For 22 years we have prayed for the healing of a family member. And at this point, praying is a grind. Other folks pray for us more than I probably do. Please don't judge me, but mostly we just cope.
When pain is chronic, I think that's what most people do.
And yet we serve this God who insists on arousing hope in our spirits. The paradox of it all can be maddening. "Curse God and die," say the cynics. And we read crazy stories of people being radically healed through our teams around the world. Last week 30 or so were healed in a place where people go to die in India.
Last week I shared with the Adventures staff my story about going to Swaziland for the first time in 2004.
I knew it would be grim. The AIDS epidemic was in full swing.
Karen, Seth Jr., Emily, Leah and I all went on this huge project. 900 participants ministering in
192 separate schools over two months.
As I prepared to go and began praying
about the reality of the plague stalking that small country, I felt my
spirit beginning to grieve with them. God took me to Lamentations 3 and I heard him say, "This is the story of the Swazi people."
It begins, "I am the man who has seen affliction" and for 20 verses, all you read is heart-wrenching hopelessness. You read words like:
darkness
broken bones
bitterness and hardship
imprisoned
no communication
lost
mangled
a target for arrows
a laughingstock
mocked
broken t e e t h
trampled in the dust
deprived of peace
wandering
bitterness and gall
And then on the heels of this misery Jeremiah makes an astounding statement in verse 21. He says, "I have hope."
What? What a crazy thing to say in the midst of all that misery. He goes on to say, "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."
I don't know how Jeremiah can say that. Clearly it seemed as though God's compassions were failing in verses 1-20. So he was either nuts or there must have been something more to the picture. Somehow Jeremiah knew that God would come through for him.
As I read these verses and meditated, I found it strangely comforting to know that a man of God could see his homeland and people decimated and still find hope.
And so, I flew to Swaziland, knowing I'd find death, but also the possibility of hope.
The weeks passed and our teams carried a message of hope that changed the atmosphere of the country. Thousands committed their lives to Christ. Many more learned about AIDS and how to avoid contracting the HIV virus. Our time culminated in a celebration in the national stadium. People cheered and danced.
What is our reason for hope? It's the power of the Gospel. We're not deluded, we see it in actual changes in people.
It's a privilege to serve in places where hope keeps washing up on the shores of hopelessness.
What hopeless place have you lived in? Can you dare to pray a hopeful prayer? If you struggle to do so, know that there are many others of us that live that way too.
"Religion" has become a bad word. In a society that puts a premium on authenticity, it has come to mean "pre-planned." In a culture that prizes reality, it has connotations of stiff formality.
"Religion" has become a bad brand. Barna's stats tell us that 2 million young people a year are fleeing the organized church.
I wonder who will be left.
Maybe you sniffed it out in college - this pre-fab spirituality. Somebody telling you how you were going to connect with God in a bulletin.
Call someone "religious" and you're really saying "you do stuff that I find strange." Maybe you're saying, "Your religion puts God in a box so small, I don't fit in the picture."
For all of you reading this who have a problem with religion, the good news is that Jesus had a problem with it too. He didn't like the ways that religion had been used to keep people from God and fought against it. Just as he fights to set people free from religion today.
Jesus didn't come to make us comfortable, but to make us dangerous. He wanted to move people from the activity of sin-maintenance and into relationship.
Sometimes those who make their living in some religious establishment will declare that Jesus no longer heals. They haven't seen him heal, so they organize their theology around their lack of experience. It was the same in Jesus' day. He didn't do many miracles around those with small, religious God boxes.*
It's not that he doesn't do miracles, it's just that he's left the building. Religion can cease to be about worship and become an effort to define and control God. It may resonate with the comfortable, but those not enmeshed in the system of rules know better.
Are you tired of religion? Are you free from religion? Today is a good day to get out of religion and into relationship.
We need each other in the worst way. We were hardwired for connection.
In this age of networks and super specialization, we have more connecting opportunities than ever before. Facebook and Linked In are power networking tools.
But the body of Christ is sadly disconnected. Evangelists are disconnected from pastors, who are disconnected from prophets, etc.
There's something in me that loves to connect people to one another and to God's dreams. Sometimes the connections seem to come together supernaturally.
Once I was getting off a plane from Hong Kong. I was exhausted and oblivious of my surroundings. I needed to connect with Jacques, who directed our school in Mexico. Unbeknown to me, he was going to be in Georgia for a day.
As Karen and I walked down the concourse toward baggage claim, she looked at me incredulously.
"What are you looking at me that way for?" I asked.
"Do you realize that Jacques is walking along next to you and neither of you know it?" She responded.
Sure enough, to my left, there was Jacques walking next to me, as oblivious of me as I was of him. We laughed in shock, stopped, and gave each other a hug and then began to catch up with one another.
Multiple times like that on planes and in airports I've run into friends, old classmates, disciples, and associates. I figure God knows I need to connect with them and sets it up so I do so.
Maybe it shouldn't have to be so random - we seem to live in a valley of disconnected dry bones. And perhaps most sadly of all, we're disconnected from widows and orphans - the poor in spirit Jesus has blessed and built his true religion around.
I love to connect people to God's widows and orphans. I love to find out a person's dream and ask, "If you could talk to anyone who could help you get to your dream, who would it be?" Oftentimes I know someone who knows that person. We can usually get to them with just a phone call or two.
When I do that in front of a group of people, it can seem like some kind of a cheap magic trick. But I think it's just God's anointing at work.
Do you struggle to make connections or does it come naturally for you? Do you know someone who has this kind of networker anointing? Perhaps they can help you get closer to your dream if you ask them.
I awoke from a dream at 3:30 a.m. In the dream I was flying in a small plane. We were descending rapidly to a grassy landing strip somewhere in a place that seemed remote.
The pilot looked like he was going to overshoot the landing strip, but brought the plane down fast and hard.
Outside the plane, we found the poverty to be great.
The people seemed odd, and I realized, it was a land of special needs people. They'd been left behind - forgotten by society. We weren't much help to them.
I awoke and lay there. Reflecting, I realized that's how we tend to view those with special needs. We leave them behind. We put them out of sight, out of mind. Like our old people.
If I enter their world I tend to do so fast and hard. Landing and taking off suddenly.
And I realized, that's how we too often do short-term missions as well. We come in fast and hard in a needy place. Going there is a good idea, but the time spent may well need more consideration.
While the average person has 150 acquaintances and 130 Facebook friends, they have just two close friends.
According to the Discovery Channel's report, one in four people have no one to talk to at all. Most people have 50% fewer close friends than 20 years ago.
My conclusion: Ezekiel's valley of dry bones* is a reality in America today.
Jesus calls the church his "body" and it's a great metaphor. As Paul describes it, we're members of the body of Christ - "a unit, though it is made up of many parts."
The problem is, we're disconnected. My function may work just fine, but it too often works in isolation from the rest of the body.
This happens in part because of the busy, isolated way we live that doesn't translate well to community living. We're descended from cowboys and pioneers and rebels. They came here running from connection - the connection to the Crown felt so strong it was strangling their spirit.
We see a picture of a connected body in the Acts 2 church. The church members gladly shared all they had with one another. Their connection became an amazing form of empowerment.
We often think of the miraculous works of the Holy Spirit as the engine that powered the explosive growth of the early church. But the cohesiveness of their community was a secret weapon - it must have made them an unstoppable force.
An arm can lift things, but disconnected from a shoulder, it is ineffectual. Jesus prayed for this connection for his disciples before dying.** We long for it. It's what we so often miss on Sunday mornings. It's why young people are leaving the church by the millions. It's what God wants to give us.
How many deep connections do you have in your life? Do you want more? What can you do to get them?
In 2004 I ran across Kari Miller. A teacher in Minnesota, she had sponsored a Ugandan child through World Vision. And that one act was the first in a long series of steps of obedience that landed her as a long-term missionary. She describes what it felt like.
Only God can ask you to join him in his work...to journey somewhere else to find him.
God will never do more than whisper - he is so gentle with us. I heard the same whispers about six years ago. Every time I would lay my head down at night, I would hear them.
I asked so many people to either tell me that they were really God speaking to me or to tell me that I was crazy to believe some quiet voice I only heard at night. In the end, my spirit just couldn't not go...I was so uncomfortable in my comfortable life.
So, I did something that everyone thought was crazy. I sold my home, I sold my car, I took a leave of absence from work, I gave away my stuff I had spent 10 year accumulating and....
I left for Uganda knowing only one Ugandan family and having nothing prepared to do.
Just like the rich young ruler, Jesus made me an offer...leave it and come. The thing is, I had to leave before I could know the outcome. God does not hand you a five year business plan. You walk only a step ahead.
It is terrifying and full of unknowns. You dive off a cliff and fall weightless through the air with only the hope that God will in fact catch you before you hit the ground. That is the chance I took. That is the chance God offers people. It is why many are called but only few will come.
When I first came to Uganda I had no idea what I was here for...just to love people that is all I knew. After about a month, God introduced me to Joyce, a widow, and after that I started the Dorcas Widows Fund.*
If you decide to follow what he is saying, it will cause you pain, disappointment and despair. Journeys always do, but in the end you will find boundless joy, unbelievable fulfillment and bottomless love.
You see our savior loves us too much to lie to us. He told us directly that the journey would be hard.
But the bigger promise is that he will NEVER leave us or forsake us. When battles come he will fight for us. When we are lonely he will love us. We will get all of him and he will get all of us and together we will love the ones he loves the most. No one and nothing else in this world will promise you that. It is worth it.
* Read more about Kari's journey of leaving it all and gaining her soul on her blog site.
I love discipleship. And that's why I love short-term mission (STM) teams. Nothing helps mold a young disciple like an STM experience. Jesus used them to shape his disciples and I believe intends for us to do the same.
STM teams are a discipleship tool whose focus is the participants. In contrast, long-term missionary teams exist to help their members reach out to the field. People fall in love with missions on an STM that changes their life, but most are ill-equipped to go long-term. If they do go, they need a lot of preparation to be effective.
At Adventures, we're learning how to send long-term teams that are as good as our short-term teams.
A lot of our graduating racers want to go to the field on their own. But the sad fact is, most of them will not make it very long. They go because they want to help heal the pain they've seen on the field. But without the support systems to help them, they'll struggle to stick it out.
It helps those who would go long-term or those who would send them to know what the differences are between short-term and long-term teams.
Short-term Teams
Project-based
Participant-centric
Time-bounded
Partner-dependent
Leader led
Cultural outsiders
Long-Term Teams
Relationship-based
Field-centric
Open-ended
Incarnational
Multiple leaders
Both long-term and short-term teams share some requirements if they are to be effective.
Requirements
Listen to God
Wield spiritual authority
Team skills
Heart for target group (in the host country)
The long-termers need some additional skill sets if they are to be successful: Culture assimilation skills, an ability to ask questions, an ability to partner, and a strong spiritual foundation for starters.
If you've been convicted to help meet the needs you've seen on an STM, I hope that you're considering how to go back and make a difference. The world needs the hope you can provide.
And if you do, you may want to ask yourself if you've got what it takes. I suggest you begin by finding a good sending team that will help you make the switch in focus from short-term to long-term.
For 24 years I've been sending people on short-term missions (STMs) that challenge them to live the kind of life God dreams for them. STMs are great discipleship tools.
This year at Adventures, we'll send out our 100,000th person on an STM. Our goal is for our STMs to activate participants to one day go and bring the hope they have to those that have none in some dark place in the world.
But moving from a short-term to a long-term focus requires a different set of tools. While Jesus sent all his disciples out on STMs (Luke 10), only a few were called to cross-cultural missions (in Acts). This may be one reason why he asked his disciples to go only to their own countrymen.
In my eagerness, I've made mistakes in sending people out for the long-term. Here are five:
1. Not enough screening. To be an effective long-term missionary, you've got to go as a learner. You learn the culture, the language and you learn people's stories. To do this, you need a mindset and you need skills.
Sometimes in my enthusiasm to help, I've not spent enough time asking if candidates to go long-term had the mindset and skills they needed.
2. Not enough of a team. While some can make it on their own, most effective missionaries go as a team. Every day they have to expend emotional energy to look more like the culture they're in than the culture of their home country. It's the same kind of assignment Jesus had in the incarnation. Every day they are asked to exchange the things that they find normal and comfortable for a set of behaviors that are new and strange. They need a team's encouragement to be able to make it. A team gives them the reference point to acclimate organically.
Team unity is essential if the team is to strike the right blend of encouragement and guidance for its members to choose into the transformation process day after day.
3. Not enough leadership. Good teams need good servant leadership. Leadership is especially important on the front end of a team's time. The leader helps maintain team safety and unity and helps shape the team's cultural assimilation process. These are her primary assignments. If the team can't be a safe place and unity maintained, then its members will not have the emotional reserves to perform the basic missionary task of assimilating the culture.
4. Not enough preparation. In my eagerness to get teams to the field, I've sent them without the skills they needed to be successful. While we're taking steps to avoid this in the future, we're having to go back and retro-fit teams with the skills they needed: conflict resolution, cross-cultural assimilation, spiritual warfare, team-building, and self-leadership.
5. Not enough support. It takes a strong sending team to help sustain a long-term missionary. The sending team prays for them, helps them raise support, and communicates with them on the field. Too many missionaries neglect this part of the process and have inadequate covering when the pressure of life on the field inevitably comes.
Recently we have developed a model of a sending team that incorporates both Adventures staff and outside volunteers. Unfortunately, some of our earlier teams did not have a good sending team. We're having to go back and help them recruit their sending teams.
Now that I'm done writing the book Kingdom Journeys, it's time for another writing project.
The good news is that I've started seven other books. The bad news is that I haven't finished them. The question is, which of the following should I focus on and finish? Which would you be most interested in? Why?
Revolution of the Broken Heart - stories of those whose hearts have been broken by the poor
Three Roles of a Leader - about how I coach leaders to lead
The Secret of Abundant Living - a devotional based on Isaiah 58
Risk-Based Discipling - how I disciple people
Mistaken Identity - issues young people wrestle with as they dismantle the false self
Paradoxes of Faith - Issues that contain spiritual mystery
The Warrior's Journal: Leader Edition - The Warrior's Journal is a nine week discipleship study. It needs a leader's edition.
For 22 years we have prayed for the healing of a family member. And at this point, praying is a grind. Other folks pray for us more than I probably do. Please don't judge me, but mostly we just cope. 
I awoke from a dream at 3:30 a.m. In the dream I was flying in a small plane. We were descending rapidly to a grassy landing strip somewhere in a place that seemed remote.
While the average person has 150 acquaintances and 130 Facebook friends, they have just two close friends. 
Only God can ask you to join him in his work...to journey somewhere else to find him. 
I love discipleship. And that's why I love short-term mission (STM) teams. Nothing helps mold a young disciple like an STM experience. Jesus used them to shape his disciples and I believe intends for us to do the same.