fault in their worldview that allows them to believe that they do not have to pick between deities. Father blessed my words, and everyone present had something to say about what they had learned from the story. After we sang some more, Kasey shared a short message on Paul’s conversion to teach that believing in Father is not just intellectual—that is brings about a change in people, and that no matter what our past holds, Father still wants us to turn to Him. I’m pretty sure I had a goofy grin on my face the entire time because I was so excited to see Father’s work in our student’s hearts! Please continue lifting them up with us. If you lift up Rita and Padma, Father will know who you’re talking about. 🙂

I have one more quick story about feeding the hungry and I’ll let you go on with your lives instead of melting your corneas in front of a computer screen. Today was not one of my favorite days. The girls and I had a wonderful brunch with the lady Ms, and then we met the boys in the market for some shopping and bartering before we went back home to rest. Today is an Independence Day for the Khmer people, so there were no classes. The first part of the day was great, but after that I wasn’t feeling very good, which compounded any emotions I had stored up. But as we rode back from supper in our tuktuk, my mood was radically changed because we were given another opportunity to feed the hungry. The streets are lined with beggars, many of whom are contracted and are forced to pay any money they receive to bosses, who dole out next-to-nothing to live on. We stopped at a stoplight and three precious little boys came up to our tuktuk with a hand out and a feather duster ready to clean anything for us. We had some leftover food from the restaurant and some fresh fruit we had just picked up, so we gave the boys something to eat. We also handed them each a little book in Khmer that told the Greatest Story Ever with comic book-like illustrations (taken from an incredible storying tool called The Action Bble, for any of you who’d care to know). They forgot about the food in their hands and immediately sat down and started flipping through the pages and following along the words with their fingers. It may not have been much, but at least they have the chance to hear the Good News from someone who cared enough to feed their bellies and souls.

Thorn in the Flesh

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I have known I was supposed to be on the field since I knew what the word ‘missionary’ meant. Sure I went through the archaeologist, astronaut, and the author phases, but whenever I thought for one second about what the Father wanted with my life, I was never in doubt. I became a believer at the tender young age of 5, and I went every summer to Nunny Cha-Ha GA camp. Those grounds will always have a special place in my heart. It was there that I first remember meeting a real, live M. I remember holding instruments from the place she worked, tasting traditional food, and seeing pictures of children not much older than myself, but very different in every other way. But what affected me the most were her stories. She told me about people who had never heard the stories I had been raised on. She told me they needed the Word that I had. And I was hooked. I was probably about 10 years old.

I don’t know when I first officially ‘surrendered to the call.’ To be honest, I barely even remember that experience. It was listening to the M at Nunny that has stuck with me for all these years. I’ve never had any serious questions about my career or future. I came to college with the same major I’ll graduate with in a few months, and I never once considered changing. I’ve never really had a crisis moment in my life about what I would do, how much it would pay, or whether or not I was following the career path Father would have picked for me. All things considered, it’s been pretty easy.

And on top of that, I have been incredibly blessed beyond anything I could ever ask or imagine. One of my favorite passages (aside from Eph 3:20-21) is Jer. 1:4-9. It talks about Father knowing Jeremiah’s destiny before he was even born. I claim those words in my own life. I have clearly been wired for work as an M. Father has given me talents and passions and dreams for which I cannot take any credit. He has perfectly fitted me for His work overseas. I LOVE children, and I only get tired of American ones (and even that takes a loooong time). I don’t mind getting dirty or grossed out; in fact, I often feel that the dirtier I am, the better. I’m very flexible and don’t handle time constraints well—I work best without schedules. I love to story too. I could sit with you all day long and tell you stories that would make sense in your culture and hold your attention. And the only time I’ve ever had trouble adjusting to a culture is when I return to my own. While it is difficult at times, on the whole, everything about being an M has come easily to me so far—until this year.

Paul gets pretty steamed up in 2 Cor. In chapters eleven and twelve he goes on a half-crazed rant about his credentials because people doubted his message on their validity. The first ten verses of chapter twelve are my favorite. Paul’s rant comes to a screeching halt and he takes a few deep breaths as he explains that all of his accomplishments, talents, and stories come to nothing when compared to the power of the Son. “Therefore,” he says, “I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that [his] power may rest on me.” And how did he come to this realization? By something he calls ‘a thorn in the flesh.’

I have already boasted about the work Father has done in me and the gifts he has given me, and now I will gladly boast about my own thorn in the flesh. Paul describes this anomaly as “a messenger of Satan, to torment me.” He never goes deeper than that, but whatever the case, he was plagued by some constant source of spiritual warfare. But what was meant for evil, the Father used for good, for after Paul asked for the thorn to be taken away, he is told, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Through Paul’s weakness, Father’s power was most visible and active. Paul’s thorn was nothing but glory to the Father.

And so is mine. I told you before that pursuing the life of an M had been easy for me until this year, and I meant it. After falling absolutely in love with the Lord’s work among the Roma people, I was led to organize a return trip that fell through a month before its departure this summer. After applying to a two-year internship with my denomination’s sending agency, I was turned away until I got my weight under control. And in the midst of all this, my health has been a constant thorn in my side. I had bronchitis for over nine months straight. I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS), which causes continually forming cysts, intense pain, weight gain, and anemia. These weaknesses have been my constant companions. Those of you who know me understand well just how weak they have made me. My health forced me to miss classes, I was prescribed a barrage of medicines, and I lived day by day. As the year progressed I began to realize that I was facing constant spiritual warfare because of my health and situations keeping me from the field.

I say none of this for pity or shock-value—I want you to see how superlatively good my Father has been. In the space of a year, he made what had been an easy road, difficult. After firmly convincing me that I was to follow him to the Field, He complicated things to keep me from becoming conceited. But more than that, He sought to bring himself glory. You see, in my weaknesses, the Father’s power is most clearly seen. Now it will be completely obvious to anyone who sees my journey to the field that I did not get there in my own power. I have no doubt in my mind that Father will fulfill his promises and take me overseas to join in his work, but now I can praise him all the more because I know that out of my thorn in the flesh, Father has grown something beautiful for his glory. And I can truly say with Paul, “That is why, for [His] sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

 

The Suffering Servant

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*Contains some graphic material

Many members of our team have already had their turns being sick or injured. We’ve got someone maybe coming down with strep throat, someone’s got painful blistered hives covering hands and feet, someone’s got a fractured foot, and all but one of us have run fever and had body aches. We try not to whine and to pick up and keep going. This kind of thing happens all the time overseas. But in the last couple of days we’ve had experiences that have put our small aches into perspective.

Today at a service we shared communion. As we all drank, we knew that we drank a cup of suffering. We heard a message about the Son sending out his followers from the upper room (Jn. 20:19-23). We cross-referenced a few stories to compare and expound, but the bulk of the message was on the idea that the Son’s words there are about incarnational ministry. We learned that he showed his followers the scars in his hands and side right before he said, “As my Father has sent me, so send I you.” He meant that they were to suffer as He had, perhaps even to the same extent. We heard that just as the Ark was YWH’s presence among his people, so was the Son in his turn and the Body of believers in ours. We are meant to suffer and to love, for it is only by that love that people will identify us for what we are. Only through that Love can they identify the Way, the Truth, and the Life that we have.

So while the suffering may not be comfortable, it is a way for us to show love. We do have stories worth suffering for. We should be glad to endure heat, sore throats, and nights of little sleep for the sake of sharing those stories. It demonstrates the Divine Presence we wish to be in our communities here, because only something that good would motivate and sustain us through whatever suffering comes our way.

The other experience that put our aches and pains into perspective was Tuol Sleng and the Killing Fields. This was a very difficult experience and I am still dealing with it in my own heart and mind, so I apologize if my writing seems scattered. I do not want to shock you with my stories. I want to make you weep. Weep for humanity and corruption and violence and mercilessness. Cry out to our Father like Habakkuk. Seek healing and wash the blood from your own hands. This issue is not political or ideological; it is about sin and humanity. I want to prepare you for what you are about to read so that you are not shocked by the words you will see: Interrogation. Torture. Whip. Beat. Knife. Noose. Electric wire. Infanticide. Genocide. Mass grave. Bloodstain. Merciless. Kill. Do not focus on the traumatic impact of those words. Run through the images and associations brought to your mind before you move on. I want you to identify with the heart of this issue.

On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge invaded Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. People fled from the city and it was entirely empty twenty-four hours later. For four and a half years the country lived in fear and the constant threat from the Khmer Rouge as the unchallenged ruling power. Pol Pot and his communist Khmer Rouge party attempted a cultural revolution of sorts. The educated, the resistance, and the religiously affiliated were caught, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered, sometimes in the name of ethnic cleansing or genetic planning, sometimes in the name of totalitarianism. But these deaths were many and senseless. Some estimate 3,000,000 deaths in those years, and 20,000 mass graves have been found throughout the country to substantiate those claims.

Tuol Sleng was a high school before the takeover, but it was converted into a prison and torture facility. Only twelve of the thousands who passed through its gates survived. Captors photographed each new prisoner and well-documented deaths and torture from whips, poison, severed limbs and digits, broken facial bones, and dunking prisoners into filthy water as they hung upside down from their ankles. All who came through were tortured and interrogated to produce coerced confessions before the victims were killed. There are still bloodstains on the floor and walls. Torture instrument lie where they were left. An artist who was spared death because of his skills was forced to paint graphic pictures of the torture methods, which hang hauntingly throughout the buildings. But worst of all, hundreds of pictures of victims look straight out of wide, terrified eyes from the walls.

And the Killing Fields were even worse. Sunken pits cover the landscape, their sheer volume an indication of the number of bodies since exhumed from the mass graves. A towering, ten-level stupa houses only a fraction of the intact skulls from some of the thousands of exhumed victims. I walked past a tree where babies were held by their ankles and beat against the tree just like someone would beat out a dirty rug. One mass grave had been full of people who’d been beheaded. Another had held only women and children, most of whom had been naked at the time of their death. We walked past a shed where chemicals were kept to sprinkle on the graves to cut the stench and finish killing those buried alive. There was another painting of a child flung up into the air with a bayoneted gun primed to catch him as he fell. And even after careful excavations, bones still remained in the ground. They, along with victims clothes, wash to the surface after rain. I could not avoid stepping on pieces of bone and rags of clothes and was deeply chilled.

What should our response be to such senseless violence? How could our Father let this happen? How could we, as humans, have the capacity for such unadulterated evil? One of the signs at the Killing Fields was captioned: “In the End Justice was Found for the Cambodian People,” but how can that ever happen? How can millions of broken families be repaid? How can there be justice in the face of such extreme evil? When many of the officials remain alive today, some are even still involved in the government?

I cannot give an answer. Lost people sin like lost people. Demons and evil spirits will stop at nothing to cause and incite death and destruction, violence and chaos. Does the Evil One win this battle? We believe that YWH is more powerful. That even in the darkness he is a great light. Habakkuk asked many of the same questions, and he was given an answer that was not easy. The prophets tell us that we have blood on our hands—blood of orphans, widows, runaways, aliens, and fatherless. Our Love should compel us to reach out to them and to minister to them in their distress. We are to drink the cup of suffering with them and weep as they weep. The Son wept. As he looked over Jerusalem in Lk. 19 he pondered the corruption, violence, and lostness of the city; he was overcome with tears of compassion. But he did not stop at tears. He ventured on into the city and set about restoration and redemption. That is the work we should be about. But we should begin by weeping. We cannot hide ourselves from the hurting. And we cannot hope to make a difference in their lives if we do not cry with them. So weep with me. And lift up the lost in the darkness of the past and the present.

I have a few more scattered thoughts to leave you with, and I apologize again for my verbosity. As I walked through the museum at the Killing fields I saw an agricultural tool used for slitting throats. I was reminded of our promise that one day, swords will be beaten into plowshares, but until then, the plowshares will be beaten into swords. We live in an age in which we wait for the coming of peace. It has not yet come fully on the earth. And even as I pondered these things in my heart, I remember another who had been cruelly beaten and tortured. As I saw paintings of striped backs being burned with salt water, I remembered the back of One whose stripes healed me—who is the balm for the healing of the nations. And as I thought on Him I understood his words of comfort. “I have felt this pain too. And it was not senseless; I did it for your sake… and for theirs.” He did. He suffered as much as the faces covering the walls of Tuol Sleng. His suffering brought glory to the Father, as should ours. Suffering gives us a change to deliver up true praise. This kind of praise does not come from a place of happiness and contentment. Anyone can praise in those situations. True praise comes from a place of suffering, when you praise in spirit and in truth because our Father is sovereign—because you know that he has a wonderful, beautiful plan that maybe you don’t understand, but you know it will be for His glory. So, in the words of Habakkuk:

Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines,

Though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food,

Though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls,

Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior.

The Sovereign Lord is my strength;

He makes my feet like the feet of a deer,

He enables me to go on the heights.