Opening my Eyes

Do you ever have moments when much like Saul with the scales (Acts 9) you feel like you are finally able to see something? And once you see that something, it seems so glaringly obvious?
Halfway into my India trip, I found myself in the northern state of Bihar to a place called Purnia. Incidentally and completely unrelated, a few firsts happened to me while I was there:
1. I lived at a girls’ orphanage
2. I got my first mosquito bite of the trip (which is actually not that small a feat as I’d been in India for 2 weeks already!)
3. I saw my first Indian tea plantation (each row of leaves was the same height which may not sound like much but when you see it, you can’t help but being awed by the sight and think about all the work that must go into growing tea)
4. I met a guy who went to medical school with my cousin, Thomas bhiaya
I think that was all my firsts in Purnia. Oh! Wait… I also spent some time in my first Indian police station.
But back to my story.
My presence in Purnia was solely for the purpose of chatting up all the people involved in a storying workshop being held there. What you ask is storying? Well, it’s a big part of the orality movement that is currently underway in ministry and encompasses taking the Bible orally to the world’s least reached people, in particular the non-literate population, in a culturally appropriate way. It’s actually an incredibly fascinating concept and project. If you want to learn more about it, check out http://www.onestory.org/Default.aspx.
But back to my story… I arrived in Purnia with the workshop well under way and into its final week. Now you might not know this about me but I do not speak a lick of Hindi. Well, it turned out that most of the mother tongue translators (MTTs) do not speak a lick of English. So communication with them wound up being mostly smiling and hearing their stories through interpretations (thanks Matthew and Sarosh!). I also met some of the foreigner missionaries (mostly US although there were some Australians as well) that led the seminar and work with the MTTs to put together the stories to share in their communities. Now, I was only there for a very short time but one thing became evident very quickly. Telling a Bible story? Not an easy task. In fact, it’s rather hard!
I think that might sound weird to people (I know before I got there I didn’t really think sharing stories from the Bible would be all that difficult) but imagine it like this. You are a believer but most of the other people in your language group, say less than 2%, have never even heard of Jesus. And you now have to share the Bible with them. Let’s not forget that you weren’t someone who grew up going to Sunday school and church but you came to know Jesus through a missionary who visited your village when you were 24. Oh yeah, and there’s no Bible in your language so even through Hindi isn’t your mother tongue, the only Bible available is in Hindu so you do your best. Now, think about telling the story of creation in an engaging interesting way to people who think of Jesus as a foreigner’s God.
I don’t know that I explained that well but I hope you can see how it can be an arduous process, albeit a labor of love (God’s love). Given that the scenario I painted isn’t so far off for many language groups in that part of India, putting together stories means the local MTTs need to share their traditional stories with the foreigners helping them, they then listen to Bible stories and then together craft Bible stories for their communities. Now, I have done a huge injustice in describing the process. I didn’t talk at all about story selection, culturally adapting stories, translating and back-translating the stories so they can be checked for Biblical accuracy, finding a theme to link the stories to the needs of a particular people group, creating songs, or the hundreds of other details and steps that go into this work. So…let me just apologize for that now and say that the workshop I was at was the third in a series and the whole process of crafting approximately 25 Bible stories started before July 2008 and is still underway today.
Most of the people, both foreigners and Indian nationals, started their days well before six o’clock and ended their days around ten o’clock. Mind you, it’s India so on top of all the work, you’re also constantly battling power outages, having to put up with electricity surges frying computer strips, trying to stretch every rupee to unrealistic levels to make it to the end of the project, and of course, trying to swat away the bugs, bugs and more bugs that are everywhere (my room had termites and boy, are they loud. Who knew?).
In spite of that, after spending only a few days I could see why they all did it. When MTTs are trained to tell stories, they are also trained on engaging the people in the story. One of the MTTs was telling the story of creation to a group of rural, more than likely illiterate people in Angika, one of the languages of the region. When he reached the part about the creation of Eve, one of the women went very still and when question time came, she jumped up and demanded that he share that part again. I think the translator repeated himself a few times until the woman sat down, a look of profound joy and awe upon her face. Afterwards, she stopped to talk to him, asking him to confirm that she had understood what he had shared. He assured her she had. She got so excited. You see, she didn’t realize that she was created to be a helpmate for her husband. She didn’t realize that her birth wasn’t an accident. She never knew that, in spite of what she had been raised to believe, she had value in her family. She mattered. And even though she had heard the story before in Hindi, hearing it in her mother tongue, she understood it for the first time. She realized that God wasn’t a far off God or a statue sitting in her father’s house, but He is her personal God. She understood that He is her father and just like Eve, she too was created with a purpose and out of the incredible love our Creator God has for each of His children.
My fish scale moment. I know that God created me for a purpose. But how often do I get excited about it? I have at least four Bibles in my room in Florida and even more in New Jersey; I've heard Bible stories my whole life. How often do I read it? When was the last time I simply listened to a Bible story without needing amazing sound effects or graphics to make it interesting to me? How often do I thank God that I am so blessed that I can read His Word in a language that I am 100% comfortable with - my heart language?. I’ve heard the story of creation hundreds of time. When was the last time I stopped to recognize my place in it?
I take God’s Word for granted. The thought of not having access to it never crosses my mind. The thought of not being able to hear sermons, read a Bible, or the thousands of Christian books in English are alien concepts to me. My mind can’t even fathom such a reality.

And yet experiencing this woman’s joy made me realize how precious all these things are.
There are millions of people in the world who do not have a Bible or have ever heard about Jesus in their heart language. What do you think about that? And perhaps more importantly, what are we going to do about that?

as close as I'm going to get...

Hi from the Kenya Kenyatta Airport!

My computer died about five days after my arrival in Ghana so right now, I am at an internet cafe at the airport paying $2/15 minutes to be online. It is so worth it.
So... in October 2008, I spent 1-2 weeks in Nairobi, Kenya and I absolutely fell in love with the city and its people. I became so enamored in fact that since then, I have been trying to find a way back to Kenya.

I thought I'd finally done just that when I finagled my way onto a project that was supposed to start at the end of October and would allow me to spend 2-3 weeks in Kenya (dreams of a hot air balloon ride over the Masai Mara were pretty much a constant for most of my September). Two days before I was to leave however, I wound up going to Texas.

Yeah... so not the same thing (which isn't to say Texas is not without it's charms. Yeah, barbecue!).
But now, I have finally made it back!

Yes, It is just the airport.

And it is a ridiculously early hour in the morning and I am barely awake after flying through a whole night. And on some level, I suppose airports don't really count as being in the country.

But... I've been praying for a year to get back to Kenya, Now I have.
If nothing else, it really does confirm for me that God has a rather charming sense of the ridiculous.

Happy Birthday Bennett

Traveling is an incredible opportunity. There are moments when I sit back and think... seriously, am I really in [insert name of country]? But the downside of traveling is that I miss a lot of events that I wish I didn't, like a birthday party for a pretty spectacular little boy named Bennett who turns two today.

So Bennett, ten years from now ('cause you can't read yet) when you are going through the albums and wonder why I am not in any of the pictures, you should know that even through I wasn't there, I was sitting in a hotel room in Ghana praying that God would grow you in amazing ways and thanking Jesus that you are in my life.

Happy Birthday Bice! I hope you have a day filled with cars that all belong to you!

I love you lots and lots and lots (way more than Rob for example) and can't wait to see you in a few months.

Exploring Budapest

Most people who know me would agree (I think) that I am not really the adventurous sort. I'm more of a “read a good book” kind of girl. Yesterday, however, I decided to step out of my comfort zone and leave Romania a day early to spend a night exploring Budapest. Everyone at the ministry has been telling me how beautiful a city Budapest is so... curiosity piqued, I decided to give being a tourist on my own a try.

Since I only had one evening in the city, I wound up visiting a castle and an opera house (Beethoven was there! Not today ‘cause he’s dead but he used to be there once upon a time, long, long ago) within walking distance of my hotel. It turns out, everyone was right. Budapest is a beautiful city. It has that old provincial European look to it that makes you think that you've stepped out of your real life and into a fairy tale.
The castle I visited is situated at the top of a hill. Looking down from atop it, I had a perfect view of the chain bridges that cross the Danube River and connect one part of the city to the other. I don’t have words to do the scene justice. Except to say- in spite of the hundreds of people around- there is a sense of peace there that I suspect is a reflective glimmer of what Adam and Eve must have had in the garden.

It took me a while to notice that of the many, many tourists there, I was the only one that was alone. I got to thinking that I spend a lot of time alone. I know part of that is my fault; I am well aware that I am the opposite of social in Florida. But part of it is my current lifestyle of living out of my suitcase 75%- 85% of the year.

As I stood there, “Sea of Faces” by Kutless came up on my iPod and I identified so acutely with the first verse:

I see the city lights all around me
Everyone's obscure
Ten million people each with their problems
Why should anyone care?

All of a sudden, my aloneness was this palpable covering over me. And I started feeling a little sad and really lonely. Then the next verse came on:

And in Your eyes I can see

I am not just a man, vastly lost in this world
Lost in a Sea of Faces

And I realized that Jesus knew exactly what I was feeling. What Jesus did on the cross was incredible but it struck me, in a way that it never has before, just what Jesus went through all the years he had to live on earth. Do you ever think how alone Christ must have felt all the time he was on earth? And how, in some ways, that must have been so much harder for Him than dying? The people closest to Him- His disciples, His mother- they didn't really see who He was until He rose from the dead. 33 years and even surrounded by the crowds, he must have felt so isolated from everyone.

Jesus lived with God. He was with the Father. And who, after being there, would want to leave? Yet Jesus separated himself for us... for me. As I stood at the castle looking down at this incredible view of God's creation and man's architecture, it struck me that Jesus has experienced so much worse than everything I was feeling at that moment. He knew what it is to be alone. He knew it for 33 years instead of an hour or two on top of a hill in a city that I know I am blessed to be able to experience.

Being able to make the connection between how I felt and what Jesus had conquered made me remember that with Christ, I am never alone. Jesus understands me in a way that no human companion does or ever will. This truth hit me so powerfully in fact that I got my two legs walking down the hill and across the chain bridge to explore what just might be one of my favorite cities in the world.

I don't think you can ever reiterate this too much- God is so faithful. He is just so good in his faithfulness. It’s funny how much my perspective on ministry has changed in one year. When I started at Book of Hope, I knew that God would do things in my life but honestly, that was not what I really, really thought. Mostly, I thought I would be working for God. I thought that I would be changing lives. More and more I experience the truth that everything I do and anything I could do does not compare to what God does. It’s just so awe-inspiring, isn’t it?

Wherever you are reading this, I hope you know that God is doing something great in your life and growing you in miraculous ways.

Psalm 46:10: “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”

What not to say

This past year, I have heard a lot of never say never stories.
I heard the first in the Philippines from an amazing young woman. Do you ever meet someone and before you even get a chance to say hello, you think of course we're going to be friends? Well that is my friend Joy and this is her story.
A few years ago, Joy worked in youth ministry at her church. One day she received a phone call from a young man who wanted to see if her church would be interested in partnering with his ministry to deliver God's word to the young people of her community. She was happy to say yes and before she knew it, she and this young man (who also happened to have the Jesus glow), wound up communicating quite a lot. While for him their time working together was "I think I found my wife," for her, it was "Lord, am I ever going to get married? And why does this guy come around so much?" He asked her for permission to court her. She said, "Never. I'll always think of you as a friend, not a husband."
Being a very smart young man, he was naturally disappointed but had the good sense to leave it with the Lord. And the God of miracles answered his prayers. A few years later, I had the pleasure of sitting down to dinner with them to hear the story of their wedding day (no, I did not eat balut because I am anti-chick abortion).
Shortly after that, I heard a similar story in Indonesia. A young lady with a heart for the Lord decided to go to seminary where she met a brilliant young teacher who recognized his Eve almost immediately. Mutual friends let her know of his interest. She said, “Never! Why, a cow would have to turn into a horse before I'd marry him.” A year later, she married the young professor. Her friends, kind enough to want her to be a woman of her word on her wedding day, decorated the wedding hall with a banner of a cow turning into a horse.
Well, my own version of the story is not quite so exciting but I do hope the hand of the Lord is in it as well.
I said I’d never start a blog.
And now here you are reading.