Off to India

I’m getting ready to pack my bags and head out on a three-week trip to India and Nepal to minister with BEE World’s Women’s Ministry. We’ll be visiting three different locations and teaching/facilitating three different sets of curriculum. Lots of plane rides and bus rides and car rides…lots of new sights, new sounds, new smells, and of course new people to meet. The experience will be quite different from Africa, I think. For one thing, BEE tells me that very few people wear western dress so along with preparing for my teaching time, I’m also trying to find a couple of Salwar and Kameez outfits!

I am so excited about this trip. I love to travel and I love to experience other cultures. Of course, culture is a product of thousands of years of people groups living together, developing cultural habits and traditions and ways of thinking, and worshiping their God or gods. But God is sovereign and He is a God of creativity and variety, so culture is more than simple anthropology. He has sovereignly given each culture a special way of displaying His glory. No one culture could reflect all of God, and no one culture can praise Him sufficiently. When we actually see the great multitude praising God as described in Revelation 7, we will see that every nation, tribe, people, and language will be there adding their unique flavor and essence to the song that rises to God’s throne! Only when all of God’s people are included can it be complete.

But in the here and now, cultures can be a problem. How do you communicate in a culture that is so different from your own? How do you talk about the wonderful justice of God to women who have lived with injustice their whole life and perhaps don’t even understand what the word "justice" means?  Forget about “insignificant” cultural differences like materialism vs. rural village life. How do you express God’s love to women who have grown up in a culture where a woman’s status is described as "lower than the sole of her husband’s sandal?"

And so these final weeks as I prepare, I am asking God to use me to serve the needs of the women of India and Nepal. I know that I can never understand their culture enough to be able to mold my teaching to their culture perfectly. But I also know that God wrote His Holy Scriptures knowing each culture completely. And I know that He created all of His children in a way that each can accept his Word and His truth. So just as we will be relying on translators to translate our words into their language so that they can understand what we are saying, I am also depending on the Holy Spirit to translate the truth of the Scriptures through their cultural filter and into their hearts. And then I am asking that God will show me, moment by moment if that is what it takes, what the best way is to share with our sisters in India and Nepal. Isn't living dependently a wonderful thing?!?

The Call

It sounds so impressive, doesn't it? "God called me to be a missionary!" When I share my testimony with people, I use that phrase myself. 

"Five years ago, when I took Perspectives for the first time, God called me into full-time missions work." 

Most people just kind of let that phrase float on past. It is the kind of thing missionaries and "professional" ministers say, don't you know!

But a couple of weeks ago, someone called me on it and I'm glad she did. "What does that mean, exactly?" she asked. "How do you know that God called you? Did you have a dream or a vision or something?"

When we read about callings in the Bible, they are wonderful events. In Genesis we see God calling Abram to leave his home and go to a far-away land. The Holy Spirit doesn't tell us exactly how God communicated with Abram, but the instructions were certainly very specific and Abram had no problem in knowing what he should do. When God called Moses into leadership by speaking to him through a burning bush, it was pretty convincing (even though Moses tried to argue his way out of it). Prophets had ongoing conversations with God about what they should do and specifically what they should say to Israel. And perhaps the most famous call of all was to Paul in Acts 9 on the road to Damascus where God communicated through a blinding light and a voice from heaven. Although we don’t always see the specifics of the call itself, God always shows us the results…His people start moving.

Well, I didn’t get a burning bush, or a shining angel giving me a scroll with exact directions, but God got me moving. It started with the Perspectives on the World Christian Movement course. This is 15 week-long course that starts with 5 weeks exploring the Biblical basis for missions. As I saw God’s passion for the nations, my “perspective” was changed forever…God gave me a new set of glasses and a longing to be a part of what He was doing in the world. When we studied the history of missions and people groups, my heart broke for unreached people of the world and I found myself asking God what I could do to help reach them. We studied about Christianity in cultures that are so very different than our Western ways, and I saw that God created the variety and loved it. I wanted to experience it all. And then the clincher...strategy…my eyes were popping and my jaw was dropping as I learned about all the new and wonderfully creative ways God was showing us how to reach His people. I was full of excitement as I thought, “I could do that!! Yes, even I could do that!” And God answered, “Yes, you could.”

So that’s the story of my “calling.” God putting first knowledge, then understanding into my head, followed by joy and excitement, and culminating in hope that was validated when a mission agency, BEE World, said, “Yes, Merrikay, we feel confident that you will make a great contribution to the ongoing work of BEE World.” 

Have you experienced a calling on your life? I'd encourage you to spend some time thinking and praying about it. I think most of us have; we may have just not defined it as such. If you feel like you are where God wants you right now, then you are probably living out his calling. Spend some time defining it. Write your own mission statement and share it with your spouse and/or family. And if you don't have peace right now...maybe God is in the process of calling you to something new. Be sure to listen.

A Missionary in the Making

“Merrikay, what would you think about blogging about your journey to become a missionary?” asked Randy Shuffield, our Executive Pastor at CBC. I was taken back…I could easily see how people would be interested in stories of great missionaries who are on the field doing great things through God. We all were on our knees and praying for our own Dave when he was being held and questioned in that big Asian country. And just a couple of weeks ago, Mike Messerli blogged about the Uriay people in Papua New Guinea hearing about Christ for the first time (Reaching the Uriay). Now that’s exciting stuff. That’s the kind of stories where people can really see God at work.

But he continued, “I want people to see what a missionary’s life is like…what you are going to be doing, how you are preparing for it.” So I guess that makes sense. If we think only about the people who are serving God in far-off exotic places and hear only about their mountain-top experiences, we don’t have a real picture of what a missionary’s life is like. It’s sort of like seeing Pastor Steve in front of the congregation on Sunday morning and thinking that you know him well.

So, I am going to embark on this blogging journey and we’ll see where it leads us. For those of you who don’t know me, I’ve been going to Crossroads for about 20 years. Pastor Woody Woodward was leading us and we were preparing for our very first trip to Haiti when I first came. In fact, it was on one of those early trips that I started to understand God’s love for the world. I’ve been a Christian for 30 years, coming to the Lord as an adult.

I raised two boys pretty much on my own, and they turned out pretty good with a little help from Dave Semmelbeck and Brent McKinney along the way. Scott, my oldest, now lives in Chicago with his wife Emily and their two children, Miles and Eleanor. My younger son, Jack, his wife, Cammie, his two daughters, Scout and Sawyer, and I all share a house in Double Oak. Retirement? Peace and quiet? Knitting? Not in this household!! But it’s just what I need to keep me young!

Until September, I was the owner of a book and Website publishing company. We published material about IBM technologies and had 8 employees. I joined BEE World in February 2010 and since that time have been balancing my life between those two worlds…running the company and preparing to go on the mission field. I can’t tell you how freeing it is to now be fully involved with BEE.

All of this rather mundane detail is to show you that I’m a very normal (and rather mundane) person. Certainly not a Christian superstar, and yet God has called me into ministry. And that’s what this blog will be about. I guess I could title it “Mundane Ministry,” but then who would read it? And the ministry isn’t mundane…God always turns the mundane into miraculous.

So instead, I’ve titled it "The Third Third." You see, the first 30 years of my life, I was totally lost and missing the whole point of life. The second 30 years of my life, after I became a Christian, I grew in the Lord, raised my boys, earned a living, and did my best to serve God. Now, for the third 30 years of my life, I hope to serve Him as a missionary!

As all bloggers say, I would so appreciate your input. Any question? Comments? Ideas for topics? Bring them on. You can either post them here and I’ll answer them publicly or if you’d prefer to email me privately, that’s good too (merrikay.lee@gmail.com).