From the Field

I pray:     – One day we will be able to put kids with leukemia in remission.     – One day we will see less domestic violence because of changed lives by the power of the Holy Spirit.     – One day we will see less ChopChops because lives will be changed and folks will choose love and forgiveness over violence.     – One day we will see less cervical cancer because husbands will choose to be committed to one wife and the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases will decrease.     But today is not that day. – Today I am having to tell Ambane and his family that his cancer, that we thought was responding to the chemotherapy we were giving, is back and his 5 yo life will come to an end sooner rather than later. – Today I am having to cast a women’s hand and elbow after she was beaten by her husband. – Today I am seeing a patient in followup who was chopped by a brother over a land dispute. – Today I am having to tell a patient and her family that she has cancer of her cervix and that we can’t cut it out, it is too big.  Telling them that they need to come into the hospital for a blood transfusion and maybe in a few weeks we might be able to send them to Lae to get radiation, that is if the radiation machine is…
Source: One day from Erin Meier – Asia Pacific

God has been speaking to me a lot lately about his greatness (as in size) as well as his smallness (as in caring for the tiny details of our human lives). In college, as I participated in mission trips abroad, God rocked my world with his grandeur. At this point, I had lived my entire life in Oklahoma and traveled a bit, but something about crossing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (and even swimming in the Indian Ocean) changed my worldview. There was something so beautiful about colliding with other people groups and experiencing a whole new world. Something God has since given me a love for. At one point, I remember being so overwhelmed by God, thinking about all the planets and galaxies and stars. I couldn’t help but be in awe of God’s majesty and creativity. And yet…as we read in Genesis chapter 1, on the 6thday of creation, God wanted someone to share His creation with. So, he created man and woman in His image. Did you catch that? I know we know this, but have you really thought about it before? God who created light, water and earth, trees and plants, day and night, fish and birds, and the animals walking on the ground…created human beings. Now, we all know that our story is a long one. It’s filled with failure and forgetfulness, but it is also filled with hope and promise and second chances. It is filled with love. “God so loved the world (you…
Source: How Great Is Our God from Fothergill – Africa

We’ve lived abroad now for over 5 years, and it is quite amazing how much one can learn in such a short period of time.  We are getting ready to attend a Resiliency Conference, designed to give us: space to process, an environment that will foster mutual sharing and learning, and to give us tools to work toward resiliency in our cross-cultural context.  We have experienced our fair share of struggles and conflict already in this short period of time of serving abroad, but I love the journey of growth God has us on.  I’ve seen how God continues to work in us not with the purpose of stopping with us, but in order to enable us to serve out of what is our healthiest place.  On this idea of resiliency, recently I was reflecting on a part of a final paper I turned in for my most recent Ordination class, which was, to have true empathy means moving from being a “taker” to being a “giver”.  I hope learning how to be resilient, helps me continue to learn how to move from being a taker to a giver, from surviving to thriving.   In the beginning, I was under culture stress as I learned to navigate the new system around me.  I recently saw “culture stress” defined this way: getting your needs met in new ways.  The hard part of culture stress is that we are creatures of habit.  We’ve learned to get our needs met in certain ways, in…
Source: Another's world from Scotts – Eurasia