Thoughts

I’m reading in 1 Peter this morning. Some of the passages are especially challenging.

“So be truly glad! There is wonderful joy ahead, even though it is necessary for you to endure many trials for a while. These trials are only to test your faith, to show that it is strong and pure. … So if your faith remains strong after being tried by fiery trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed…” (1:6,7, New Living Translation).

I don’t understand why God needs to use trials to test our faith. It feels bad. It seems there must be another way. But apparently there is not, because he is both all wise and all loving. Putting these together tells me that he is not playing games with me. This is serious stuff and he’s committed to me – both as his child whom he loves and as his child whom he knows will be happiest as I grow stronger and purer.

I was also finishing reading in James this morning. Ch 4:10 surprised me in NLT (which is why I like to read different translations from year to year). “When you bow down before the Lord and admit your dependence on him, he will lift you up and give you honor.”

I’ve been convicted personally about my need to feel and express my dependence on the Lord more regularly, multiple times each day. It’s easy to drift into independence where the focus becomes the mechanics of the Christian life and the processes that lead to success (like sharing my faith with the guy sitting next to me; organizing successful conferences, etc.). It’s a fine line and it’s not very sharply defined. But a life truly dependent on God delights him. By this time in our Christian lives, many of us know the words, and I can trick myself into a feeling of dependence.

My prayer lately is that I’ll truly live out my total dependence on him. It pleases him. He loves it when it’s pure in my own soul.

I recently switched from a Palm OS Treo 650 to a Windows Mobile 6 device. I’m using a t-Mobile Wing. I’m enjoying grafiti again which is good since I have trouble typing on the Wing’s slide-out keyboard.

Things I like about Windows Mobile 6:
• Outlook Mobile. I live in Outlook. I can live comfortably in Outlook Mobile.
• Today screen.
• Opera mobile browser. Faster than IE mobile and much better than the Palm browser.
• Multi-tasking. I can sync while on a phone call.

Things I don’t like:
• Having to use menus for so many functions. Palm’s user interface is cleaner. Key functions are exposed through buttons on screen rather than nested in menus.
• Having no “silence” button. As one who moves in and out of meetings, an easy way to go silent is great.
• Memory management. Why can’t we have more than 64 mb of main memory? I have a 2 gb micro-SD card, but many programs must be installed in main memory. Email storage is in main memory (attachments can be directed to the storage card).

Program’s I’ve added:
• Google maps
• Delta flights tool
• Opera browser
• Infosafe (password store)
• Pocket e-Sword (free but no NIV, must be loaded into main memory)
• Pocket Bible (not free but has NIV, I’m using KJV for trial period)

I tried Microsoft Onenote. I love it on my PC, but the mobile version hides everything in menus. I found it clumsy to use. I use Word Mobile to take notes. 🙁 The good news is that with grafiti, I can keep up with a speaker while taking notes. I could never thumb fast enough on my Treo.

What Windows Mobile 6 programs do you like?

At our conference in Colorado this summer, the parents of Lauren McCain were interviewed. I heard it live. I’ve replayed it many times since then, both in my own head and on my computer. I was deeply affected by the juxtaposition of the McCain’s interview and the story of 23 Korean Christians who were kidnapped by terrorists while doing relief work in Afghanistan.

My friend Judy Nelson has written very eloquently about the McCain’s interview. Please read Judy’s thoughts.

In amazing evidence of God’s preparation, Lauren (their daughter who was murdered) was videotaped during an interview. A rough cut is available online.

Our children grew up in Nigeria in West Africa. During that time, I committed them to the Lord. I gave them to the Lord for his purposes. God gave Kay and I tremendous peace raising our children in another country. He is sovereign everywhere. We never feared weird diseases, political unrest, or violent crimes. Yes, as parents part of our job was to be smart and not do unnecessarily unsafe things. We experienced God’s protection and provision many times.

But sitting in Moby gym on the campus of Colorado State University praying in small groups for the hostages from Korea and hearing the McCain’s story, I realized I had never given our two beautiful granddaughters back to the Lord. I had never consciously and intentionally acknowledged his sovereignty over their lives.

And I realized that not only had I never done this, I didn’t want to. God and I had quite an argument there in Moby gym. Have you ever known that you’re going to give in on an argument because the other person is right, but you are not emotionally ready? Your head is ready to concede because you know the other person is right, but your heart is still arguing?

It came to a head when the praise band led us in singing songs of surrender. I remembered the dialog in C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia about meeting Aslan the lion. Susan asks, “Is he–quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.” Mr. Beaver responded, “Who said anything about being safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.

I thought this was just an inner battle as I stood there in Moby gym. But long-time friend Charlie came up and put his arms around me and just hung on. I thought he’d do the nice “Christian” thing about reassuring me with a brief hug, then moving back to his seat. But he hung on. Minutes. Lots of them.

And my heart began to come around. It’s still fighting some, even as I write this weeks later. But I am on the journey of consciously entrusting Abby and Lucy into God’s care. He is good, all the time. He is sovereign, even over the country on the other side of the world where their parents hear God calling them. He is involved in making his glory known among the nations, even through the difficulties of his precious children. And he is lovingly working out his merciful plan of redemption through his children — the big ones and the little ones. Even if some of those children are big ones like our son and daughter-in-love or little ones like our grandchildren Abby and Lucy.

One of the things I’ve done is to take a seminary-level study of the book of Acts taught by Trinity Evangelical Divinity School professor John Nyquist. This “bible study” came complete with

• 382 pages of textbook reading
• 28 chapters of Acts reading
• a summary book chart of Acts giving titles to each chapter and paragraph
• a 10 page paper

All this in 5 days of class( plus one day of writing the paper)! It was great. It was rewarding. It was refreshing. It was revitalizing.

The Holy Spirit reminded me of four major themes in the lives of the disciples and the early church:

• Engaged in evangelism
• Empowered by the Holy Spirit
• Prayerfully dependent on Christ
• Unafraid of persecution and sacrificial suffering

I wrote a paper to help me process my thoughts. You are welcome to read it if you want. It is in Adobe Acrobat format, so if you do not have Acrobat Reader, you can click here. It is free!

My paper is Acts-The Missionary Roadmap.

In case you can’t wait to get to the conclusion, I wrote:

What does this mean?

There seems to be a tendency to reduce the missionary enterprise to training, to strategies, to tactics, to methodologies. Acts is a reminder that at the core of the missionary enterprise is the commissioning of God to go, the empowering of the Holy Spirit for supernatural effectiveness, the communing of prayer for wisdom and direction in daily decisions, and the role of suffering in the “presentation to the nations of the sufferings of his cross in the sufferings of his people” (Piper).

Tell me what you think?