I Just Went for Pizza

The past few weeks I have had this internal debate going on with the Lord. It mostly centres on why I am still here in New Zealand and pastoring this particular church. For about 4.5 years now, we have poured our lives into this little fellowship, hosting evangelistic style meetings, using tools such as ALPHA and the UNDERSTANDING CHRISTIANITY series. We've worked on discipling and motivating people through small groups and had some delightful times of prayer in our Prayer Pinnacle Meetings. The group is a wonderful mix of South African, Indian, Chinese, Fijian, Solomon Island, Kiwi, Canadian, Filipino, and American, a lovely group, dedicated and passionate about their Lord Jesus and faith in him. But since we have come the church has gone from about 45-50 down to 20-25 and while personal spiritual growth is happening, numerical and financial growth is not happening at all, in fact it is shrinking! We came with a vision to see hundreds of people from all over the world raising their hands in worship together. We came to assist the International Christian Centre in the dream of gathering the nations for this purpose in this massively multicultural city. We have not seen this come to reality. I do not believe we have mistakenly come here, that somehow we missed what the Lord said to us or took a wrong turn as we followed the master. I do believe we are meant to be here, and minister here and bring the gospel to this dry and thirsty land. However, I have not seen as much fruit as I believe we should have seen by now.
Anyway, yesterday I went to get pizza. While i was sitting there waiting an Asian man came in and few minutes later a tiny African lady came in to wait for her pizza. Finally, my name was called and I went to the counter, the tiny lady moved to the counter quickly and shyly mumbled something that I thought sounded like "don't give up on your dream". I thought she was speaking to the guy behind the counter but then she turned to me and said what sounded like the same thing. I laughed and grabbed my pizza and headed home. While sitting in the car waiting for the light to turn green thinking about what I thought this lady had said to me, I decided to spin the car around and go back and ask her if that was what she had said, and if so, why she had said that. I went back and thankfully she was still there. I motioned to her to come outside and asked her if she had said what I thought she had said. She told me that she was a Christian and that while she was sitting there, God told her to tell me "Don't give up on your dream'" She continued, "He is right behind me, he is there, he knows what I am going through and that I should hang on to the dream." She said that she had done this kind of thing before and only gotten mocked and silenced by those who she said it to, so she stopped. But when she looked into my eyes, she saw kindness there and decided to go for it. When I told her I was a Christian as well and a Pastor she was sooo excited and filled with joy that she had obeyed what the Lord had told her to do. I thanked her for her bravery and that her message couldn't have been timelier for me. This kind of thing has happened to me before, about 4 or 5 other times, where God has used a complete stranger to send me a message. Her words it seems have attached themselves to my mind and heart. I went to bed thinking about them and woke up early with them on my mind. I will ponder them for the next few days and lay them out before the Lord to be sure they are from him. Mmmm, all I had done was go for pizza!

FIrm Faith

This week we bid our youngest, 18 year old Mackenzie, farewell and sent her on a big adventure. She has been planning this for months and my wife has meticulously helped her plan each aspect of the journey. So, this past Monday she packed up a few of her belongings and we all headed for the airport to give our hugs and kisses and watch her head off out of eyesight as she boarded her plane. She is off to Europe, Austria to be specific, and will spend the next 4 months working at a Bible School, traveling and making new friends followed by a trip back to Canada to renew friendships and spend some time with family.
As a family we are all at varying degrees of both excitement and nervousness for her as she does this. Excitement, because we know that adventure always brings with it an element of change, a pushing past what is comfortable in order to experience something bigger than we are, bigger than we know, bigger than just our tiny little circle of life. This comes with possibilities that seem to reach the sky and joy that soars bringing memories that can remain so vivid and full of life they are not easily forgotten. Nevertheless, we are also nervousness, because when something so precious as one your daughters follows a dream the worst part for me is that I know that such dreams can be crushed and bring pain and hurt because the world can be such a nasty place sometimes. Of course we all hope for the best and pray for a terrific experience for her. However, always somewhere in the back of the mind there is a little nagging sensation that something could go wrong and that this could turn out to be less than what we had hoped for. That sense of protection from the big bad world is strong within parents and it can push our hearts beyond simple nervousness to worry and even fear. This was brought into a tangible feeling when we awoke Tuesday morning to discover that her original flight out of Auckland was delayed by several hours, which meant her connecting flights were all going to be missed. This news for a moment created a sense of panic and a feeling of helplessness that was so raw and so real.
This is when our faith becomes so essential to how we handle this kind of scenario. We talk, we consider the options, and we pray. We trust in the Lord with all of our hearts, we seek his strength to face each day with all its ups and downs and spin-arounds. We know he loves us more than we could know and that he will watch over all of us, especially MacKenzie while she is so far away from us. This assurance calms our hearts, releases our fears and comforts us. It moves us outside of our tiny perspective and gives us an inkling of his viewpoint and thus creating a firm place, as the bible says a table-land, to stand reassured that he is actively involved in all our ways, all our comings and all our goings as a family... at least until the next bump in the road when the cycle is repeated again.