Oh, the interesting paths God weaves.

Have you ever thought that we mainly discover our paths as we walk them? That's the way my life and ministry usually seem, anyway. We've gotten connected with the man who has helped a long time with the International Conference for Computers in Missions. He's now trying to start one in Africa. We've seen here a great opportunity for us to help them get started by helping develop the pedagogy and context side of their content. And from that, we can get a lot of starter material for some new courses, like networking. Anthony was brainstorming this morning that this might get me to Kenya for a little while this April. We'll see what happens ... :)

The programming and databases course is still coming along, though somewhat slowly. It's hard to make good linear progress when it's three people working on it at once, and all of us have a lot of other things on our plates. And Anthony, the one with the best understanding of programming and what we're trying to do, is the busiest of all of us. But it is coming, and we're all enjoying it. One of the high school students I mentioned in a previous post is reviewing it for us, and his input has already been helpful.

Anthony reported a really successful first Mini Mission Trip in Houghton. They had young and old people there, veteran ministers and ADHD kids. I think ten laptops were prepared, and believers were encouraged, and newcomers to church heard the gospel in a very clear and gripping way for them. Please pray I'll be able to do the same in places near where I live.

New volunteers

TEN3 has some new recruits: high school students! Anthony got a part-time job as a network administrator at a high school, and has of course been building some good relationships there. Two students have expressed interest in helping TEN3. We will probably mainly have them review our courses. That should be good to see how these courses, designed for young adults, apply to this age group since we also want to market to them. This should be a really good learning experience for them and for us.

Please pray for us as we develop these relationships and continue to work on the programming/databases course, as well as a networking course now.

How many generations?

Anthony shared something so cool recently I thought I'd share it:
Someone once mentioned to me that "Discipling to the third generation" seems strange to them because in the Bible, third and fourth generations are used for curses and a thousand generations is for blessing. That might be true, but our tagline from TEN3 comes from 2 Tim 2:2 "and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also." We are trying to live that out. Besides, TEN3 has the thousandth generation covered too. 10^3 (10 raised to the third power) equals 1,000 ;-).

Perspectives

Part of required training for all new SIM missionaries is the Perspectives in Global Missions course. I had been putting it off until I actually went active. Now that I'm taking it, I'm wishing everyone would.

The lecture last night, "The Story of His Glory," indicted those churches and Bible studies that treat the Bible as a collection of rules and moral stories. It's not that at all, but one great story of God whose glory pales all else from being considered significant, who reflects it in love among the Trinity and in love has determined to sweep mankind up in it. I love how the speaker said that any religious teaching with the punchline "We should be better" will always come up short; the all-sufficient punchline is "Jesus IS better!" So much better than all our strivings. In the midst of my own struggles with vanity (my most haunting sin), this worthlessness of our own efforts to be better, and the Worth of God's glory, reminded me painfully where my obsession belongs.

Convicting as it was, the lecture was also incredibly affirming because it has been on TEN3's hearts for years that people need the whole story of Redemption, not the piecemeal that well-meaning Christians often offer. To hear it from someone else was a deep joy, and made me long all the more for the whole world to hear this story, and see "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." (2 Cor 4:6).

My mission is now my "day job"!

(I kinda want to subtitle this, "I can haz paycheck?!" LOL if you get it.)

I'm so thankful I just might melt.

To explain why, let me give a bit of summary of what life has been like since I started this path:

August 2009 – I discovered TEN3, and realized this was where God meant for me to serve. I started volunteering as an editor. I also began a part-time job at South Plains College.

July 2010 – I went to Africa with the team for the first time, and fell in love with it. At the end of this trip, I was asked to become TEN3's curriculum department head.

August 2010 – discontinued the job at SPC. I realized I wanted to pursue TEN3 wholeheartedly, and my boss needed someone who could give more than I could.

October 2010 – At SIM's candidate orientation, I was accepted as a long-term appointee. I then began the process of support-raising.

November 2010 – June 2013: continually juggling four jobs: TEN3, support-raising, substitute teaching, and working "rush" periods at the SPC bookstore.

...

I've been content to have multiple "jobs to pay for my job"*. Content, but not satisfied**. I've been wanting for so long to get my full support so that I could serve with focus, hopefully go to Africa long-term, and no longer be living pieces of a life.

I've been raising support for nearly three years. I'm still at just 43% of what I need monthly pledged to come in. However, there have been precious people who have been giving faithfully, and that money, besides providing for my three short trips to Africa, has built up enough that I could be fully funded for a year. SIM has approved my going active for a year on these funds, starting September 1.

This means that instead of working four jobs and only getting paid for two, I now have just two jobs (TEN3 and Relationship Development Ministry) and can draw a salary for them. Oh, and those benefit things which are supposedly good for me ;)

This has been approved with the goal of reaching 100% support by the time the 12 months are over. With my time and energy less divided, I will be able to focus on visiting people about supporting my ministry, and also running mini mission trips as part of our goal to raise 2000 laptops. That, and the programming/database course we're working on will keep me plenty busy!

And after that? Well, if we get those 2000 laptops, TEN3 will be generating income. With that income, we hope to be able to look into hiring African writers to help us develop curriculum in the other areas that are needed. And if I have full long-term support then, I'll be able to go to Africa long-term to work with them on education that combines technology, the African context, a biblical worldview, and purposeful discipleship to be something truly transformational.

I hope you'll rejoice with me, that at long last I can "go active" as a missionary. Please pray that the Lord make this year fruitful in every way for His long-term plans, for me and TEN3 and Africa.

*An expression I got from the movie of The Freedom Writers Diary

**A lesson Anthony likes to teach from George MacDonald's Thomas Wingfold, Curate

Mini-Mission Trips and a free Puppy!

My priority job over the summer is RDM, which is called Resource Development Ministry or Relationship Development Ministry, depending on in which decade you started missions. ;) What that means in plain speech is connecting with people, sharing with them about my ministry, hopefully bringing them closer to God in the process, and hopefully raising funds and laptops thereby.

I've been trying to raise my support to make TEN3 my full-time job for over 2 1/2 years now. I guess my chief difficulty has been that I consider money to be such a personal thing, it's hard to bring it up with people. Oh, I can bring it up with churches, yes, but except for the few with which I have a really close connection, the response has always been, "You're doing a great thing, but we're already supporting all the missionaries we can afford."

I'm still very much working on RDM with individuals, and don't see that changing, but my visionary leaders have come up with a much better approach for RDM with churches. It weighs heavily on both Anthony (Operations head) and Claude (CEO) that the church in North America is dying. The stats we've read are that only 1% of churches in the USA are growing by baptizing new believers. So while our work is in Africa, we don't want to neglect the Body of Christ in America, either. Thus, we are making RDM with churches truly a ministry. The idea is that the church take on laptop raising as a mission project. (To learn why we're after laptops, see 2000 Laptops.) The people ask neighbors, friends, post it on Facebook that they're collecting used laptops for Africa. They then come to a "4-hour mission trip" in which they set up the computers to send to Africa with Puppy Linux, a free operating system designed to run on old computers. (We have to assure people strongly that they do not have to be experts to do this. If they can read and make a cup of tea, that's enough skill level to set them up with the group!) Cool, right? But how does that help the church?

• Involvement in foreign missions brings people to know God in new ways. (To read about my experience, see the newsletter dated October 24, 2011 in Newsletter Archives).
• One of the strongest undermining forces against the Church in North America has been use of technology without discernment. We generally realize that the immoral things propagated with technology are harmful. But even in recognizing this, western Christians have fallen into a trap. We tend to put technology in a tier separate from our spiritual lives and assume that as long as we don't do anything overtly sinful with it, it doesn't affect us. Those who participate in a mini-mission trip will get introduced to the idea of godly use of technology as the first step out of this trap and into a wiser and more effective walk with the Lord.
• Another serious detriment to Christianity throughout cultures and history has been not knowing the whole of God's story. God gave us the Bible with a variety of literary genres included, but as a whole it tells one great story, of which all the parts are needed to understand Him and His work in the world. Research has shown that we do indeed base our understanding of the world on stories, and that if our minds have only part of a story, they fabricate the missing parts. That has led to great deceptions time and time again. And yet today so many Christians in the US only know the Bible in disconnected fragments. They don't know whether Abraham or Moses came first, much less what Solomon or the priestly rituals have to do with the coming of Jesus. And thus they are spiritually weak, easily led away from the Truth. I can't tell them the whole story in four hours, but I hope to make them want to find it out for themselves.

As always, I'm grateful for your reading and prayers. May this blog make you hungry for the whole story, too.

How did I get here?

I'd like today to share how I ended up with TEN3 in the first place. I sure didn't plan it out!

My story starts with deciding on a college. I was rather anxious about it, as I anticipated that would determine the course of my entire life. Or rather, that it had to be the perfect preparation for what I would do with my life. Except I had no idea what that was. Part of me wanted a career, but doing what, I didn't know. A larger part of me wanted my future to center on marriage, children, and homeschooling, because I saw growing up how precious that is. I was comforted in realizing that, regardless, I would want to go to college just to learn, but again, where to go?
Long story short on that, God told me to go to Wayland. I argued with Him about this-- "I don't want to go to that sheltering local Baptist school my whole family went to! I want to go somewhere to be challenged and spread wings, to really be a light!" Arguing with God is quite an unforgettable experience if you're willing to hear the reply. It came ever so gently, yet still hit me with the force of a speeding cement truck: "I'm God, you're not. You are telling Me how to use you. So I would rather hear you say, 'not my will but Yours be done,' than 'use me.'"

But what was I going to study? Again, I had no idea. I'm very good at almost every subject. I went a year and a half undecided, and finally when the deadline was getting really close when I would have to declare a major, I chose English with a physical science minor. Why? I like them. That's the whole reason. I still didn't know what I wanted to do for a career, so I figured I might as well prepare for it studying something I liked. So whenever I told people my degree, the response was almost always, "so are you going to teach?" My reply was always "no." It was as if there was a wall between me and the education building. There was no explicable reason why, but there was an unavoidable sense that teaching was the wrong way for me to go.

In the next two years I discovered I am particularly gifted at writing, and wanted my job to involve writing somehow. So I thought about working for a periodical, and checked some into freelance and technical writing. Then my senior year, grad school was making a lot of sense. But the more I thought about it, the more frustrated I felt. I didn't understand why, because I loved school, but I did not want to continue on to grad school. Finally, in a conversation with my Mom, I realized why: I couldn't bear the thought of spending the rest of my young, free years pouring more into myself. It was time to serve. I was meant to. The moment I thought I'm going to the mission field was one of the happiest in my life.

Originally, I planned go go with IMB as a Journeyman, but that was 2009, thus the economy had closed that door. I consulted with Dr. Shaw, the missions professor at Wayland, who advised me to look for a way to write for missions. The search tools God gave led me to TEN3. I read one of their job descriptions and thought, I could do that. As I began volunteering with TEN3, I fell in love with the vision. God had been putting long-term service for long-term transformation, detailed evangelism, discipleship, and meeting human needs all on my heart over the previous years, all of which TEN3 does. And all of that I can contribute to with my writing skills and love of learning.

Please pray for my younger sister. She's facing a similar crossroads. Ask that she seek the Lord, and walk in the good and true paths He has for her. May we all trust and not be afraid (Isaiah 12:2).