Wake up, Today is the Day!

“We wake up every morning needing Jesus desperately. What changes our life is when we wake up every morning realizing that we need Jesus desperately and living in His strength every second of the day” –paraphrase from Joni

The second week of my internship consisted of travelling to a Joni and Friends Family Retreat in northern California. I have served at 9 JAF family retreats in the past 6 years so I know that camp is too amazing and surprising to get used to. However at family retreat, I have always encountered a beautiful picture the body of Christ as it was meant to be because camp is a place of complete acceptance and genuine love. It is also a place where I wake up everyday realizing my desperate need for my Savior and realizing that I can only serve in the strength that He provides. Many people talk about JAF camp as a glimpse of heaven, but I agree with one father who said that he saw it as the genuine body of Christ in action on this earth. (if you have any interest, hear more about family retreats! http://www.joniandfriends.org/television/joni-and-friends-family-retreat/ ). I only wish that it was not only at camp each year that the body of Christ displayed this type of acceptance, but the only way I can change that is to start with myself. Family retreat inspires me to persevere in praying and seeking to genuinely accept all people through Christ’s love as He has accepted me!

Marlin was my buddy at Family Retreat this year! He is twelve years old, has a hilarious sense of humor, and loves everything to do with water (from swimming to drinking to washing hands). Marlin has autism and is comforted by schedules so we always went over the plan for each day. But that meant that sometimes we struggled to focus on what was happening right in front of us. So I decided to try to teach him a song that we could sing to help focus on the present. I tried out a few which he quickly dismissed (probably in part because of my below par singing voice). But then, while we were playing at the pool one day we found a song that he liked: “Lean on Me”. I would sing it to him while we played with some of the toys in the quiet room or while we were sitting taking breaks from running around on the lawn. One of the highlights of my week was when I was singing quietly to myself and suddenly I realized Marlin was softly singing all the words with me! Needless to say, after that we had lots of sing-alongs much to both of our delight. The song “Lean on Me” is a touching example of how we can support each other in our times of need. Two are better than one for each can help the other succeed (Ecc. 4:9-12). I have been blessed to experience this type of community in the team of interns with whom I have been learning and serving these two weeks!

 These past few days we have been debriefing and preparing for Haiti and I can finally say that today is the day!! When we arrive, we plan to lead VBS and parent training at a special needs orphanage and at churches in the surrounding area! We have gathered and prepared all the supplies but more importantly we have been preparing our hearts and minds for the work that God will do through us as we seek to strengthen His kingdom in Haiti! We are so excited! Please keep us in your prayers, that we may live according to the Spirit for “to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace” (Romans 8:6), that we will wake up every day recognizing that we need Jesus desperately, and that no matter what obstacles we may face God will shine through us so we might share the hope that “in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us”!! (Romans 8:37)

The Banquet for the Broken

            I wrote this post on our drive up to the Joni and Friends family retreat in Scott’s Valley at Mission Springs last Sunday but I did not realize that once we arrived at camp, I would not have access to Wifi until we arrived back at the hotel in Thousand Oaks late last night, so anyways here is my post from last week! And this week’s post is on the way!

This first week of my internship has been simply and yet extravagantly blessed. When I first learned about this internship, I was uncertain of this week of textbook learning from a book called Beyond Suffering. I prayed that I would have an open mind and let my heart be prepared for the upcoming weeks of service. I could sum up the week by saying that our God is absolutely and incredibly faithful!! But I want to share more than a sentence about everything that I have learned this week so I hope your looking for more than a summary J

            Through my experiences and through the lectures I heard, I grew in my understanding of the importance of stories. My heart is captivated by the stories of the incredible people who surround me. I’ve heard stories of surrender, healing, conviction, passion, trust, and generosity, all of which originate in brokenness. In Luke 14 the Great Host tells us His servants to go out into the alleys and byways to compel the blind and lame, the outwardly broken, to come to His feast so that His house might be full. Now this took a while to fully register for me so I’m going to say it again: Our God wants His house full of people with disabilities! We need humility to admit our own brokenness before we can come in and help fill our Lord’s house, then also we can go out in love to help gather those who feel ill-equipped and invite them to the great banquet for the broken. “The only fitness God requires is that we feel our need of Him!” Praise be to the One who says it’s ok not to be ok, who invites us to come empty so that we may be filled with His grace and love. The community with disabilities is the largest unreached people group in the world, but the fields are ripe for the harvest and the differences between their struggles and ours are not so different as they once seemed.

 God has given each person a story, but in this fast-paced world we can get too caught up in comparison (which so often turns to pride or self pity) and we forget that when we share our stories, we are less likely to criticize or judge and more likely to trust and understand how to best encourage each other. Our stories are often filled with suffering, maybe because “God is not as interested in removing the problems that we see as He is in removing the selfishness to which we are blind”. Suffering could be described as “a splash-over from hell,” and sometimes God might use suffering to grab our attention or wake us up from complacency. But if hard times are a spoonful of hell, then are easy times a spoonful of heaven? No, rather “it is when we find God in the midst of suffering that we taste the joy of being in the presence of God”. For “the more we lean on our Savior, the stronger we find Him to be!”

Nevertheless, it is hard to reconcile the fact that God is all powerful and yet suffering still exists in the world. Timothy Keller once explained this in his book Reason for God saying that if we believe that we have a God big enough to eradicate the world of suffering then we must also believe that we have a God big enough to have a purpose for suffering bigger than our mortal minds can comprehen. When questioned about why she trusts a God that has allowed her to suffer quadriplegia for 40 years Joni responded that she has faith because Jesus knows the pain of this world. He was paralyzed physically when His hands and feet were nailed to the cross, experienced the relational poverty of misunderstanding, betrayal, and rejection and was a homeless wanderer on this earth. And He calls us to follow Him. We need to realize that “the promise of suffering is found in bold not in the fine print when we sign up to be in the army of the Lord”.

Beyond this, our “God is a Healer” as Mike Hoggatt’s daughter proclaims. She a precious little girl whom he and his wife adopted at age 3; she is a cancer survivor and has been diagnosed with autism. I believe that our God is in the business of healing. But to understand that healing, we must understand that God’s value system is not like the value system of this world. Our value in the eyes of God comes from our Savior. God already loves us infinitely and cannot love us any more or any less than He does at this very second. And since our value is based on what God has done, we come back once again to the idea that God invites us into His presence just as we are, with our stories of brokenness and healing. “Suffering is the textbook for learning our own identity” and for bringing us into a place of community. 1 Thessalonians is a story about perseverance through suffering and remaining steadfast through affliction as Paul encourages the church of the Thessalonians. I want to conclude this post as Paul closes his letter:

            “Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely 

and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless

 at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it… 

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you” 

 -1 Thessalonians 5:23-24,28

*Most of the quotes in this post are from when Joni came to speak to us while we were in class at the IDC!

Radically Inclusive

I am excited to start up my blog again to write about this amazing internship opportunity that I am blessed to be a part of for the month of June! This Missions and Ministry internship is through the Cause for Life program with Joni and Friends International Disabilities Center. The past two days have been a lovely whirl-wind of putting faces to names. I have encountered and come to personally know people and places that, prior to Monday, were only familiar to me by way of the words of others. In the short time since I hopped off the plane at LAX, I have been overwhelmingly blessed as I strive to be attentive to the specific ways that the Lord has prepared my heart for this time. My desire is that I may praise Him with purity, love Him deeply, and serve Him faithfully.

            I prayed that our team, all with similar passions and hearts may be encouraging to one another. This prayer I based on Romans 1:12 where Paul expresses his longing to come to the Romans so that they “may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith”. There is a special type of friendship that forms in times like these when we know we have only a month to be in each others company, and I love how people become vulnerable when we know that we have to trust each other in order to form community so that we can minister to others. Our conversations have truly been blessed, and have been an encouragement to us all. In introductions, something that stood out to me but was the beautiful balance in each person’s story between surrender and persistence; each person advancing God’s kingdom to reach this broken world in our own individual way.

            One phrase that remained in my mind after the many lectures and speeches that we heard on Tuesday was “radically inclusive”. This defines God and it should in turn define His church. Joni Eriksson Tada lives this radically inclusive lifestyle in a most beautiful way. On our tour of the IDC, we passed a small side room which beautifully depicted and explained Joni’s story and all the ways that God has allowed her to be His hands and feet even more through her own limited use of her earthly hands and feet. We then passed the radio center hearing more about all the ministry outreaches in which she participates and then walked by her office where we glimpsed through the office window that she was recording video. We passed by, being told that we would get to meet her later, but before we had made it around the next corner she comes out and asks if we had missed her office and welcomed us in with a warm and heartfelt smile. I do not think that Joni will knowingly miss a chance to invite someone in and cover them with the ridiculously radical love of Christ. I want to become more like Christ by learning to live a life full of love and radical inclusion.

            Well, I am off to day 3 but I will update again later!!