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5 Lessons Learned

Reach into your pocket or purse and pull out your keychain.  Look at your keys and they just might reveal quite a bit about your life.  Your work, your home, your car(s), maybe your church, your boat (or other toys) . . .

Just a few short weeks ago, my keychain (a carabiner) was empty.  Zero!  Nada.  Kind of refreshing, kind of weird.  My keychain was symbolic of a huge transition point in my life.  I had just spent over 18 years in ministry in France.  Although my full-time involvement in ministry would continue, I would be based in the United States.

God’s Word gives us words of wisdom when we come to crossroads in life.  Jeremiah 6:16 puts it this way:

This is what the LORD says:

“Stand at the crossroads and look;ask for the ancient paths,ask where the good way is, and walk in it,

and you will find rest for your souls.

But how do we find “the good way”?  One approach to finding “the good way,” as we face an unfamiliar future, is to glean from what we have learned from the past, from experience.  My eighteen years in France have taught me a few lessons.  They are nothing new and I could have read about them in a book.  But I learned them through my life experience.

Lesson 1.  The need is not the call.

“Why go overseas when there are so many needs right here in the US?”  Yup, I’ve been asked the question more than once.  True, Europe is the spiritual “Dark Continent,” but, if we are honest, there are needs everywhere.

I’m sure the Apostle Paul was asked more than once why he spent his time going off to the gentiles when there were so many needs “at home”.  The answer -- because that is what he was called by God to do.  And just because there were needs at home doesn’t mean he was called to stay.  I’ve seen many who have tried to minister in a context just because there was a need.  Most don’t last very long.

But why is responding to God’s call on our lives so important?  Because itʼs not just about what God is doing through us in ministry, it is about what God is doing in us. Yes, we are God’s servants, but we are first and foremost his disciples.  International Teams USA has a mission statement:  “We bring people together to help the oppressed”.  The oppressed are the poor, the slave and the blind (spiritually).  They need food, freedom and forgiveness.  But so do I and so do you.

The reality is that International Teams brings oppressed people together in order to help the oppressed.  God uses broken people to help broken people.  When Anna and I look back at these 18 years in France, we remember what God has done in us much more than what he has done through us.

As we look forward to the next chapter of our lives and seek to follow “the good way” here in the USA, we seek to honor God’s call on our lives.  What has God called you to?

Lesson 2.  Godʼs math is not our math

Yes, 1 plus 1 equals 2.  But 2 fish and 5 loaves doesn’t feed 5000 men by a long shot.  Yet this is the only miracle Jesus performed that is recorded in all four Gospels.  Maybe God wants us to understand something basic to the way in which He works.  Now let’s talk about God’s math relative to money.  I know this is only lesson 2 but money is the second most talked about subject in the Gospels.  There are reasons for that.  We have strong feelings about the way in which we spend our money (God’s money), but we often have stronger feelings about how others spend their money (God’s money again).

Why serve in a country where it costs over $100 to fill up a Honda?  And if we think in terms of efficiency, value for money, why serve in a country where you count changed lives in the ones instead of the tens or the hundreds as some do in Africa?  But we canʼt think that way because the need is not the call.  And where God has called us, He will provide.  Godʼs designs often look unattainable and non strategic.  Following “the good way” requires our believing God’s math, not our own.  Is your vision a reflection of your math or God’s math?

Lesson 3.  Lean years in ministry are not wasted years, lean years are preparatory years to bountiful years.

Scripture is full of leaders who have spent significant time in the “desert”.  Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Paul . . .   It is the norm, not the exception.  It isn’t always fun and it feels like you are just “doing time”.  But God has His reasons and they often revolve around teaching us a good dose of humility.

My colleague Mark Soderquist says he spent a decade in inner-city Chicago before seeing significant fruit for his ministry.  Anna and I spent 13 years praying that God would show us “the fruit of our labor”.  Of course we saw lives changed and God at work.  But the dividends didn’t seem to match up with the effort invested.  Then for the next 5 years, things started “clicking” and “coming together”.  I felt more productive in the last five than I did in the first 13 put together. 

Would I want to relive those 13 years when at times I felt like “throwing in the towel”.  Nope!  But I hung in there because I was called, not because I was responding to a need.  God was doing more in me than he was through me.  And besides, God’s math was different from mine.  Am I a better man for having gone through those years in the wilderness?  Absolutely!

Has God led you out of your desert years yet?  Sooner or later, He will.  In the meantime, embrace the calling he has given you.  The higher the calling, the longer the period of preparation is likely to be.  The good way is to recognize that we are all a work in progress.  God is working on us as he works through us.

Lesson 4.  The way to the mind is through the heart, not the reverse.

Ok, I’ll admit it.  I love facts and I love a good debate.  But that is a dangerous cocktail if you are sharing your faith with a friend.  I once would have thought that convincing someone intellectually of certain realities would lead them to having a change of heart.  But it rarely works that way.

This all crystalized in my mind in June.  I was in a place where Jesus often was:  at a party surrounded by a bunch a people who had had too much alcohol.  In Jesus’ case, he was after that one life-changing conversation with that one person.  He went to them, on their turf in order to find His lost sheep.  Picture the scene.  Great food, good music pumping and a room full of successful, affluent professionals who have it all and yet are desperately empty.  In this sea of superficiality, I felt led to meet Bernard.  Somehow through our conversation, he felt as though I cared more about him than I did trying to convince him of some theological truth.  I didn’t have an agenda.  I just had the whole evening to hear his heart, listen to his pain, hear his fears and questions about God.  And then it happened.  All of a sudden the high-level-BMW-driving executive whom I had just met an hour previous got choked up and his eyes welled up in tears.  Finally someone had seen him, not the persona but the person.  God had given me the strength to just humbly listen and ask good questions.  The walls came down and the real Bernard came through.

You’ve probably heard the expressions “It is hard to relate theologically to someone to whom you can’t relate socially” and “People don’t care what you know until they know that you care”.  Bernard said “I don’t know who I can go to in order to have conversations like this.”   He did ask me some tough questions (head).  But I had earned the right to be heard because I had first spoken to his heart.  I could encourage him on his journey TO faith because he saw that I was on a journey OF faith.  

What is more important to you:  What you say or how you say it?  A few years ago, Bernard might have rejected my message because I would have appealed to his head, before winning his heart.  Learn from my mistakes.

Lesson 5.  The opposite of poverty (economic poverty, spiritual poverty, emotional poverty, etc.) is not wealth, the opposite of poverty is community.

Sometimes all it takes is one simple event for the light to come on in your mind.  This happened to me just a few months ago as I was in the parking lot of a shopping center.  There was a beggar outside on a cold day and I had a Euro coin in my pocket.   My though was “this guy needs a whole lot more than a euro but I’ll give it to him anyway.”  I reached into my pocket, grabbed the euro and extended my hand out to him.  In retrospect, I must have had a smile on my face as I greeted him with a “hello”.

Again, picture the scene.  I am clean and standing up greeting him with a smile.  He is sitting on the filthy ground.  I expected him to reach for the euro coin in my left hand.  Then it happened.  He smiled, reached out with his right hand and grabbed my right hand.  He didn’t go for my money, he went to shake my hand!  After a brief discussion he did end up gratefully taking my euro.  But that was not what he was ultimately after.  He was a human being who was reveling in being treated as a human being if even for a short minute.

Back to the mission statement of ITUSA, “We bring people together to help the oppressed”.  The real nugget in that statement is in the first four words, “we bring people together”.  We all suffer from some sort poverty.  Either way, the effect is the same.  Isolation and separation!  Poverty separated him from me.  But it also separated me from him.  Paul says in Ephesians that Christ has “made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.”  I knew this already, intellectually, but it took this beggar to give me a “whack on the side of the head” for me to assimilate it.

What about you?  Who in your life is waiting for you to kick down the barriers and restore relationship?You might have noticed that all five of these life lessons involve contrasts between:

The need and the call, Our math and God’s math,Lean years and bountiful years, The mind and the heart, Poverty and community.

In the Gospels, Jesus often contrast two opposing realities. The one gives greater meaning to the other.  Light has significance only when contrasted with darkness.  It is only when we are found that we realize how lost we really were.  An empty keychain only feels empty when we are used to having a bunch of keys on it.  Speaking of my keychain, I now have a few keys on it again.  As I enter into  my unfamiliar future, I hope I can “ask where the good way is, to walk in it and to find rest for my soul”.