She Has All of Her Teeth

"Your teeth are as white as sheep, recently shorn and freshly washed. Your smile is flawless, each tooth matched with it's twin." Song of Solomon 4:2
This is one of my favorite verses (random, I know) for several reasons. The first reason is that I have some kinda messed up teeth, I've always been self conscious about them, and I just adore how Solomon compliments his bride in this way. Second, it speaks to the perfection of the body of Christ, The Hebrew in this verse means "not one is missing". Most of the members of my family do not know the Lord and this verse comforts me to know that when the Bride of Christ stands before Him, not one part of her will be missing. 2 Peter 3:9 says, "The Lord isn't really being slow about His promise as some people think. No, He is being patient for your sake. He does not want anyone to be destroyed, but wants everyone to repent." It's very comforting to know that the lord is in control of saving people. Third, I love this verse because it says "each tooth matched with it's twin." Recently the Lord has been showing me how he has knit His body together. It is an amazing thing to hear the same things coming out of the mouths, lives, and minds of our dear brethren around the world. It speaks to His magnitude when people we haven't seen in over a year and spoken to sparsely during that time can come to us and we are all on the same page.
Our missionary friend, Warren, left for Kenya for sixteen months yesterday. Unfortunately between packing and saying goodbye to family, phone tag was less than effective and it wasn't until two hours after he had left his final message that we actually received it. My husband and I wept as we heard his voice for the last time tearfully encouraging us in the Lord and asking us to pray as he was fearful. My husband called him back and left him a message just hoping that maybe he would hear it eventually. We turned to the Lord and put our trust in Him. We committed our dear friend into the hands of his Father and will continue to do so as the months go by. What we do not doubt is that when we see Warren again, while he will be different, we will be the same kind of different. Because His bride has perfect teeth, each one matched with it's twin. What a glorious and mighty God we serve!

A Call to Die

Let's start at the beginning: When I was....about 16 years old, I became a disciple of Jesus Christ. I had been a believer for a while, but it wasn't until I was 16 that I truly began to seek hard after the heart and the will and the glory of the Lord. At this time in my life, the Lord began to impress on me the bigness of the world. That there were floating villages in Peru, skyscrapers in China, secret coves in places I can't even pronounce, places and people and lives all happening simultaneously with mine, and the Lord knew every bit of it. I fell in love with the idea of travel, something that up until that point in my life had been something I never would have dreamed of doing. At this point in my life, it became a very distinct yearning to go and to see all of these places to find myself in a land completely foreign to myself and everything I had ever known. This surely was nothing short of romantic fantasy, a longing for adventure and danger, at this point I simply desired to be well traveled and well cultured. Shortly hereafter though, the Lord gave me an image in my mind of the world as a dark place. Where His children were gathered was bright with the Light of His Presence, for instance a church gathering or a worship service would be positively luminescent with all of the little lights shining brightly all together. At the same time, however, He showed me that with all of these little lights together, one tiny light wasn't going to make all that much difference. Like if you were to take one grain of sand from the beach, one wouldn't even notice it was gone. If you put that same grain of sand in someone's eye however, they will take note. In the same way, the Lord told me that a little light could make a world of difference to a very dark place. He called me to take the light of His gospel to the darkest places I could find. This floored me, I had never even considered the possibility of myself as a missionary. I just wanted to be the normal Christian, ministering to the people I worked with, raising a family, and going to church twice a week. "Missionary" was a foreign word to me and at first, I didn't even want to claim it. I decided that United Market Street (where I worked at the time) was the darkest place around and I was just supposed to share His light there (come to find out, while I was supposed to be faithful in this way and the Lord did want me to share Him with those around me, United Market Street is rather alight with people who call on the Name of the Lord). So, I struggled greatly with this call for awhile, not really being sure of what it meant. The Lord was so gracious to put around me the best possible influences: my two best friends, Katie Bobbitt and my now husband Brandon who had both received similar callings. Together we searched the scriptures, prayed earnestly, and tried to live in a missional way that was pleasing to the Lord in the meantime. My friend Katie got her answer in the form of a call to serve in Uganda. Brandon and I at this point decided that maybe we were supposed to serve in Africa as well as his best friend Warren had also been called to Uganda. Wherever we were supposed to go, the Lord never let us doubt that we were to go. During this time, the Lord called me yet again to a life of not-normalness. It was literally a violent ripping away of myself and my heart from the world and it's offerings: I had to chose between a life of reckless abandon to my Royal Husband, or a boy who claimed he loved me. After struggling for months over this decision, in a heartbeat, I was won over by the call on my life. I remember telling my mom the night I broke up with this kid "I can't live in a nice house with a minivan and a white picket fence and a little dog and five kids. I wasn't made for that". The Lord called me away from normalcy. I later married my best friend Brandon, which I never would have done had we not shared the same call and the same passion for Jesus. At the time our hearts were very hard, we stubbornly told the Lord we would go anywhere as long as He didn't tell us to stay in Amarillo. This showed our hearts and He really had to break us down on this point. It had become less about glorifying the Lord and more about leaving our po-dunk town behind and living an adventure, we were behaving much in the same way as I had when the Lord showed me the bigness of the world. We wanted to go for going's sake, not for the Lord's or the gospel's. Recently, (praise Him!) He has broken us, transformed our minds, and caused so great a surrender in our hearts and minds that we both were brought to a place where if we were called to serve in Amarillo for the rest of our lives, we would do it with a love for the gospel on our tongues and a song in our heart, praising the Lord and serving Him wholeheartedly. At the same time, through studying the gospels, the book of Acts and 1 Corinthians together, we began to feel a burden for the unreached. Those 6,000 or so people groups that are perishing daily without ever having heard the name of Jesus Christ and His gospel. Brandon and I have loved Asia for a long time. If I could go anywhere in the world right now, it would be China. I LOVE China! I was fortunate enough to go there a couple of years ago and have since become slightly obsessed with the Chinese underground church. They have experienced the biggest church growth in history-I find this fascinating, but am assured that China needs no help from foreign missionaries. Someone once asked "Why should anyone hear the gospel twice when there are those who have not heard it once?" The other night the Lord showed us that He wants us to shed our blood for the gospel in Asia. I know there are people like K.P. Yohannan who claim that foreign missionaries are not needed in Asia, and I think he has a great point. There are places in Asia where foreign missionaries simply are not allowed to go, at which point national missionaries and evangelists are necessary. However, Romans asks the question "How then can they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they are sent?" Romans 10:14-15. The fact is that two out of every three people alive on earth lives in Asia. There are 100,000 missionaries in the world, and only 2% work among people groups classified as "unreached". 70% of Asians have never even heard the name of my sweet savior. The harvest is ready, but the workers are few. Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission once said "The Great Commission is not a possibility to be considered, it is a command to be obeyed." As disciples of Christ who have been called to go into the darkest corners of this earth with the Light of Christ, we find that the darkest corners exist in the House of Buddha and the House of Mohamed among the Asian nations. In some of these places, evangelism is completely outlawed. In Tibet for example, the Buddhists who are typified as being peaceful and accepting have a past soaked in the blood of martyrs who gave their lives to see their killers saved. If I have to die, I would die a martyr, but that is not why we go. We pray that the Lord's Spirit would be poured out on us that we may witness boldly to the Truth and that we may give a courageous testimony as we seek to know only Christ and Him crucified. Please pray with us for the Lord to lead us and for us to know Him more. May the Lamb that was slain receive the reward for His suffering!!!

May It Not Return Void

Today we took my students to a conference in Lubbock, TX. I had been praying that the Lord would bless it. I have the privilege of working in what is probably the most economically, socially, ethnically, and spiritually diverse school in my city, so I knew that my students have been raised in strikingly different religions or faith systems, or whatever you want to call it ranging from Pentecostal to Mormon to Muslim. With this knowledge and having pretty good relationships all around, I took the initiative to strike up a conversation with one of my students regarding his religion. He answered all of my questions as a young man who was very informed about the teachings of Mormon, and strikingly misinformed regarding the Bible which is what Mormonism claims to be based on. He seemed a little nervous as I asked honest questions that I have had for a long time about his faith (I turned out to be slightly misinformed on a few points)even laughing to us that "Gosh, it sounds like it's a cult or something". I was surprised by his honesty and blessed to hear the Spirit speaking through me Truth over the lies that his religion has taught him. The old lie is still alive and kicking and it made me sad to hear this bright young man talking about someday him, being able to create life. That he would one day be the same as Jesus. The old lie, by the way, being that we can become like God, the lie that the serpent deceived Eve with in the Garden, the old lie that has become the new age as I heard one pastor say of the teachings of Eckhart Tolle and the "Church of O". This is why the Bible says that we are to "walk humbly with our God" and the world says to "Walk proudly with our heads held high". The Lord has been challenging me to ask Him to make Himself more real to me than He has ever been. I pray this over every brother and sister I know as well and also for this world in general. When we stand before the Lord in judgement, there will be no doubt that the words from the, ahem, epic tale of Rudy hold true "There is a God, and I am not Him". This is something that I have to keep reminding myself of, and even more that He is not what I make Him, that my ideas of the Lord are not necessarily what He is. That I have at least to some degree up until this point been at least in part, in love with my idea of God, and not necessarily with Who He is. I want so desperately to know Him and to be known by Him. Even today, as I have been walking with the Lord for over four years now, I feel like a baby Christian, like I'm just now beginning to start to get ready to begin making some progress in getting down to the nitty gritty with the Lord. That's cool and scary and sweet...and scary! I hope and pray that the Lord would clear up the thorns of my ideas, cleanse me of all unrighteousness and transform my mind to be in love with Him in truth. I pray that the conversations that went on today between myself and my students and my students and my other students would at least make them think. His Word never returns void, I pray it wouldn't return void in me. I've been really off- subject-y here maybe, but I said what I needed to.