I´m a Sheep (7/4/09 - 7/9/09)

Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised:

While the work in Quchumi has been tremendously discouraging for our men´s team lately, we are so grateful for the way the LORD has encouraged us recently. He has used some recent happenings in that community to draw in more prayer partners and, in particular, He has kept reminding us of Isaiah 55:10-11:

"As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it."

Praise Him for how He is faithful and true to His Word and for how He has the saints interceding for this tiny Quechua village!

Prayer Necessities for the Skimmers:

1. Please continue to pray for those in Quchumi. The people there have been taking advantage of our guys in only wanting to use them for their work in the fields, rather than listening to the far more precious gift of God´s Word that they have to offer. Pray that God would prick the people´s hearts with the Word that they already have and that they would hunger and thirst for more of Him.

2. Please be in prayer for us as we begin Quechua language school next week. Pray that we would be diligent to study and to practice the language, even though it might be difficult.

3. Pray that God would give us opportunities to make disciples here in Cochabamba over the next six week and that we would recognize and take advantage of those opportunities.

Inquiring Minds Wanna Know (Bonus for the Readers):

On the day before our hike into the camp, Jeremy presented us with a surprise: Two sheep (pictured here). There was one male and one female, and we were to herd them the ten miles to camp with us.

Heh. Yeah, our boss has a really sick sense of humor.

We named the sheep Jay (after our boss, whom we thoroughly despised by that point :)) and Bella (after Jezebel in the Old Testament). Believe me, they deserved those names. :)

When we first saw Jay and Bella, I thought of this passage:

"The man who enters by the gate is the shepherd of his sheep. The watchman opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger´s voice." (John 10:2-5)

I envisioned us leading the sheep down the highway, calling them by their names and gently coaxing them down the road to the safety of our camp. Of course, they wouldn´t follow a stranger, but they wuld certainly follow us because we were their shepherdesses.

That thinking lasted for maybe fifteen minutes. After that, all bets were off.

See, those sheep wouldn´t obey us for anything. We were walking beside a busy highway with any number of vehicles going at high speeds but, if we let go of them, they immediately wandered into the street. We couldn´t get them to follow us, no matter what we tried. I finally resorted to dragging Jay by the rope around his neck and, honestly, by that point, I didn´t really care if I killed him. I just figured, if that happened, we´d have good meat to eat for our first few days in the jungle.

Even once we arrived in our camp, the sheep were the constant banes of our existence. They would bleat if it rained, but they would fight us if we tried to move them to a dry place. They would bleat if they exhausted their food supply in a spot, but they would try to go in the opposite direction if we tried to lead them to a place with lush pasture. They would bleat if they got tangled in the ropes with which they were tied to the jungle trees, but they would try to run from us when we approached to try to free them, only succeeding in entangling themselves further.

I´ve heard all my life about just how stupid sheep are, and I suppose that´s true. But the part that frustrated me the most was not their stupidity. It was their willful rebellion and complete lack of willingness to obey, even though we were trying to do what was best for them.

I´m sure the metaphor here is not lost on you. It wasn´t lost on me either. I fully understood that I was just like those sheep. I just didn´t like it.

I don´t like that I whine and complain when my situation isn´t to my liking, yet I fight the LORD when He tries to change it. I don´t like that I don´t trust the One Who laid down His life for this stupid sheep to lead me to green pastures. I don´t like that I get tangled and, rather than relying on Him to free me, I get myself even more bound up because I try to get myself out. And these are lessons I´m still learning daily, even though Jay and Bella are no longer with me.

But what strikes me even more than how much of a sheep I am is the incredible patience of my Shepherd.

After fifteen minutes with them, I was dragging our sheep through the jungle, not caring whether they lived or died. And, though I helped care for them during the next two months, I did it out of obligation rather than any genuine concern for them.

But I´m so thankful that Jesus is an infinitely better Shepherd than I will ever be. His Word says this:

"I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand is not the shepherd who owns the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the

sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it. The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep. I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me - just as the Father knows me and I know the Father - and I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd." (John 10:11-16)

The LORD deals not only with my rebellion and murmuring and constant lack of appreciation for Him but with that of all of His sheep. Yet He loved us enough to lay down His own spotless life for those same stupid sheep.

Jeremy gave me a very fitting nickname that is preserved for life on the back of my Xtreme Team jersey: "I´m a Sheep." But Jesus gave Himself and even more important nickname that is forever immortalized in His Word.

The Good Shepherd.

Isn´t it good to be His sheep?

Bearing One Another's Burdens (6/27/09 - 7/3/09)

Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised:

October 15 was my first anniversary of my arrival on the mission field. God has been so faithful through the victories and trials of the last year, and I can't wait to see how He will continue to be so during the years to come.

Misty and Amy will be able to attend Quechua language school for six full weeks, thanks to the generous support of several of you. We are all so grateful for your generosity in these uncertain economic times!

The girls just arrived back in Sucre today after spending the last two weeks with other believers in a Quechua community about five hours away. (They are pictured here in their full Quechua attire, along with Leah, me, and our dear friend, Daria.) They had a difficult but fulfilling time as they spent time encouraging the body of believers and learning how to do many things they had never done before. We are so glad to have them safely back with us!


Prayer Necessities for the Skimmers:

1. All four of us will travel to the city of Cochabamba next week and begin language classes on October 26. Please pray that we would be able to learn Quechua quickly and efficiently and that we would be diligent to study and to practice the language.

2. Please pray for our upcoming Xtreme Team training, which begins November 22. This training is to teach Latin and North American missionaries how to reach some of the most unreached peoples in South America with the Gospel. Pray for wisdom for the trainers and for a willingness to learn on the part of the students.

3. Pray for the Lord to give us opportunities to make disciples during our time in Cochabamba. Pray that we would be able to share the Gospel with those who have not heard and to spur those who are believers into a deeper relationship with Him. Also, please pray that we would be able to recruit some of those believers into His service among the Quechua in our province.

Inquiring Minds Wanna Know (Bonus for the Readers):

"Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ." (Gal. 6:2)

One of the purposes of our training - and probably the main purpose - was to teach us how to truly be the body of Christ. In order to plant churches that look like the New Testament model, we first have to learn how to be that ourselves.

It's funny that I thought I already knew what that meant. Boy, how much I still had to learn!

From the start, we were learning how to be unified. I mean, the Bible says we're supposed to do that, right? In fact, Jesus Himself prayed this for all of His future disciples:

"'My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.'" (Jn. 17:20-23)

OK, so we're supposed to "be brought to complete unity." But what does that even mean? Well, thankfully for us, Jesus defines it for us. It means to "be one." He uses that phrase twice in this passage.

The Bible never uses words lightly. It always means what it says.

And it says we are to be ONE.

Just think about that for a minute. No, really, stop RIGHT NOW, and think about it. What does that mean? What it doesn't mean is living our lives separately as a group of individuals who may spend a little time together every so often but, in reality, just look out for ourselves. What it does mean involves doing whatever it takes to preserve what we have within the church... regardless of how much sacrifice is involved. It means ensuring that your brothers and sisters stay on the right path, confronting them with their sin even if it means offending them and listening and accepting when they confront you with yours. It means giving up the time that you wanted for yourself in order to encourage and comfort a hurting brother. It means forgiving your sister when she wrongs you and allowing nothing - not pride, not hurt, not anything - to disturb that unity. That ONEness.

On the very first day of our training (pictured here), we had to hike ten miles to our camp. In the pouring rain. That was bad enough, but Amy had no rain gear. The good news? Jeremy brought plastic to keep her from developing hypothermia in those conditions. The bad news? The plastic had a price. 200 push-ups, which could be paid by one person or divided up among all of us. Because he had begun the day by quoting Gal. 6:2 (remember that whole "carry each other's burdens" thing from the beginning of this post?), we chose to divide up the push-ups and do fifty apiece. But, as I got on my face in the mud, I have to tell you I wanted nothing more than for Amy to do her own push-ups.

But we were only beginning to learn this lesson. Jeremy had told us that we would each be the burden in some area, and that was so true.

In some areas, I was the strong one. For whatever reason, God has gifted me with the ability to memorize very easily, so it didn't take me long to learn our Bible stories. I could memorize a story in a few hours and have it down pat. But Lori struggled with it. She would spend hours each night trying to learn just a few lines but, despite the difficulty, she persevered.

And we were learning to carry that burden along with her. Sometimes that meant listening to her tell a story we'd heard a million times before, just to be sure she didn't forget it. Sometimes it meant rehearsing a new story over and over with her. Sometimes it meant doing the physical labor in camp so that she could have time to work on the stories on her own. Yes, it was a burden, but it would have been impossible for her to do it by herself. She needed us, or she wouldn't be able to complete the task to which God had called her.

As I watched all of that, I began to realize that this was the way God wanted it to be. None of us is an island. We all need each other, or we won't be able to fulfill the purpose God has for us, either.

But I'm hard-headed and often don't learn the things the Lord wants to teach me quite that easily. See, I didn't like being on the other side of the coin. I hated being the burden. Carrying other people, though it was hard, was much easier than being carried. My pride didn't want to be the one who had to be carried. I wanted to be the strong, self-sufficient one, the one who helped others but didn't really need help myself.

But the Lord wanted me to learn that lesson, too. It was probably the most important one He had to teach me.

I've mentioned several times that I hate running, and I'm not good at it. At all. But because I knew it was one of the requirements for the team, I trained nearly a year in advance to be able to run the four miles necessary. I ran three and four times a week to work my way up to that goal, and I eventually made it.

But then Jeremy decided to change the rules. We ran a shorter distance, but we had to run it in the time he set. If each person didn't meet the goal, everyone had to run an extra lap.

Now I should tell you some things about my teammates (Lori and Amy are pictured here, center and right, respectively). Amy was a cross-country runner in college, Leah did cross-country in high school and had been running for years, and Lori could just run like the wind. Me? Well, let's just say it was a rare day that saw me meeting the goal. But running an extra lap was no problem for any of them. They didn't mind it at all, but it drove me crazy, because it meant I was the burden they had to carry.

Then God helped me to realize that my desire to be self-sufficient, to not need anyone else, was exactly the sort of rebellion He detests. Independence is telling Him that we don't need Him either because we can run our own lives.

Are you hearing me, Church? We need our brothers and sisters in Christ. We cannot survive without them. We are not individuals; we are ONE. Or, at least, we should be. And the fact that we're often not is the reason Christ is not glorified.

How sad that we drag the unspeakably beautiful name of Jesus through the mud for the sake of OUR independence. How it must grieve His heart.

I know it does mine.

Let's change that. Whose burden will you help carry today? And who will you allow to help carry yours?