Weekly Update: February 22nd, 2013

Weekly Update: Friday 2/22/2013

Hello again everyone,

Well, if anyone has been following these updates since I left for South Asia last December, that sandwich I ate at the airport in Helsinki was as amazing as it looked. You can probably find them in the big nice looking place to eat about half way through the international terminal, if you’re transiting through the air port in Helsinki, of course.

If you’re interested in all the happenings of what my 9 weeks in South Asia looked like, hang on, I’ll be writing that up in due time.

For now, our family Is getting settled into our nice little apartment here in Cascade, Idaho. It is a very comfortable cold outside and a decently comfortable warm inside. The air is much dryer than either the Netherlands or South Asia, which I am very thankful for; dry cold air helps my health to no small degree. We still have a couple of bags to unpack, some furniture to rearrange and replace, still a little bit more cleaning to do, and with that we should be all settled in.

It has been really exciting to see many of our old friends again! The winter in Idaho isn’t always the easiest time for finding our friends in YWAM. The vast majority are either in Asia or back with family raising support. Still, we’ve been able to visit four out of the five families that are still around.

Within the next couple days we’ll also be ready to get started on the School Of Apostolic Pioneering that will be running from March 10th though May 31st. We are going to have a great line up of speakers, students, and staff (which of course includes us)!

If you know anyone who really wants to start a new ministry or YWAM location, please, let them know about the SOAP!

Thanks for partnering with our family!

Other Updates:

– Our son is an excellent traveler! After a slightly troubled night of sleep in Amsterdam, He managed to sleep half of the time on our flight from Amsterdam to Chicago and lounge around for the rest! From the look on his face it seemed that he found it the lamest thing ever done, though, he wasn’t cranky bout it at all!

After the first flight, he played around in Chicago O’Hare airport for another eight hours; following that, slept through the next flight, the entire night in Boise, and arrived in Cascade without any jet lag at all!

– Last Saturday I was able to talk with my friend in Enschede about the prayer meeting that we had started. It was a fun time, but we won’t be able to continue it. I was a little sad about that, but when I prayed about it I felt that God was saying that seeds were planted in Enschede for another prayer meeting and that the prayers we have prayed for the city will be effective.

Thanks for praying for us!

Scripture:

Since coming to Cascade I have been feeling the need to read the Bible and receive what I need from God through it. It isn’t that unusual, of course, many times after I travel I get off track with reading my Bible and haveing my quiet times with God.

This time, though, the need has been much greater.

After being gone for so long and just returning from my time in South Asia it is easy for me to become withdrawn. I suppose you could say I am a bit culture shocked.

Yesterday, I asked God if there was a book in the Bible that He would like to start revealing Himself to me through and help me through what I was dealing with. It felt like He wanted to go through Psalms with me again and to start with the first psalm.

It was a very special time with God!

The first psalm is about where you set your mind and what you do; do you put your trust in ungodly things? Do you walk in the way of sin? Do you sit around in scornfulness? As I read it I started to see how selfish I was for not looking beyond myself – in a way, scornfulness. It says that the person who is blessed is the person who sets his mind on the law of God. Jesus Himself says that the greatest commands of the law is to love God and to love others.

It helped me to start my day with a new perspective and new confidence.

You all should try it out too!

 

Praise & Prayer Report:

– Praise God for our time in the Netherlands!

– Praise God for my wife’s visa!

– Please pray for our family’s finances and continued support!

– Please pray that our family would adjust well for life and ministry in the United States!

Thanks for all your prayers!

In Christ,
The Abiding Kingdom

Weekly Update: November 21st, 2012

Weekly Update: Wednesday 10/21/2012

 

Happy Thanksgiving!

We pray that God will bless all of you and show you all the things that He has done for you this year!

Our time in the Netherlands is going well.

We have an understanding of how the next couple months will look for us and God is providing for all of our needs to accomplish them. Within the next months we are hoping to see the Enschede Prayer Team continue, we are having a missions fair at our home church here in Enschede, and I will be off to Asia from December to February.

We are looking forward to a very busy and exciting time!

Though, I don’t want to miss what has been happening in the last month since I last updated our weekly update… I see the irony.

My wife is the one heading up the missions fair for our church’s  missionary members, which means she is very busy emailing, writing, and visiting people. She is also sorting things out for the immigrations sale that we will have at the same time.

While my wife works at this, our son likes getting into bookshelves and plants, and cabinets that he shouldn’t – of which there are plenty of each.

I’m reading through my fourth book dealing with early church history and trying to understand the implications it has on us today. It is really important for me to keep learning and sharing what I learn with others. Writing things down here on the blog is one way, talking about them with my father-in-law over coffee several times a day is another that I particularly enjoy.

So, with that, my mind is often caught up in several different places at the same time. What happened at this time, who said what when, Jay Edward trying to pull down a great big potted plant  or playing with his grandpa’s books now, etc.

In all this I am preparing to travel to Asia; I have the opportunity to teach at a discipleship training school, help a couple of outreach teams, and learning/showing how to make water filters out of clay pots, sand, gravel, and water.

Out of those three, doing the research and showing people how to filter water will have the most impact on my time there.

It is a project that comes out of our prayers for Asia.

During my first trip to Asia we learned how terrible the water there can be. As we prayed about what to do we felt that God wanted us to bring water filters, but we never found a way how. Since then, our outreach have been focused on helping people learn about basic hygiene and preventable sicknesses.

Yet, we’ve still had the problem that most people do not have access to clean water.

Earlier  this year I learned of a water filter that may fit our unique demands. On this trip I’ll research them more, see if I get sick when I drink the water, and do my best to share them with my other friends who will be able to share the water filters with even more people.

Be praying for my time away from family, success in the water filter project, and safe travels!

Thanks for partnering with our family!

 

Other Updates:

– We had an update this past week that the National Visa Center, in the US, has all of our documents again. Please pray that the process will go smoothly from here!

– In order to use my time well in the Netherlands, I’ve begun pioneering a prayer team for the various ministries in Enschede. This project is going well and I’ve sent invitations to other ministries to see if more will join the prayer team.

 

Scripture:

The last time I wrote here I had just finished Isaiah and was in Jeremiah, now I’m finished with Jeremiah and am in Ezekiel.

The two books are very similar; it seems that Ezekiel is written even more like a journal than Jeremiah. Ezekiel writes about the amazing visions and experiences he has with God and the strange and very persistent ways that God has him speak to the people who have been taken captive by the Babylonians. They speak at the same time, to the same group of people, about most of the same things, but in completely different places.

Jeremiah speaks from Jerusalem and later from Egypt, Ezekiel speaks from Babylon after being taken there as a captive himself.

You need a really good imagination to see the things that Ezekiel writes about. He writes about God’s throne sitting on towering angels, being spiritually taken to Jerusalem and digging through walls, and hearing God tell him to do dig a hole through his own house’s wall and act like he’s going into exile – just so people will ask and give God an opportunity to speak to them!

It’s an interesting and challenging read!

 

Praise & Prayer Report:

– Praise God for our time in the Netherlands!

– Please continue praying for my wife’s visa application!

– Please pray for our family’s finances and continued support!

– Please pray that our family would receive everything God has for us during these months together in the Netherlands and after we are apart!

 

Thanks for all your prayers!

In Christ,
The Abiding Kingdom

TAK Article: Servant Leadership

TAK Article: Servant Leadership

Over the past year God has been teaching me a lot about being a servant. He has been doing this through the books I read, the relationships I am committed to, and especially when I take the time to listen and hear His voice.

Perhaps I can pass something of that along!

Servant Leadership

The first time I heard of “servant leadership” was at a team training week preparing our team of young people to lead youth groups on missions trips over the course of the summer. We were mostly familiar with each other and our two-weeks of training were broken up with teachings in the morning, workshops where we created a program for the Summer in the afternoon, followed by times to hang out and have fun in the evenings. That morning our base leader came to teach us about values, servant leadership, and conflict resolution.

He opened up his Bible and told us to turn to John 13: 3-10.

‘Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.

He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?”

Jesus replied, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”

“No,” said Peter, “you shall never wash my feet.”

Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.”

“Then, Lord,” Simon Peter replied, “not just my feet but my hands and my head as well!”

Jesus answered, “Those who have had a bath need only to wash their feet; their whole body is clean. And you are clean, though not every one of you.” For he knew who was going to betray him, and that was why he said not every one was clean.’ – NIV

My take away from that morning was that if I wanted to lead people then I would need to serve them too. However, it took me several more years (plus my future wife and our son) to learn the greater part of what Jesus was talking about.

Servant Leadership in Practice

What I missed that summer morning was the very nature of leadership that God desires for us. Mark 9:35 says this, “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.”

At that point in time, and for several years after that, I operated out of the idea that those who were the leaders had the authority to tell others what to do. As a follower, it was my job to do exactly what my leader told me to do and I wasn’t responsible for anything more than that.

This was the point of view that I took when I listened to people talk about leadership, read stories from the Bible about leadership, and did my best to practice leadership. In many ways, this was my paradigm – the way I filtered the world around me. I could recite a lot of stories from the Bible where God and others leaders used this model, but even  when that was not the case I would have still perceived it to be true because this was the paradigm that I understood leadership from.

During my time in the Netherlands, in the spring of 2012, I started reading You see bones, I see an army, by Floyd McClung.

In that book Floyd McClung talked about leadership in a way that I had never heard before, nor would I have understood prior. It was this, to serve is to lead. Leadership does not come through training, degrees, titles, positions or power over others – it comes by being a servant to the people around you and building influence through that.

He used the same verses of the Bible that I had always read and heard, but now they made a lot more sense!

Shortly thereafter, as I remember it, I spent some time asking God about this. Is this why Jesus has influence in the world today? Is this what His kingdom is built upon?

In my heart I felt a resounding yes, the only reason that Jesus, God with us, has influence in the lives of people today is because He came to us as a servant. He didn’t use His position in heaven to force things to happen in the earth, but He gave Himself to us – He served us.

Applying Servant Leadership

Just recently I also read The Servant, by James C. Hunter.

I found that this book brought a lot of the challenges of servant leadership together and then practically worked them out.

The book follows the story of an educated businessman and several others as they learn about what it means to be a leader. In the beginning of the book almost everyone thinks that it is their job is to serve the people above them and control the people below them, but then as the book progresses they find that their ultimate goal is to serve the people that they are leading.

I highly recommend the book to anybody!

One of the principles shared in this book was that in order to lead people you needed to choose to love them through meeting their needs – not to feel warmly about them, but to actually act in their best interest. The book goes on to say that character traits we find most valuable in a leader are what you would call this sort of action oriented love.

The attributes listed were taken from 1 Corinthians 13: 4-7.

‘Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.’ – NIV

As stated in the book, love is: patient, kind, humble, respectful, selfless, forgiving, honest, and committed. This sort of love requires action!

Committing to Lead as a Servant

As a I write this my wife and are still in our first year and a half of marriage, we already have an eight-month old son, and we haven’t had a really solid place to live during any of that time. God has been unbelievably faithful during this time, but this has also been the time when He’s chosen to hammer out my commitment to lead like Him the most.

Towards my wife… I’ve always known that the Bible says to love her and even to lead her (which could seem like a rather intimidating task in itself), but it didn’t make sense before God really started revealing this idea of being a servant. Yes, I should love her like Christ loves the church and control her too? No, that’s not the message, God calls me to love her and lead her – to serve her, to make it possible for her to become even more of the woman God created her to become! Now, that’s something that I can be excited about!

Towards my son… well, in the months right after he was born it was really difficult to serve him with all my heart. A lot of the time my actions were driven by guilt or fear of becoming a bad father to him. Instead of this, God’s call for me is to serve my son – to build a strong relationship with him so that he may know what it is like to have a strong relationship with our Father too!

Towards others… as I am learning it, the most effective way for us to show God’s love to other people is to love them through our actions. Is that really leadership? Yes, it is leadership – if people do not see God’s love for them through you they will not follow you to Jesus.

That, as the realization of it hits my heart, is the greatest challenge of leading as a servant! Are we willing to serve others just like Jesus has served us?

The Challenge of Servant Leadership

Jesus shared a lot of stories about being a servant to those around us. He certainly went to the point of death for us and even further!

That is the last point that I will share – it is not spoken by Jesus when He was walking the earth, but after He rose from the dead and took His seat next to His Father. This is what others came to understand and applied to their lives. Perhaps you would consider it in your life too?

Philippians 2: 1-11.

‘Therefore if there is any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and mercy, fulfill my joy by being like-minded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind. Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself. Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others.

Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.’ – NKJV

May Christ be with you!

In Christ,
The Abiding Kingdom

Het Koningsfeest

As close as I can tell, that would mean “The King’s Party” in English.

I really was rather uninvolved with this whole thing, but I did have my parts here and there: mostly pushing my wife and her ideas out into the open a little bit at a time. It all started back a few weeks ago while we were visiting the C3 Church in Enschede, the Netherlands.

We were standing around after the service and wondering who we should talk to next. We had already met a Dutch missionary to Indonesia and learned some more of what YWAM was doing there. Still, we were a little bit hesitant to strike up a conversation, but someone else was a little bolder than us. One of the ladies turned and introduced herself, her name was Dorien and soon we found that she was a YWAMer too! She was the leader of the Bible study group leaders for the Navigators student association in Enschede.

Before long she asked what we were doing and I shared about my work with Mission Adventures. I also mentioned one of my wife’s ideas about having a dinner for the homeless people around Enschede. Dorien was very excited about this and said that her group in the student association wanted to do something like that too.

Within a few minutes the idea sprouted into a plan, together it was possible for the three of us to have a date, a building, and helpers for the night.

There was a lot of work to be done before the night was pulled off though. As soon as we arrived home my wife started looking into all the places where homeless people could find food, help, and shelter in Enschede. I think it was the very next day that we grabbed a pair of bicycles and rode around the city center searching for the places we found online. We asked whether or not this was a good idea, how best to advertize for it, and if the places could help us. The responses we received were all very good. We learned of a couple new places that we hadn’t found, and everyone was willing to take up flyers when we would bring them.

It was interesting, at this point things were all rough, but they were coming together really quickly. We hadn’t even really met any of the homeless people yet and stilled referred to them as some strange community we didn’t know much about; though, that would change over the next couple weeks.

Yes, mind you, I should mention that from beginning to end this project and process only took about three weeks, plus a couple of days. It had to move quick or else it wouldn’t happen.

We were also able to meet up with Dorien again to see the building we would use for the night. It had plenty of tables, chairs, room for guests, cooking equipment and all for the right price. We also found an opportunity to have the event sponsored by the CDA in Enschede, a Christian political party. Things were looking really good!

About a week later we had made the flyers and began handing them out to the various places we had been to before. At our first stop, Humanitas, a sort of café for people to come get bread and a warm drink, we met a couple of people we would get to know better. One was a young man whose family came from Morocco. Around we went until we also got to a nicer, or more well-funded, place called Tactus, it was meant to be a place for people with drug addictions. My wife was able to talk with another person there who didn’t think he would come; he said that he used a fake heroin instead of the real drug, most of the time the Christian organization wouldn’t give him any help because of that. He was rather burned by the Church on that point.

There were a lot of ups and downs for us as we went around the city center. Sometimes my wife would feel really good about everything, and then would feel down and nervous. Throughout the day the answer was prayer. Each time we were down and needed encouragement our God was there for us.

At this point God had already pulled us out of quite a bind!

On the day that we meant to take the flyers out we heard that we wouldn’t be able to rent the building! Someone else had already got it, but Dorien was already at work figuring out an alternative plan while we took the time to pray. It felt like the sort of thing that I had felt God do before, but I think this was also the first time for my wife to really feel it with something that was hers. So, we prayed, and again God encouraged us to trust that things would go well.

After several hours we found that it did go well, better than we could have imagined it! Dorien was able to speak with the owner and instead of the lower floor we were able to get the smaller floor above our original building (which meant all of our flyers were still good), we were also able to get a charity price of €20 instead of the original €150, and soon after we heard that the CDA would give us €250 for the event! We expected to be having faith for just having the event, but God swapped up the original idea for an even better venue!

Finally, the night had arrived, several of us were finishing up the hall and setting the last tables as people started to come in. The rest had gone out to invite people from the streets, beginning their invitation with, “Do you have a place to eat tonight?”

It was really cool to see; the lights were all low in the old bar, several party light things moving now and then, and as the people came they would throw their arms out to their friends and shout greetings to one another. Dutch people, whoever they are, seem to like small places rather than big ones and they say it gives them a nice close feeling (they call it gezellig). So, of course, almost everybody crammed around the first table until enough people showed up to fill the next table and so forth.

Soon the place was filled with people from the street and people from the student association talking and having a good time. My wife and I were able to talk with the young man from Morocco again. We spent most of the night with him. We were able to serve a three-course meal of soup, beans and bread, brownies and ice cream for desserts, all followed by some coffee for anyone who wished for it.

We didn’t have any big program in the middle, though we were intending on it, but lessons for times to come, perhaps. What made it a success was that the “homeless people”, so labeled, felt like people enjoying a warm meal with other people. Nobody was turned away and afterwards we heard that they felt like they were able to be themselves. It was an open environment where we could get to know each other and make friends. For that, I would say that it felt like one of the best outreaches to people on the streets that I had ever been a part of.

Oh, to add even another blessing from God’s wisdom, the persons who rented the floor below us turned out to be a decent band. We had music right through dinner!

This morning, as I was thinking about how to write about this event and the preparations for it, I felt that God was telling me to read through the book of Philippians, found in the Bible. Chapter 2, verses 3-11, really stood out to me.

I’ll write more about that later, but you should go check it out for yourselves for now.

Thanks for reading!

In Christ,
The Abiding Kingdom