Sunday, June 12, 2011

Bit by Bit


Miracles happen every day.  Most of the time we're too busy to notice.  This past week, we got to be a part of some of them, took notice and were downright floored.  Thank you for being part of what God is doing!

One day last week, I (Lori) was feeling a little insecure about all of this moving to Africa stuff.  It was hot...the kind of hot that we jokingly call 'Africa hot.'  All I wanted was to do was to stay inside and avoid the heat.  And my mind was working overtime of the details that still need to be dealt with before our January move.  I felt like crying.



At Bible study the next morning and at the park with a friend, I asked for prayers over progress with our financial partnership, about getting a self-study language program and about home-schooling stuff.  I know God has my back, but at the time I didn't feel it and asked for prayer from friends.

Then some little miracles happened.

That evening I opened an e-mail from a good friend.  As I read it, I really cried.  There it was.  God answered it all in one letter - just at the right time to give me a much needed hug from Him.  Thank you God!  Thank you Jessica for being his hands and feet!  And a few days later came another answer to prayer from other friends with a huge help toward our outgoing expenses.

But wait!  That’s not all!  On Tuesday, I asked my friend Carol to pray for our prayer calendar.  It was about 1/3 of the way full and we desire to be covered with prayer every day.  Before the day was through, seven more days were covered!  WOW!  The note on Facebook was 2 weeks old, but suddenly there were lots of responses.  With God, all things are possible.  Thank you God for listening to the prayers of your people.  And thank you Carol for asking for specifics - focused prayer is so very effective.

The Prayer Calendar Project, by the way, is something that we heard about from one of our colleagues at Wycliffe.  It is a tangible way to have people get involved with the prayer that needs to be behind the ministry.  We have decided to seek prayer warriors that would like to volunteer for either a specific date of each month or a particular day of each week to keep us in prayer.  And we will use this tool as a way to focus our prayer life by praying for those partners on their chosen days.  It has already been a good tool to develop good prayer habits for us.  If there is a particular date or day that you would like (even if it's a duplicate...the more the merrier), let us know either on Facebook or by e-mailing us.

Each letter of financial or prayer support, whether it be snail mail or e-mail, is a bit of the extraordinary.  Each one is a small miracle.  Thank you all for praying, supporting and being a part of watching miracles happen.



Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Step by Step

Yesterday I was talking to my mom on the phone and we were talking about this path toward missions being involved with ethnomusicology.  She chuckled and said, "Ten years ago would you have ever imagined?"  Nope!  It hadn't crossed my mind.

Way back when, I was intent on being a trombonist and college professor.  Years of school (with Lori loyally supporting) and loads of interesting experiences and people made that vision become a reality.  What came to pass after that is where our story toward missions gets interesting.



Sometimes the saddest events in your life are the beginning of something wonderful.  In the Fall of 2004, our son David was stillborn.  In spite of all of the grief, we grew tremendously in our faith and began attending Redeemer PCA.  We had renewed desire to understand theology, engage and invest ourselves in a church family, and deepen our relationship with the Lord.  There was something electric about our spiritual growth that we can now look back on and see as preparation for our journey ahead.

In the summer of 2006, I was a bit frustrated with the academic world.  While enjoying teaching, the other junk that goes along with the job was not so fun/fulfilling.  A meeting with our pastor, Mike Sharrett, was arranged.  It's a wonderful thing to have a pastor that used to be a career counselor at UVA before going to seminary!  In those discussions, I shared that I really felt like I wanted to move toward full-time ministry.  A range of possibilities from going to seminary and being a pastor to the mission field was brought up.  Nothing tangible came out of those talks, but the wheels began turning.

Another year of contemplating how to steer toward ministry and searching for how we could be used went by.  Then, an opportunity sprang up to travel to Africa with a group from Redeemer in the summer of 2008 to work in a community center presenting English conversation classes.  Lori encouraged me to go and get the idea being involved with overseas ministry out of my system.  It didn't work out the way she planned!

I immediately looked at the world differently and saw what my faith meant.  Prayer became very different in my life.  I had been changed to the core through the experience.

The idea of ministry became more real and the focus shifted toward cross-cultural missions.  I had enjoyed being in a different culture so much and adapted easily enough that I really felt a call to use these gifts in ministry.  Lori was skeptical and wisely so.  But we attended a Vision Weekend at a mission organization and learned a lot about what "calling" was.  Lori also felt relieved to know that if she didn't feel called the way I did, it was a sign that we shouldn't proceed.

The next summer, we again sent a group from Redeemer overseas to teach English in the same place and Lori came along this time.  It was good for us to see each other in the cross-cultural situation and how we handled it.  But still Lori had no burning sense of call.  While I was willing to cash in all of the education and experience that I had in music to do just about anything on the mission field, Lori saw that as a waste of gifting.  In hindsight, she was again quite wise.



But then...when looking around on the Wycliffe website one evening, I found some links that led to the Ethnomusicology/Arts group.  I read through those and watched the videos.  Something started to click.  Lori came to the basement and looked at it also.  She recognized quickly that this was something that she might feel called to - something that used the many abilities and gifts that we have.



We began a dialogue with Wycliffe and found out more.  Sometimes as you gather more information about something, the luster wears off.  That has not been true in this case.  The more we have learned, the more motivated we get.  In May of 2010, we visited the International Linguistics Center in Dallas to learn as much as we could about the use of Ethnomusicology in missions and came away very much impressed and inspired.  We then felt truly called together to this work and have really embraced the vision of Wycliffe and its work.

As I mentioned in our first blog entry, the formal beginning to our journey was recent.  But the development of our calling to this venture is a long story deep into the past.  God's timing is so interesting, but we never really understand it until we can look over our shoulder and understand how the confluence of events shape us and prepare us.