My Moldova Adventure

My Moldova Adventure

by | Jul 12, 2016 | Justice and Mercy International, Missions, Moldova

Hello friends!

I hope you’re enjoying summer as much as I am. I’m loving the slower and more relaxed pace. I’m realizing I’ve needed it. For this July edition of our newsletter, I thought I’d tell you about a trip to Moldova I just took with Justice and Mercy International. Some of you who are familiar with me know I work with JMI in the Amazon (I wrote a little book about it called Wherever The River Runs), but I’ve also made three trips to Moldova with JMI. In case you’re wondering, Moldova is a small country that sits between Romania and Ukraine, roughly the size of Maryland. I only mention this geographical tidbit because before I had friends who regularly went there, I’m pretty sure I’d never heard of it.

I was a very small part of helping put on vacation bible school in a village that managed to turn out 150 of the cutest clamoring kids nipping at your heels for crayons and more plăcintăs (a Moldovan pastry), chirping in Romanian and occasionally a phrase or two in Russian. Yes, chaos is the word you’re rummaging for.

So, why VBS in Moldova, you ask?

Gosh, I’m so glad you brought this up.

Moldova has a grossly high percentage of girls who are sex trafficked out of the country, a high suicide rate for boys, and an enormously alarming orphan population. To combat this terrifying reality, JMI helps orphans and vulnerable children through its child sponsorship program. Many of these children we’re able to identify through our yearly camps. One of my greatest privileges of the year is sharing the Gospel with these children through Scripture and through all the ways a game, a skit, and a plastic cup of orange Fanta says “I love you.” But summer camps are just the beginning.

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When these children turn 16, whether in or out of the orphanages, many have nowhere to go. And if they do have a place to go, the scenario is usually horrifying. I’ve heard these kids’ stories firsthand and they’re too gruesome for me to write about here. But here’s the hope. Here’s why I love VBS in Moldova. Because JMI has two homes—one for girls called Grace House and one for boys called Boys to Leaders—that house 15 teenagers respectively for anywhere from two to three years. This isn’t just about shelter, this is about a home. These girls and boys are welcomed into a family where they learn life skills, flourish in school, receive counseling, go to church, get discipled, and learn about the love of Jesus through His Word. The transformation of these kids is nothing short of miraculous. As my friend Steve likes to say, I’d put these kids up against any kids in the world.

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Now, for the moment of my trip that impacted me the most. The little girl on the right in the picture above was in my bible study group. Her name is Nastea (I changed her name). My friend Brittany and I asked her the question, if she could go anywhere in the world where would she go? Without hesitation she said, “Moscow”.

“Why Moscow”?  I asked.

“Because that’s where my mom lives.”

Nastea hadn’t seen her mother in almost a year and she doesn’t know who her father is. This would be a pretty bleak story except for the girl on the left. Her name is Alla (you can watch her story here). Alla grew up in an orphanage. She intimately knows Nastea’s plight, her void, her aching loneliness. Alla also spent several weeks at vacation bible school during the summer, which is how JMI connected with her. When she was just sixteen and being thrust out of the orphanage, JMI reached out to her and she entered the Grace House. And all of life changed. She met Christ, received love, and is blooming like the cutest red headed bud you ever saw. For the past three years she’s been serving with us at the very camps she grew up in.

When Nastea told Alla and me how much she missed her mom, how she didn’t know when she was coming back, and how all the others kids have moms and dads, I turned to Alla and whispered, “this one is yours”.

I don’t know exactly what Alla said to Nastea because it was all in Romanian. But when I took two steps back to snap this picture, I realized I understood everything I needed to know. This is how the good news of the Gospel spreads. When Jesus rescues our life and we go and tell about it, and someone like Alla hears the news, she then in turn finds another little one on whose shoulders she places both her hands, and in a language I can’t begin to speak to a child whose story I can’t begin to understand, she says, “God loves you.”

And that’s why I do VBS in Moldova.

For more information about Justice and Mercy International, you can visit www.justiceandmercy.org.

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A Birthday and Three Gifts of God’s Faithfulness

A Birthday and Three Gifts of God’s Faithfulness

by | Sep 21, 2015 | Encouragement, Morning Meditation

Morning Meditation, September 21, 2015

 “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” Lamentations 3:22-23

I turn a year older this week. What is it about birthdays, especially the adulthood ones that make you reflect on God’s faithfulness? Cherish it, actually. Realize you wouldn’t be here without it. Last night I sat on a friend’s porch over dinner with two of my closest, longest-time friends. We were working on putting the final pieces together for Justice and Mercy International’s Benefit Gala (an organization I partner with in the Amazon), and it suddenly hit me—that we’re the adults in the room. We plan stuff. People occasionally want our opinion. I don’t know exactly how or when I got old enough for this to happen.

The marker of another year causes me to look back on the path from whence I’ve come, aware that all my choices for obedience don’t add up to having gotten me to where God has brought me. In other words, grace fueled any obedience I can claim and made up for everything else. All of us have glimpsed around the room of our lives—be it a job we never dreamed would be ours, a child so unique we couldn’t have imagined him or her up, the ministry calling so beyond us—and realized we just couldn’t haven woven all this together, not to mention redeeming the bad stuff for good. When it comes down to it, there’s really just one word to describe God’s hand on our lives: Faithfulness.

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The prophet Jeremiah points to three facets of God’s faithfulness:

We Are Not Consumed

We have not been snuffed out by our guilt and shame and selfishness. I admit the idea of, awesome, I haven’t been consumed today is not the first grace I think of when I consider God’s love. Still, Jeremiah’s words are both sobering and relieving. My sin could have taken me out a few different times—or as my friend likes to say in Old Testament terms, I could have gotten smote. So just the reality that I am writing these words, and you dear sister are reading them, says we do this because we have not been consumed. Because we are alive. Because of His great love for us.

His Compassions Never Fail

There’s just no telling who or where I’d be right now, or what my community would look like, if the Lord’s compassions were to have failed me at any point. They would have had only fail for a moment, at the wrong time, for things to look so very different. You may feel the same. I think in my younger years I presumed upon the Lord’s compassions, as if they were there for me like oxygen—paradoxically too plentiful to be seen as a treasure. But now I realize God’s never failing compassions are why I have anything at all. As I become more aware of the fragility of life, I am keener to the reality of His mercies. The fact that Almighty God bows His head toward us with compassions is deeply meaningful, but the fact that these compassions never fail is what keeps us alive.

His Mercies Are New Every Morning

It’s the daily dose of His morning mercies piled up from thousands of daily servings that have, one by one, carried me to today. Carried us all here. If the Lord had dolled out His mercies in one lump sum I may have used them all up, clean gone. If there were a limit to His tenderness, I may have outrun it. But every morning brings a fresh batch out of the oven. They are new. They are here today. They will rise on the wings of the dawn tomorrow.

So this week I will turn another year older. I’m looking forward to being with family and friends and perhaps strawberry cake. And I will breathe deeply these surroundings because I have not been consumed, because God’s compassions are present and they do not fail, and because His mercies will be new that morning, and every morning for as many days as God gives me.

Great is His faithfulness.

 

 

 

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Three Ways to Help Our Children Love God’s Commands

Three Ways to Help Our Children Love God’s Commands

by | Sep 7, 2015 | Encouragement, Morning Meditation

Morning Meditation, September 7th, 2015

 Deuteronomy 6:6-7, “These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.”

The social media back-to-school pictures are reminding me of my own days of spiffy lunch boxes and snappy new shoes, the backpacks that look like they’re carrying adults in them. My favorite post to date is this picture of my friend Martin. Please love this with me.

We get so much less applause as we get older

We get so much less applause as adults.

I should begin by saying that I am not a mother, but I was a child once. And I have nieces and nephews who I hope will one day look after me, so all this has to count for something. In this post when I speak of “our children”, I mean the ones we’ve birthed, adopted, or who simply hold dear places in our lives.

Deuteronomy 6:6-7 tells us to teach these little ones as we go along the road, all the time. Little of this manner of teaching will be the stuff of chalk and blackboard. It will rather be lived by example in all the places where everyday life meets our faith. Out in those wide-open spaces and in the quiet corners of our houses, where our children will see what we really believe based on how we really act.

1. Our Children Will Only Want What Comes From Our Hearts

Before God told the Israelites to impress His commandments on their children, He told them to make sure those commandments had first landed on their hearts. This is the difference between regulation and relationship—and our children can discern between the two. So much of what I learned about God’s ways was by watching how my Mom and Dad’s faith colored every area of their lives, both public and private. God’s commands weren’t merely a to-do list they kept up with, or a behavior management metric, they were a heartfelt conviction. Even if they didn’t always get it right, I knew their faith was real. When they were lying down or getting up.

2. We Can Only Talk Conversationally About What We Know Experientially

Revel in the nearness and practicality of what it means to share with our children about God’s ways through every movement—sitting, walking, lying down, getting up. It was never hard for my parents to talk about what it meant for them to live according to God’s commands because they’d had history with them. They had stories to tell us about how sometimes they wanted to respond to that critical person in anger, but they chose love instead; how when it seemed advantageous to shade the truth, they decided for honesty. Their faith spoke into their daily experience and those experiences left them with stories they could talk about. Whenever we sat down.

3. Our Instruction Should Be As Natural As Breathing, But As Pointed As An Arrow

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The word “impress” in the original language—as in “impress upon their hearts”—means to pierce or sharpen a sword. I get the idea that the way I pass down God’s instructions to the children in my life should be able to cut through all the fuzz and blur of ambiguity and deception. (Hebrews 4:12 says God’s Word is sharper than a double edged sword, able to divide between soul and spirit). A child can tell if I’m simply repeating religious rhetoric or if I’m speaking meaningful wisdom that transcends their circumstances. My Mom used to pray with my brother when she drove him to elementary school—teaching along the way—and he can still tell you the specific answered prayers that came to pass during those years. Those were penetrating experiences for him where God’s Word pierced into his reality.

As another school year begins, may we teach our children from the heart, teach from experience, and impress God’s truth on their souls—all along the way. Because His commands are meant for every road we’ll ever walk on.

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