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Finding Rest After Intense Ministry
I just completed four weeks of back-to-back events where I taught, trained, and cared for both incoming and seasoned global workers. It required long days and focused attention. My team and I faced many challenges both logistically and relationally. I needed the Lord’s strength to listen, listen again, and offer words of comfort and help. It was intense, it was good, it was right, and I am understandably tired. I can relate to Jesus’s disciples. After following in Jesus’s footsteps for a year, he sent them two by two out into the towns in Galilee to minster (Mk 6:6–13; Mt 10:1–11:1; Lk 9:1–6). Scripture doesn’t say how long this missionary…
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Hope for Healing After Sexual Intrusion
I met Lynne (nee Straton) Head in seminary. We were in the same degree program. We sang in choir together. Our future husbands were dorm mates. We both became global workers. And missionary care providers. From my viewpoint Lynne looked attractive, confident, gifted, and someone everyone wanted to be. Little did I know the battles she faced. Later I learned that Lynne had survived a near fatal car accident, suffered the tragic death of her sixteen-year old son, and endured chronic pain. So when she told me she had written a book and graciously sent me a copy, I looked forward to learning more of her story. After reading Unfolding:…
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Musings of a Grandmother-to-Be
I’m finally going to be a grandmother for the first time. And all the thoughts and emotions swirling inside of me need to be sorted and find expression. Excitement. Giddy with anticipation. Love already growing for someone yet unknown. And fear, concern, worry. But also hope, curiosity, and joy. And inadequacy. And relief… All my grandmother-friends tell me that this is the greatest “gig,” even better than advertised. The writer of Proverbs seems to agree, stating that grandchildren are the crown of the elderly (Pr 17:6). I know I am entering this new phase a little later than many of my peers. My age has occupied a good bit of…
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On Elisabeth Elliot and the Hidden Realities of our Mentors
“I want to be like Elisabeth Elliot,” I told my mother. I had just graduated from college and was contemplating my next steps. I picked Elliot because she was the only example I knew of a woman speaking publicly in my faith circles. “Really?” Mom’s eyebrow raised. “Then you need a story to tell like hers. Do you want to go as a missionary to an unchartered area, lose your husband to the spear of a tribesman, raise a daughter alone, labor in a village to share the gospel as a single mom? Then finally get married again, only to lose that husband to cancer and experience widowhood a second…
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Ten Principles From Scripture to Guide Engagement
“I can’t believe you just said that!” I look aghast at my screen. “Does she really believe that?” “This can’t be happening again!” My heart starts beating faster. I feel a mixture of anger, astonishment, disgust, disappointment, confusion, fear, exasperation, and superiority. I waffle between wanting to fight or to flee. I can’t go on this way. How do I respond when social media, news, and typical conversation is fraught with fear-driven division? When I read a disturbing post, when a friend purports a conspiracy theory, when my least favorite politician wins, should I turn off all devices, quit reading the news, and only talk about the weather? I need…
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Deciding to Stay or Go
I feel like my time here may be finished? How do I know when it’s time to go? Should I stay or move on? We encounter this tough decision many times in our lives. Should we leave our job? Our church? Is it time to resign from teaching Sunday school? What about the ministry where I volunteer? Which extra activities should I let go of? Can I press through the challenges and stick it out? How do we make an intentional, not reactive, decision to stay or go? Global worker and author, Sue Eenigenburg, invited me to cowrite a workbook* with her in which we offer thirteen reflection questions to…
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Will Change Ever Get Easier?
“I have decided to accept the offer in Spain,” my colleague announced. Here we go again, my heart cried. Even though I rejoiced that God had answered her prayers for direction, I still balked. After all these years will change ever get easier? I think back to my childhood in Papua New Guinea and the classmates who came and went, the rhythm of home assignment, the moving of my belongings from home to children’s hostel every three months. Then I consider my 12 years in Indonesia. My team and leadership configuration morphed at least 15 times until my family also returned to our passport country. My senior worker and team mentor…
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Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love in Mary’s Story
As we head into the final week before Christmas, we expectantly anticipate the coming—the Advent—of the Son of the Most High as his mother, Mary, did. Consider with me the traditional Advent themes as seen in Mary’s story. HOPE “Listen: You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.” —the angel Gabriel to Mary of Nazareth (LUKE 1:31-33) The Bible defines hope as patiently…
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Do Not Be Afraid, I Am With You
Since my word for the year 2023 is “with,” I’m sharing a chapter entitled “With You” from my devotional Favored Blessed Pierced: A Fresh Look at Mary of Nazareth in preparation for the upcoming Advent season. So the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid.” Luke 1:30a The angel’s preface to his commissioning, “Do not be afraid,” is the most commonly repeated command in the Bible—with good reason, for we are people of fear. Last year, I finally admitted that I feel anxious when I travel. While I have the privilege of traversing the globe in my ministry to cross-cultural workers, I rarely travel alone. Still I worry. Will we make…
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Gaze On God, Not the Wicked
News headlines are bleak these days. Factual events are spun as fiction to benefit the guilty. Differing accounts cause confusion and disguise the truth. And just when it seems things can’t get worse, violence breaks out again, communities are displaced, and thousands tragically perish. The marginalized suffer (again) while the wealth of the privileged increases. It can seem like the wicked are winning. We can feel like Asaph, the writer of Psalm 73. 3 For I envied those who are proud, as I observed the prosperity of the wicked.4 For they suffer no pain; their bodies are strong and well fed.5 They are immune to the trouble common to men; they do not suffer as other men…