Arrested: Beautifully Engaged

Hey Folks! I am recently back from missionary training in Colorado…talk about 5 Weeks of “wow!” Surprisingly, this training focused in on the heart of the participant (Missionaries heading to all corners of the globe).
Topics of discussion and study ranged from conflict styles, spiritual growth, emotional wellbeing, grief, etc. The training was filled to the brim with topics designed to make us Western missionaries think in a different way.

What changed my life:

1) Conflict: I know I am a consummate avoider of conflict. Yet, like most of us, I have never been challenged with the damage my confrontation style generates. I have new tools now. This is Good.


2) Grieving: For some reason, while I emote in a blog, I am forever hiding any demonstrative grief about leaving my family, friends, home, and country for strangers and Fiji. While in training I, along with my comrades, had an opportunity to explore the grief, fear, expectations, and tears that sit in our gut. Now, ask me how I feel about leaving. I will tell you I am excited…but never have I been more uncomfortable in my life. I am filled with anxiety that I keep handing to God because I am tired of it; this anxious feeling is heavy. Good thing my Papa-God’s shoulders are wide. This is Very Good.


3) Community: Few will receive the privilege God has granted me. For 5 weeks I lived with, cried with, laughed, became upset with, and spent veritably every blithering waking moment with 40 individuals who come from all walks of life. Enter men and women, young and old, single and married who have vastly different styles of worship and theological preferences; whom all love Jesus with desperation. Oh, the wisdom! Oh the stories of experience and heartbreak and change.

Oh, my Jesus, the beauty of dirty prisoners robed in Your righteousness. And they go all over with a message: Jesus saves. They will feed, bring water, create business, raise children, run camps, teach, rescue the molested. Live and live and live. What stunning Good. So Good.

And so I am home. For Now.

What now? I get to wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Good to know that God is good to those who wait on Him, whom seek Him .Lamentations 3:25

Okay, waxing poetic is complete :-) I am waiting on a call from my sending agency that says I am 100% funded for the funds I need to live. I am about $200 shy of what I need. Once I have this last $200 a month coming in I can buy my plane ticket and leave.

Fears, Anxieties, and Audacity.

I and my thin Phoenix-blood have been calling Palmer Lake, near Colorado Springs home for nearly two weeks now, and will yet be calling this town home for three and a half more.

I am here with 39 other missionaries attending a program bent on preparing us for the mission field. A heavy task this is. Instead of boring you with details of what I am learning here, allow me to share my mind.

Fear. I am fearful. I cannot explain the inner turmoil, the paradox of the excitement and joy of leaving overseas soon, a date that is so near, to the disquiet of leaving my family that has been such a necessary unit for the past year and a half. I am fearful in leaving my steadfast and stalwart support system of mentors and friends. Leaving what is common and safe and known for a place where I have no friends, little knowledge and confidence. God help me; I am scared.

Anxiety. I am anxious for the loneliness I believe will come with leaving such dear ones in the US. Who will call me when I am gone? Who can I vent frustrations to when my day is done? Who is going to celebrate the joys with me? Who will read my face and know when I am upset, simply because they know me well? Who will hold and hug me? Who will laugh with me? God help me; I am anxious.

Audacity. Who am I that I am this audacious to believe I can help, understand, live with, and not be torn asunder by the lives and stories of the women and children I will come to love? I am comfortable with the concept that it is my Jesus who must do the work, but am I able to step aside and be an instrument for Him whom heals? God help me; I am bold without any right to be.

And so I sit in this passage:

God's loyal love couldn't have run out,
his merciful love couldn't have dried up.
They're created new every morning.
How great your faithfulness!
I'm sticking with God (I say it over and over).
He's all I've got left.

God proves to be good to the one who passionately waits,
to the one who diligently seeks.
It's a good thing to quietly hope,
quietly hope for help from God.

Lamentations 3:22-26a [The Message]

America's Hidden Sex Slaves

Hi friends…I thought I would share this news article with you. Many of us in the West, while knowing about prostitution, are misguided by the notion that Human Trafficking, and in particular, Sex Trafficking is a problem found in 3rd world nations. Read an excerpt from The New York Times article by Nicholas Kristof found in The Week magazine…

Mention America’s “sex-trafficking” industry and most people think of foreign women smuggled into the country, said Nickolas Kristof. In fact, many sex slaves are “homegrown runaway kids.” Just last month, police in Laurel Md., freed 12-year-old girl who’d been imprisoned by a 42 –year-old man who was pimping her out from Washington D.C., to Atlantic City. Two days later, police discovered three other young women being held under threat of death at a motel a block away. So how widespread is this horror?

Thousands of underage American girls are involved in prostitution here; the typical case involves a terrified runaway who is picked up at a bus or train station by a pimp, who often offers her a meal, a place to stay, and convinces her he loves her. “The next thing she knows, she’s having sex with four men a night and all the money is going to her ‘boyfriend.’”

Due to a mix of fear, hopelessness, and “shattered self-esteem,” the girls don’t run away, and law enforcement does not consider them a top priority. Until cops get serious about arresting both pimps and johns, more young girls will become chattel in this distinctly American form of “21st-century slavery.”

I "Heart" Updates...

At the moment I am a hair’s-breadth from being fully funded. At most, all I need is about $100-$150 more a month to be fully funded.

So, here are my up and coming plans:
-My mom, brother (Peter), and myself will take a last-hurrah vacation in October to simply enjoy each other. Then on the 18th of October I will report to Colorado Springs for 5 weeks of missions training.

-Upon completing this training I believe I will be fully funded and able to buy a plane ticket to Fiji.
Enter dilemma Number One: To leave before Christmas or to leave after Christmas; I have not quite decided which I will choose. I will wait and see and make a decision as the time draws nearer.
Regardless, by the 1st of the year it is my hope to be in Fiji or in-route.

-My Visa or Permit to Reside in Fiji is on its way-thus making my 3 year temporary residence in the Fiji Islands a shoe-in. Rock on!

Visa!

Alright folks…The permit that is necessary for me to move, live, and work in the Fiji Islands has been approved!

Currently, Homes of Hope is waiting for the paperwork to be fully processed, and then they can pick it up for me. Thus, the only thing keeping me from leaving right now is the last of the funds I need to move, live, and work there.

Thanks for praying with me, and praise Jesus; He does all things.

Here. There. Everywhere...

I have just returned from a jog around the country this past month. From St. Louis and Town and Country, Missouri to visit West Hills Community Church…you guys are forever patient and welcoming. And you always give me AMAZING food! May I one day get to make you amazing hot dogs, or something equally lame because I can never be as good a cook as you all.

Then to visit South Carolina to hang with family and have a meeting or two…Man oh man, it’s like a sauna there.

Finally to Bass Lake, near Fresno, California to visit with my family at The Little Church in the Pines. And thanks to the generosity of Little Church I am about $600shy of my monthly monetary needs to live in Fiji.

Conceivably, dear friends, I can meet the necessary financial goals by the end of this month. I am thrilled to see what God will do.
I have to admit, a month ago, I was thinking I might be hanging around till next Spring before I could move to Fiji. Yet, it looks like God has different ideas and might have me there this Fall.

My efforts now are pressing forward to get the final $400 and to get my Visa, or “Permit to Work” in Fiji. I have already submitted all the necessary paperwork, and my partnership at Homes of Hope is waiting to pick it up for me.

Here’s some prayer request if you are so inclined to throw me at God in conversation:
Please pray for the final funds and permit to come through-I know it will in God’s time. So instead, just pray for me to be patient and diligent in the meantime :)

Pray that I remain submitted to God, seeking Him, at His feet.

Please, please, pleeeease PRAY for my youngest brother, Alex, a Marine, who at this moment is in the Middle East with his comrades in arms.

And, onward, here, there, and everywhere…

Sex Slave

Considering the work I want to do in the area of Sex Trafficking in the South Pacific, I find it odd that I have not yet seen the movie Taken (2008). I watched the film for the first time this past weekend.



In short, the film is about an American teen-aged girl who is kidnapped in Europe to be sold at auction as a sex slave. The girl’s father is able to find his daughter and her abductors. Daddy saves his little girl. Daddy meets out justice. Daddy saves the day. Great movie.


Overly dramatic in ways, the parallels to this film and what actually happen in our world are nonetheless stunning. Right this moment there is a young person somewhere who is forced into the furthest reaches of human depravity-she is treated as only a body, a number.
In this movie the happy ending was heralded with daddy’s arrival. Yet, the few true “happy endings” are of girls whose daddys never arrive in time. Her daddy never shows up.


Justice is that there is a Daddy, Abba God, who knows. He is in the pits with this girl, and to Him she is precocious beyond all creation. She has a name. And just as our God provides for me and my family, just as He puts food on your table and keeps you in clothing, He will provide for her.


I am glad. Time to work. May we take part in God’s portion that will bring Justice. May we never sit by when He calls us to change the world, one beloved person at a time.

Back in Business

Me and Mom


Well, it’s official as possible for the time being.
I am preparing for work in the Fiji Islands. For those of you who have been in touch with me, you have been aware, to some extent that I have been working my way towards moving to Fiji in order to do ministry with women and children. For those of you who are short on details, here’s the skinny:
Last summer I was gifted with the opportunity to visit a ministry near the capitol city, Suva, in Fiji. The ministry there is a residential community wherein several missionary families work to provide prevention and awareness, rescue, and rehabilitation to women and children rescued from sex trafficking. This ministry is Homes of Hope.
Homes of Hope and I put our heads together to see if I could have a role and fill a place there, in Fiji. The resounding answer: Yes. So, after praying all last fall, I came to a point of readiness in February, and I started moving forward.
With some prayer and God’s timing in the bag, I will be looking at moving to Fiji late this summer or next fall. What I have to do now is build my support base back up. Last year, when I made the decision for a year-long hiatus after my dad’s death, most of my financial supporters went on hiatus with me at my request. Now I need to get everyone back on board so I can be financially stable while living in Fiji.

…Okay, there are all the dry details. What really is going on in my head…

I do not think I could have imagined this past year.
To go from Nigeria, to a sudden trip home due to my dad’s unexpected death, living with the reality of life without him, and knowledge that nothing will ever be as it was. One might think that you get over such feelings. Sure, the ache eases, and I smile, and joy fills the day, and there is light. Oh, what light. But just last night, I found myself brushing my teeth, and I wandered into my parents’ adjoining closet. I’ve been in there a lot, maybe because I can still smell my dad in this one place. Their closet has changed shape these past months due to the fact that my mom has begun to pack my dad’s clothes away to give to a local charity. Yet, in this one moment, as I brushed my teeth, it was not the emptied side that made my heart stutter. For a moment, for one moment, I heard my dad’s voice. Not clear, like he was actually speaking, but I heard the memory of it. How it penetrated and resonated, how it soothed because it was constant and represented safety. For that split second, as the carpet was in jeopardy of tooth-paste-drool, I was devastated because the memory of my dad’s voice will fade. And one day I will not remember it, I fear. So I live and laugh, and sometimes I ache.

So, from home last spring to whirlwind excursions to Fiji in June and July and August. Then Jury Duty in the fall. What a hoot that was, and how much fun to be a part of a four-month long trial. I do have a new appreciation for the verbal dexterity of lawyers. I mean, wow.
Now, here I am in April, simply excited. While I treasured the past year at home, I am ready to go, to run, to race, ready to continue the adventure.

Hey!
Changes are coming!
Stay tuned...