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.

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.

Ready, FIRE, aim...

I love that phrase.  It's pretty descriptive of some people's personalities - those enthusiastic types that want to dive into something without considering the cost or laying the ground-work.  We're not usually like that.  But with getting to work in Cameroon, I feel a little like that most days.

It was really brought to light today when I met a lady from the country of Ghana in West Africa.  I was asking her about where she lived in Ghana and what brought her to Lynchburg.  I then shared that my family and I are preparing to move to Cameroon.  She and her mother asked why we are going there.  I explained quickly the concept behind complementing Bible translation by studying the local arts and encouraging artists to use their arts for their worship expressions.  She said, "Oh.  You need to come to Ghana."  I mentioned that there are some folks with Wycliffe in nearby African countries and she again said, "Have some people come to Ghana."

Well that encouragement made me really want to get where we are going.  We're not looking to change locations and go to Ghana, but it made me want to get down to business in Cameroon ASAP.

But God's timing doesn't work that way!  And wise mission agencies don't throw people out onto the field without some solid training.  So it popped into my mind that this might be a good time to fill people in on our timeline for getting to Cameroon.  Here goes:

For the next seven months we are totally involved in our Partnership Development.  There are a lot of different perceptions of what that means.  But Wycliffe cultivates the attitude that in addition to raising our financial and prayer teams, we have the responsibility through our presentations to be spokespersons for the bibleless peoples of the world and their needs.  In fact we did a presentation tonight for our small group and it was a ton of fun.

Our next big step comes as 2012 begins.  We will be starting classes at the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics located at the International Linguistics Center in Dallas.  GIAL is the training institution that Wycliffe uses to prepare their people that will be in language positions - linguists, scripture use specialists, literacy specialists, arts specialists and some others.  Our time at GIAL will be one year.  We both have to take classes in Cultural Anthropology, Second Language/Culture Acquisition, and Christianity Across Cultures.  Chris has to take several more, including two basic linguistics classes, as well as Audio and Video Techniques for fieldworkers, Scripture Use Methods, Research Methods, and a few classes focusing on how to analyze non-western art forms.

The beginning of 2013 will bring another change of scenery.  Language school.  The national language across most of Cameroon is French (a small portion of the country officially functions in English).  To live in the capital city of Yaounde, we need to speak French so that we can be functional in daily life.  We will be in Europe for the language school phase.  The length of language school will hopefully be short.  We want to work with as much self-study material as we can between now and then to shorten our time in Europe.  By the way, some of you may be thinking, "If French is the national language, why does the Bible need to be translated into the 270+ languages of Cameroon?"  That's a subject for another day, but we'll cover it soon.

After we achieve a level of functional competence in French, then it's on to Cameroon.

I know two things about all of this.  1)  It's going to happen faster than I think it will now.  2)  The preparation will be worth it.  I once heard the president of another mission agency say [paraphrased], "It's expensive to send people to the field.  But it's also expensive to bring them home, so we want to have them well prepared so that they last."  That sounds wise to me.

So while some days our hearts are in Cameroon, we have the two immediate jobs of building our team and informing the body of believers here at home about the bibleless peoples in the world.

Prayer

Prayer...it's a huge subject - filled with enormous implications.  Books scream about its power, a new Sunday School class is beginning at our church about it, but what is it and why is it important?  How does it relate to our work?

Prayer is talking to God.  If you think about that, it will blow your mind.  The creator of the universe desires a relationship with each of us.  He sent Jesus to pay for our sins so that the line of communication would be open.  He tells us to forgive so that nothing will hinder our prayers.  And Jesus advocates for us; the Holy Spirit guides us in our prayers.  This is crazy good stuff!

Why don't we do it all the time?  Is it too easy?  Are we too sure of our own abilities and don't see the need for God?  Certainly sin clouds our view of its goodness.  And our comfort zone blinds us to its necessity.  Chris often shares that the big takeaway from his first overseas trip was that after twenty-two years as a believer, he didn't know how to pray until he was out of his bubble of cultural security.

God loves for us to pray and be a part of the miracles he is performing:  loaves and fishes or life and death; money for taxes or victory over the powers of evil; the Word of God into the language of all people.

We are asking for your prayer support.  We know that nothing we try to accomplish will amount to anything without prayer.  Will you pray for us and the people of Central Africa?  Will you do it weekly?  Monthly? Daily?  Will you write it on you calendar?  We are going to Africa.  But we will not succeed without good prayer backing.  Certainly the enemy wants us ineffective and fearful.  We need prayer to beat that back.

We plan to create and post a calendar of those partners that will pray for our work on a specific day of the month.  Let us know what day we can pencil you in for.  We can't wait to see what wonders God will produce through that.

While you consider praying, here is a link to Wycliffe's prayer department.  Yes, a prayer department.  Wycliffe takes prayer so seriously that we have a section of the offices in Florida dedicated to administering prayer partnership, primarily for the bibleless peoples of the world.  We have been able to hear several great stories about the power of prayer - and perseverance in prayer - and how it can affect Bible translation.  This video contains a compelling story of how praying for a particular Bibleless people group led a translator to her particular mission field.  And we love this picture from the Wycliffe Discovery Center.  It is Cameron Townsend, Wycliffe's founder, with one of his many notorious quotes.

Photo Credit to Tucker and/or Meredith Boone

Our first newsletters went out today along with an invitation to partner with us.  Will you pray over them and their fruitfulness as well?  Thank you!

Blessings,
The Gasslers

The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.
Numbers 6:24-26

In the personal news department, we are happy to have had a weekend camping with Noah's Cub Scout Pack in the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area.  It was great to enjoy some time together in the beauty of God's  premier creation called Virginia!

By faith, not by sight...

So yesterday as I was going to count the offering with my friend Tim after church, we found this trillion dollar bill in the basket.

So my first reaction is, "Wouldn't that be cool if that was real?  We wouldn't have to worry about the church budget anymore, we could fund all of the missionaries in the world...no more worries!"

But then the truth of the matter came clearly back into my mind.  In fact, it was easy for that truth to come to the fore because our Pastor, Tre Smith, had just preached a great sermon on the subject of agendas...ours vs. God's.  One of the features that he drew out from the passage of Luke 24, where there are two disciples of Jesus walking to Emmaus just days after the crucifixion, was that they were a bit down because Jesus had failed to be the redeemer that they expected.  What they expected was a conquering hero that would vanquish the enemy they perceived as their greatest (the Romans) and restore the glory of Israel.  But God's agenda was different.  He vanquished the enemy that was the far greater threat, but that they didn't understand - sin - through his heinous death...a death without dignity.

So this trillion dollar bill reminded me that as we look to our ministry, it might be easy to hope that all would be taken care of in an instant and what we think our biggest challenge is (money) would be set to rest.  But then we wouldn't do a very good job of living by faith.  God is putting us in a position where we have to live by faith, not by sight.  We have to be taught to depend on him.  We have to learn that we cannot just will that our desires be glorifying to God.  We must instead learn to be used by God in our broken, fragile state so that he obtains his glory.  He is working on the real biggest challenge that we have - our lack of faith.

This also meshes well with a principle laid out a few weeks ago by one of our instructors at Wycliffe, Diana Stuhr.  The principle is that God is having us to live by faith so that he can be glorified by letting us in on a miracle here and there.  Why did God let the thousands on the hillside be fed by a little boy's fishes and loaves?  Certainly God could have called down any manner of provision - he had for years in the desert centuries before in the form of manna.  But he decided to let his disciples and the little boy in on a miracle in order to build their faith.  Why did Jesus have Peter go fishing in order to find the drachmas necessary for the temple tax in a fishes mouth?  He could have made that money appear in any manner of ways.  But he did it the way he did to let Peter in on a miracle and to build his faith.  Why are we called to share the word of God, so that by hearing people might believe?  Surely God could appear in a vision and explain it to others much more clearly.  But he wants us in on the miracle of saving faith.

And so it is with us as we begin our journey to serving the Lord.  Our raising of funds, fielding of prayer partners and moving to Africa is his way of letting us all in on a miracle - to build our faith.

Ethnomusicolowhatski?

Ethnomusicology.  It's a big scary word that sounds tragically academic.  But it's pretty fun stuff.  Those 15 letters simply mean the study of ethnic music.  And that's what we're going to be doing on the mission field in Cameroon.

It dovetails nicely with the idea of Bible translation.  Translating the Bible into peoples' mother tongues is based on some simple concepts.  First, that the multitude of languages and cultures is a gift from God.  These are to be celebrated and enjoyed rather than squashed, forbidden or marginalized.  Second, it's a basic fact that people are able to understand the deepest levels of communication in their heart language or mother tongue.

Well, what we seek to do in Central Africa builds on those two basic concepts, but with the artistic twist.  First, that culture and art forms are a gift from God.  They are to be celebrated and enjoyed.  Second, that people are going to express their deepest thoughts best through their own familiar art forms.  In short, our goal is to spark the creation of new worship expressions using the artistic styles that they are most familiar with. So ideally, as scripture is translated into a language, we might come alongside and encourage musicians, dancers, actors, whomever, to use their traditional arts to express the contents of scripture as well as express their worship to God.

The first link below is to a short video that SIL, an affiliate of Wycliffe, has put out explaining some of the work that we will do.

Arts Consultant Video

And this link is to a great story that explains what the results can be when the arts are used to enhance Bible translation.

Canela Music

In fact, there is a great book out there filled with this and other short vignettes from around the world called All the World Is Singing.  We highly recommend it.  It is available from the author and other places, including Amazon - although last time I tried to get it from Amazon it was backordered.

Thanks for reading.  Make sure to leave us any questions you might have in a comment, or e-mail us - clgassler@gmail.com

Easter 2011

Today we begin our blog.  Our intention with this is to allow folks to participate with us on the journey we are just beginning with Wycliffe Bible Translators.  Actually, it's not necessarily the beginning...just the formal beginning.  Our progress to this point has been years in the making.  But that's a story we'll recap later.

Two weeks ago, we officially became missionaries with Wycliffe.  It was simultaneously exciting, a relief, and scary.  So all of this "official" stuff happened during the first two weeks of April while we were in Orlando, FL, at Wycliffe USA's headquarters.  We were in a class called Equip, becoming oriented with the business side of things and getting a kick-start into our partnership development phase.  It was a great time of getting to know the ins and outs of a long-standing, well run mission organization, as well as learning with our fellow classmates how much we had in common in our calling to missions.  We became very close with our classmates, all newbies with Wycliffe like us, as we all sorted out the overwhelming amount of information and began a trek into the unknown of what the Lord has for us.  The one thing we do know - he is and will be faithful.  What that will look like....that's the unknown!  Makes it kind of fun, I think, but a little scary as well.  It's kind of like being on a roller coaster.  You know everyone that day, that week, even that year, has ridden that ride in complete safety - but you still have butterflies in your stomach while you're waiting in line...it's kind of like that right now.

Below is a little pictorial tour of our two weeks at Equip training.

We had daily worship.

We did all of our new employee stuff.

We practiced a lot of public speaking.  By the way, notice the cool John Piper quote on the wall behind Lori.

We heard from Wycliffe USA's president and his wife.

We had to take the pictures that go on those cool prayer cards on your fridge.  This one was not chosen for said card.

The kids had school-work to do.

We got to see and hear a lot about the history of Wycliffe.  This was the first translation done by Wycliffe's founder, Cameron Townsend.

We practiced making phone calls to churches.

And we did some more public speaking...

And we ate...a lot.

And the kids swam...a lot.

This was our class, our instructors, all of our kids, and their teachers.  Fun times.