Month: January 2023

Categories
Slovakia Memoir

Missionary Internship

Dr. O'Brien at Missionary Internship Graduation

Today, as I am writing, it is January 19th, an unforgettable day for me. Seventy years ago, January 19, 1953, I became a follower of Jesus Christ. I was a week away from my 11th birthday and it became the day of my new birth, a day that made an eternal difference.

Twenty-nine years later on January 19, 1982, my youngest sister, Susanne, took her own life at the age of 31 by a gunshot to her head. For most of that year I felt like I was hearing people from underwater drowning in an internal sea of tears.

I begin my memoir with that year not because of what happened in January but because of a meeting in December where I met the man who was to introduce me to Joe Ann Shelton five years later. I will pick up here with the third paragraph of chapter one.

I was teaching at Houston Baptist University in Houston, Texas. What I do remember is an incident in December of 1982 that led to my meeting someone very significant to my story who was part of God’s plan that resulted in the two of us, Joe Ann and me, being in Slovakia in 1997.

Prior to meeting him, one of my students told me that since she was twelve years old she felt called to be a missionary. I asked her what she had done to clarify her sense of calling. She looked at me with a puzzled expression and asked, “What do you mean?”

Following the conversation that ensued, I thought about her and other students who needed to have some way to determine over the years whether they were truly called and suitable for a career in missions. As my thoughts evolved, I put together a proposal for a summer missonary internship program designed to help university students explore their call to missions. It would require them to work under the supervision of a Southern Baptist ethnic pastor in one of the 19 different language churches in Houston for the summer, live with an ethnic family, and study the language with a native speaker. These requirements would be part of four courses established for the internship program for which they would gain twelve hours of credit.

To get approval from the university to conduct the program and obtain supporters like the Women’s Missionary Union in Texas and in the Houston area, as well as others, I put the proposal together in a slideshow outlining the components and began meeting with potential supporters. The last person I met with that December was Dr. Bill O’Brien, the Executive Vice President of the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (now the International Mission Board). He was speaking at a youth conference in Dallas and I went there specifically to meet him and share the program idea with him.

All went well and people were able to catch the vision and back it. The program was launched in the summer of 1983 with 14 students who worked in Chinese, Korean, Laotian, and Spanish congregations. It successrfully clarified for some students that a career in missions was their calling and for others that it was not. A flim was made to document the program and Bill O’Brien came to speak at the graduation ceremony in August.

In the spring of 1984, I interacted with Bill one more time when I took the film to be shown to a group at the Foreign Mission Board headquarters in Richmond, Virginia.

I did not see him again until December at a mission banquet in Houston right after I had resigned from Houston Baptist University. A week later I had a call from the Foreign Mission Board asking me to interview for a position. After three interviews, I accepted a position in the Medical Services Department as the coordinator of short-term medical volunteers and began my new job on March 1st of 1985.

I tell that story not only because of meeting Bill O’Brien who would later introduce me to Joe Ann but also because when we went to Slovakia we created an internship program for students who graduated from Calvary Schools in Holland where I had been the principal. Our first two interns came in the summer of 1998. One of them, Jeannette Wolters, married Ben Gerth and went to Tanzania as a missionary. The other, Vanessa Lake, came back to spend 15 months with us after graduating from Moody Bible Institute before going on to the International Baptist Theological Seminary in Prague.

Categories
Relationships

Being Held

I like this image for its symbolic value – being held by a hand. It is a tiny reminder to me of the hand of the living, eternal God that is infintely bigger than me and able to hold me.

For years I have gone to bed at night thanking God for the everlasting arms that are beneath me. I also quote the lines below from Martyn-Lloyd Jones almost every night. The realization that I am a day closer to home allows me to go to sleep with joy. 

Here in the body pent,
               Absent from Him I roam,
               Yet nightly pitch my moving tent
                 A day's march nearer home.

Those words become sweeter as each year goes by. I often speak them to God by changing the word Him to You. Not every night is naturally joyful, of course. There are nights when I add these words from Zephaniah 3:17, “he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing” and reword them as a request to God.

You may wonder why I am sharing so personally in a public blog. I do it because I believe there are people who crave and need the intimacy with God the Father that is available to those of us who are His children and we are invited to it. Maybe there are others who enjoy this intimacy but could use a reminder today that they are being held by an everlasting, loving Father.

In this new year I have had people dear to me who have died and others who are actively dying now. The comfort I have felt is in knowing that those leaving know the Lord Jesus and will be with him.

Others I know are entering unknown but difficult paths of different kinds of separation. Those of us who are left can walk beside them, offer the touch of Jesus through our hands and arms and through our presence.

While moving my books around recently, I picked up one written 50 years ago that I have had in my library almost that long. The title is Loneliness by Robert Weiss. He wrote that there is very little research and writing on the subject of loneliness and hoped that his book would encourage other social scientists to write on the subject. I paged through my copy to see what I had underlined many years ago.

Picking here and there I found these things worthy of reflection even as I think about intimacy with God. Loneliness is an experience of relational insufficiency, particularly an intimate relationship of knowing you are known and understood without having to explain. There is trust in that kind of relationship and the sense of knowing the other as well.

Our lonely self is tense, restless, unable to concentrate, driven. I know that self, although I sometimes deny it is my “real” self.

Loneliness is not the product of being alone; one can be lonely in a group. It is the absense of an intimate relationship.

Weiss writes, “our problem in estimating the prevalence of loneliness is that loneliness is not a condition like a broken leg, which one has or doesn’t have, but it is nearer to fatigue, a condition that can vary from the barely perceptible to the overwhelming. How much loneliness must one feel for it to be counted?”

In Ecclesiastes we read that God has planted eternity in the human heart. We are made for a relationship with God, which we know through Jesus Christ, the Word who became flesh. While God is physically absent and invisible to our physical eye and inaudible to our physical ear, we see him and hear him in his Word. And he sees and hears us.

One of the beauties of this relationship to me is that we are not equals. He is Creator and I am creature. He is father and I am child. His love is perfect and mine is not. He is never changing and I am always changing. When I understand these roles, I can grow in the relationship.

I never have to wonder where he is or how he feels about me. I never have to fear rejection or separation or abandonment. Human intimacy is wonderful and we need intimate relationships with others but it has none of these guarantees and cannot be compared.

This morning as I got ready for another day’s march toward home, I was reminded “Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”

Being held by God is a comforting experience at at any age.

Categories
Poetry

Habits and Change

There is a poem by Portia Nelson that most people who are in recovery from some addiction or destructive habit have read or heard. Although I worked for many years with those who were addicted to a substance, I believe An Autobiography in Five Chapters is a poem that speaks to most of us.

Someone who was interpreting for Joe Ann at an AA meeting in Slovakia told us that he had gotten into a habit of playing games on the computer and that it had become a habit that absorbed more and more of his time and was interfering with what he should have been doing. There are people who spend more time than they want to on social media or watching television or eating the wrong things or any number of things. I believe the reason these habits are so difficult to break is because we experience them as pleasant, a relief from stress, or an escape and we like what we feel. When they become habits we do them unconsciously and they have a life of their own. We are all good at rationalizing, justifying, and minimizing what we don’t want to give up.

If you have a habit that you want to change, think about replacing it with something better. And let someone know that you are working on getting rid of a habit. Ask them to ask you how your doing. I think this statement: “you alone can do it but you cannot do it alone” applies to most of us trying to make significant change.

An Autobiography in Five Chapters 

Chapter 1 
I walk down the street. 
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 
I fall in. I am lost... I am helpless. 
It isn't my fault. 
It takes me forever to find a way out. 

Chapter 2 
I walk down the same street. 
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 
I pretend I don't see it.
 I fall in again.
 I can't believe I am in the same place.
 But it isnt my fault.
 It still takes a long time to get out.
 
Chapter 3
 I walk down the street.
 There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
 I see it is there.
 I still fall in ... it's a habit. 
My eyes are open.
 I know where I am.
 It is my fault.
 I get out immediately.

 Chapter 4
 I walk dow the same street.
 There is a deep whole in the sidewalk.
 I walk around it. 

Chapter 5
 I walk down another streer.