Feeling Alive Again
If you’re retiring or already retired you need to read our story to learn about new retirement options.
God has helped us find healing for the sick, help the lame to walk and influence the non-believer by imitating the authentic Jesus, not with our words alone, but with small acts of kindness.
Matthew 4: 24 And his fame went throughout all Syria: and they brought unto him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatick, and those that had the palsy; and he healed them. 25 And there followed him great multitudes of people from Galilee, and from Decapolis, and from Jerusalem, and from Judaea, and from beyond Jordan.
I’m talking about changing your life, tapping into the abundant life Jesus promises us. Have you ever felt bored with your routine? Is your spiritual life growing? Or are you a cancer Survivor, living with uncertainty? I’ve found uncertainty is the biggest challenge to 'Feeling Alive Again'. Uncertainty can put your life on hold. Our story will tell you how to start living without fear, having a deeper spiritual life with God and with your family, especially your wife or husband by living inside God’s will.
I’m talking about changing the lives of everyone who is weary of their daily struggle against boredom, fear and the talk they hear about wars in the Middle East, increasing gas prices, economic hard times and one more test six months from now to see if you are still cancer free. The story of our journey and the pictures of the orphans and our friends who traveled with us always warm up people’s hearts. Our pictures demonstrates what is possible for you to feel if you partner with God by doing His will. The men who go along with us seem to have the most profound reactions.
We've had to face the lonely journey of being diagnosed with cancer by ourselves, holding hands till the very last moment the nurses wheeled us out of our room down to the operating room. But we've been able to renew our life's journey together, on the other side of surgery and treatment, living inside God's will. Our rewards have been so much more than we ever expected and we want to share what we’ve discovered, how and what to do and how to look for God’s footsteps in your life, leading you to His abundant life.
I’m not talking about a works doctrine for salvation. I’m talking about doing God’s will to get to know God through a relationship with the Holy Spirit/Comforter. I’ve seen and felt God’s presence when I’m working on an obscure problem that only a few of us know about and can’t make anything happen and then some stranger, who has sought us out, comes along and gives us the answer; the answer to our prayers. That stranger has to be from God. That has happened too many times to be serendipity. I continue to do God’s will because my faith and trust in God is growing and I want it to continue to grow. That’s spiritual growth. That’s what has happened to me. I will explain this reality throughout this story about what has happened to us, to me and what has happened to our heroes, and all that can happen to you.
This is also the story of my personal struggle with God and His victory. I resisted God’s will for many years, preoccupied with what I mistakenly took for life.
Our Beginning
This story is about our life for the last 5 years, doing Gods work. It all started with this little girl from China in 2001.
This is Sarah Helena standing in front of her bed in her orphanage in Jingdezhen China. Sarah Helena came to her orphanage when she was 7 months old. She came to America the week of Christmas in 2001. She was 15 months old.
I thought my Mission Verses from the first chapter of Isaiah and Sarah Helena started our journey of leaving a legacy, but I would discover it was God, who started helping us a long time ago. We cashed in a 401K, bought airline tickets to China to see the sights and go to see where orphans live and how we can help them. A few friends went with us. I will introduce our friends and a number of our Heroes throughout our story.
After you’re finished reading our story you are going to know what a Hero is and how to become one. You’re also going to learn what A Circle of Friends is, how to find one, join one or start one on your own. You’re also going to see how to raise money to finance your legacy. You’re going to learn how to choose a ‘Mission Verse or Verses’ from the Old Testament to live out in your life. Why the Old Testament, because it would have been what Jesus knew and it would have been the foundation of his spiritual life, in the world. God also spoke to man directly in the Old Testament and I think it is easier to see what was on His mind, but don’t get hung up on where to find your mission verse, just find one. You’re going to learn how to discover the authentic Jesus as he lived His life in His time, not in the past or the future, but in the present. As a bonus you’re going to improve your marriage and renew your spiritual life, if you embark on the journey Jesus has planned for you. So sit down, relax and let me tell you our story.
This is an idea I want you to think about as you read our story. Our physical presence here on earth takes up space and consumes time. I want you to stand up and stretch out your arms and turn around in a circle. That is how much space you take up. If someone comes along and pushes you out of that space they will only push you into another space you will occupy. Your grave or urn actually takes up space, as does your memory in the minds of those who knew you and loved you. How I live in my family’s memory has become really important to me. I want to inspire them to be working Christians. I don’t want to waste their time and send them down the wrong road.
While we are physically occupying our space and consuming time we can reflect the Kingdom of Man, acting out the complicated natural rules of life and death, codified man made laws and base human desires like envy, lust, greed, sex, hatred, well I think you get the idea. I can also reflect the Kingdom of man thousands of miles away by sending a hateful letter, criticizing someone or if I’m a politician I can kill someone by waging war on them. I can actually occupy space and time in hundreds of places, affecting hundreds of people over the Internet with worldly information I send.
While we are physically occupying our space and consuming time we can reflect the Kingdom Of Heaven by promoting peace, good will, small acts of kindness and pure worship of God in as many places as we choose.
Sarah said, "John you need to go to China and I'm going to take you!" Sarah had already gone to China with Nina and their brother Charles to get Sarah Helena. On my first trip I met Little Fayth. Fayth had an inoperable heart condition. I looked down into her face and saw little blue lips. Her hands were blue. She was so still, not like a normal, wiggly 7 month old baby. Her Nannies were going to hold Fayth until they handed her back to God. I feel in love with the orphans, God's journey and the Chinese people.
This hospital is in Bethlehem. The staff are Muslims, Jews and Christians and they take care of Muslim, Christian and Jewish children. When we got there the staff had not been paid in over 2 months and didn't know when they were going to be paid. They were dedicated to their patients.
This is a picture of a Christmas party at the hospital. Phillip is Santa Claus and throws a Christmas party for the children, their families and the staff. Phillip and Mary Margaret have not been able to travel for health reason so they passed their work on to Jim and Glenda. Glenda raised $4,000 to send to 2 hospitals last Christmas.
I hope you enjoy reading our story and seeing our pictures and I hope you can see yourself leaving a legacy for your family. I want you to look at the faces of our Heroes, most of them are your contemporaries, and consider if you would fit in doing what they are doing. Would you like to travel and make new friends and create new lives for God’s children?
Life Is Not About Being A Success,
It's About Taking The Journey of Faith
Last night Sarah and I attended our classes at Gilda’s Club. I went to my class for family members and Sarah went to her class for Survivors. We talked about a lot of personal things in my class, which I cannot tell you about. Each of us has a chance to talk about what happened to us during the week. Last night something was said that made me think this little classroom was like my Uncle Tom’s porch most every Friday night in the spring and summer where our whole family would gather in the dark and talk. I was just a child then. I hadn’t thought about Uncle Tom and Aunt Jose in years. Those were the best of times.
The adults sat in the chairs and the swing on the porch and we kids would sit on the steps or in the grass listening to the adults. We all talked about things that were important to us and everyone would listen to us. Sometimes we kids would say something that would remind an old timer of a personal story and experience. Yes that’s right, the adults even listened to the kids and gave us advice in the form of personal stories that were usually funny. They gave us advice that didn’t sound like advice. The old timers told stories that became our life’s lessons. Stories that helped us figure out how to get along in life and solve problems. At Gilda’s Club I’m now an old timer telling stories, which I hope help the new comers help their loved ones through the journey of healing.
I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about what was said at our meeting last night. I can share this one thing with you. It’s not personal about an individual family. Over the course of attending meetings I have heard my classmates talk about crying, fear, disappointments and what love looked like helping a family member survive. Last night one of the guys said he saw a TV New’s Show where they discussed a judge’s ruling that took the children away from a mother because she had stage-4 breast cancer. He said it made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.
I had just finished writing our story and I suddenly remembered writing about our journey to China helping the orphans and talking about learning to communicate with my feelings, emotions and body language in China, because of the language barrier. I also was able to resurrect unused emotions, because seeing the human suffering in China touched me so deeply. I started rediscovering in China the same feelings I've heard about in class, emotions and feelings I had not been in touch with for years. I got up out of bed and sat down and started writing this chapter to share with you, because I think for me being in touch with my emotions is important to living life to the fullest; tapping into my spiritual strength, which I had forgotten I possessed. I think it will be important for you to experience getting in touch with your emotions, if today you’re not in touch with them fully.
Our journey of the last 5 years has required Sarah and me to live life more intensely, to embrace those feelings empty nest living and good health doesn’t always expose us to. Part of our journey was thrust upon us unexpectedly, like Sarah’s cancer, but another part of our journey was of our own choice after some encouragement from a little girl and Jesus, voluntary, going out into the world and doing God’s will.
We needed to learn to live over bad news and good news. Good news can trip us up as fast as bad news can. Part of our journey was an uncomfortable choice for me, because I had to face up to some real tough personal truths that were hard to accept. They had to do with my spiritual life, no the lack of my spiritual life. If you chose to read our story you will learn what those personal truths of life were I needed to learn.
My intention in writing our story was to be as honest as I can be, because I think a lot of my readers will be like me, finding my way difficult without help, so I want to give you my help and my road map that can be your template to take you to a special spiritual place, making your life a lot happier than it has been. The results of taking this journey for me was like being in a dark stuffy room without windows most of my adult life and finally finding a door and opening it and stepping out into the sunshine and fresh air of spring.
Living with cancer requires that same kind of living life more intensely. Cancer makes life intense. You can’t drift through living with cancer like you can drift through empty nest living. You can be a fool and stick your head in the sand or like was said in our meeting last night about friends who disappear and stop seeing and calling you or family members who can’t stand to live with you because you have all those scars, which seeing all the time creates the collateral stress they feel, so they run away, playing the divorce card, abandoning the one they loved for all the selfish, self-centered reasons fear, stress, change of routine and uncertainty produces.
The choice of living life, eyes wide open or running away has its rewards or its regrets. I don’t think there are two more intense reasons to live in our lives than to choose to actively do God’s will and give justice to his children and take care of the widows and the fatherless, or to choose to live life to the fullest in spite of cancer or any other life threatening disease or even financial disaster like loosing retirement money you expected to live on because Wall Street and your advisors failed you or you made inappropriate choices or you were the unfortunate victim of bad luck.
Important people watch us. Don’t think our children, after they are grown, stop looking to us for guidance, even if they don’t ask us for advice. They watch how we handle good and bad news. I want you to remember our children are watching us in what the world labels our declining years. They’re supposed to think less of us as we become forgetful and repeat ourselves.
What we do guides our children even in their adulthood. The last time we visited our middle son Joel and Sara Pauline, his wife, at their church in Maryville I introduced myself to a lady I had never met before and she said, “Oh, we all know you and what you do for the orphans.” We go to their church maybe 3 or 4 times a year and each time meet just a few of their friends and every visit we meet a stranger or two we’ve never met before. I really believe they all know us because of what Joel my son and his wife Sara Pauline tell them about what we are doing, because what we’re doing inspires our children as their being foster parents and adoptive parents of four little girls inspires me and Sarah, Joel’s Mother.
I don’t believe, if we didn’t have the orphans to help, that Joel would tell his friends at church how pretty I keep our yard or about cruises we go on or the books I read. Even if Joel said that about us the chances are remote that anyone would remember what we do. I also don’t believe I would brag on Joel and Sara Pauline as much as I do if in 7 years of marriage they hadn’t kept dozens of foster children. I like leaving a positive legacy for my sons. I think what we decided to do, leaving our legacy with orphans, helped them decide to be foster parents and adopt four little girls. Joel and Sara Pauline were Foster parents of the Year in East Tennessee a couple of years ago. We’re sure proud of them.
Don’t you want to inspire your children by leaving a positive legacy of your own, a worthy Godly legacy, as opposed to just drifting through old age? Think hard about the kind of legacy you want to leave them.
We’re in Jaipur, the Pink City. It’s called the Pink City because the Maharajah painted all the buildings pink when the Prince of Whales visited Jaipur in 1858. Jaipur, designed and built in 1727 by Maharaja Sawai Sawai Jai Sing II was the first modern city in India. We’re in a park where the Maharaja built sundials. The main sundial is accurate to 2 second, remarkable. The Maharajah Sawai Jai Sing II completed his Jaipur Observatory in 1728. It is thought to contain the largest stone sundial in the world. We’re having fun learning about India. When we understand about the history of a country, where we work, our understanding of the history helps us with our relationships with the local people, because they know we’ve taken time to understand and respect their country. I love traveling with Sarah. Sarah is such a happy companion.
Our Big Opportunity
American society is changing. In less than 3 years there will be more Baby Boomer eligible for retirement than enlisted and reserve men and women in the United States Military. We started thinking if Baby Boomers got organized into small groups of Circles of Friends and instead of retiring in the ordinary way, sought to leave a legacy in their retirement, we think Baby Boomers could change our world. Our story is a proposal for retiring Baby Boomers to get organized and leave their own legacy. We want you to see what leaving a legacy looks like when a husband and wife set their minds to making a difference in retirement and God helps them. You see, 2 Christians take up twice as much space and consume twice as much time in life, doing God’s will by reflecting the Kingdom of Heaven here on this Planet and can accomplish so much more together than by themselves. That’s why a Circle of Friends is so powerful.
We’ve needed to learn how to work together. When Sarah and I were newly married, 45 years ago, we went on a canoe trip with some friends and neighbors. We borrowed a big tent and camping equipment and set off to this pastoral river at the foot of the mountains in East Tennessee. We quickly learned we did not work well together. We went under every overhanging branch. We ran into every bridge support and we spent more time going backwards than going forward. We shouted at each other a lot. Our dysfunction turned into the butt of everyone’s jokes. Forty-five years can change all that with the right reasons.
We’ve matured as a couple. After all these years we’ve found when we started planning our legacy and traveling together we are better at working with each other, at least on legacy work. We’re also sharing things about ourselves that we had never told each other, because we talk to each other more. The things we share aren’t secrets; they are things we haven’t thought of in a long time, like that canoe trip and Uncle Tom’s porch meetings. Some of our memories were childhood memories, long forgotten. At least this is true for me. As it turns out, I’m the last living person to remember my childhood and the adults who loved me.
I’m having memories of events, which were physical experiences, people memories and then there were memories of emotions. A physical or emotional experience in today’s life can trigger past memories of useful experiences, if we let them. A person we meet today can remind us of a person from our past. Thinking about the orphans and our travel seems to make us more reflective; at least they do for me. I’ve been able to connect our current adventures with past adventures. Those memories help me solve problems I encounter today. I think the same is true for Sarah because she has started sharing her memories with me, memories she had never shared before.
Sarah remembered driving home from her driver’s license test after her 16th birthday. She ran a stop sign and her Father said that was terrible driving, but they shouldn’t tell Mother. That was one of those life’s lessons, showing how a parent bonds with a child, just a little secret between Father and Daughter that makes a child appreciate a parent. That was a good memory and we both laughed. I had never heard that story before. We both shared that pleasant memory of Grand Daddy.
Why is it good to remember our past? It’s good because our past has made us what we are today and today’s experiences will make us who we become in the future. I want to share with you how my past really does connect with what we’re presently doing. The following is just one example of how remembering our past helps us make sense of life today.
A recent meeting about our church being debt free in 3 years at Woodmont triggered the following memory that happened in the early 70s in Wilmington North Carolina. I remember when Billy Mattox came to Wilmington and became our preacher in the early 70s. We had all kinds of problems. We didn't have elders, a full-time preacher, an adequate building, an effective education program, no outreach into the community past a few blocks around our building, which really didn’t have many results, no regular song leader and no organized effective spiritual leadership. Sarah and I both wondered if we shouldn't go to another church. There were no other C of C churches, but that didn’t really matter to me. I wanted my sons to grow up in an active, fun church, like I remembered from our college years in Nashville. Sarah and I babysat a class at West End and one of the children in our class was Amy Grant. I say babysat because we had fun and not much teaching happened because the children were so young.
What did Bill do? He didn't try to fix everything at once and he didn’t shame the old members for not knowing what to do. He wanted to get our attention in a positive way or at least that’s what it looked like to me. After years of the church trying to find financing for a new building and being turned down Bill chose to find the financing for a new building that everybody had dreamed about and his second project was to have the members select elders. Billy chose the two biggest things that would take our breath away and all the while he was quietly working on our other problem areas, like preaching spirit filled lessons every Sunday morning. Billy called Jim Bill at West End C of C and got a loan for the building, the new elders found a building lot and they put out bids for the construction.
Most every weekend Billy would be at the construction site picking up trash and straightening building materials. Soon members started meeting him at the building site, helping him. I'll never forget one Saturday when the Moms brought the children to pick up and dig rocks out of the front lawn so we could turn the rough ground into a grassy lawn. The children started singing camp songs, then everyone joined in and we spent all day in the hot sun preparing the ground for planting. Someone brought a grill, somebody brought the meat and bread, some women went back home and made deserts. I'm not so sure angels hadn't gathered above us and flapped their wings to provide the brisk breeze we enjoyed all day.
Billy had just had surgery for a bleeding ulcer, but codes required we have planted grass and Billy was out there working along side us all day Saturday. If we didn't have planted grass we couldn't have our first service in our new building. Billy had persuaded codes to work on Saturday to give us the approval. By evening Billy got the Codes document that said we could have service tomorrow morning.
I had long private conversations with Billy in his garden and at his office. He told me about what he had to do to keep Lubbock Christian College running and about preaching in CA, when he was a young man, and about the guy who started Western Auto, who was a member of his church. He might have talked more to me than anyone else because I invited myself into his life more. We even built a solar oven in his garage and cooked a roast on his driveway. That was a great day, and I know he had great days with almost everyone he came in contact with.
I'll never forget the time in an elders and deacon meeting when one of our money conscious elders reprimanded Billy for giving a homeless family, traveling through Wilmington without any money, what the elder characterized as 'toooo-much-money' and asked Billy what was his 'excuse'? Bill proudly announced it was God's money and he wasn't going to be stingy with it, even if he got scammed!
Bill Mattox did everything in life with Godly passion. That ‘money conscious’ Elder became a special spiritual leader in our church with time and he learned saving the church’s money wasn’t as important as serving. I know he learned that lesson because of how he changed over the years I knew him. I’ll tell you another story about how our Elders grew in faith a little later.
I think when Bill came to our church he saw God's children wandering in the wilderness of Eastern North Carolina and he thought giving his all was not too much to give even for a 70 something year old man who thought he was going to retire in Wilmington and go fishing with his son. Billy didn't come to Wilmington to be our preacher; he came there to retire.
Those memories came back to me after the meeting at Woodmont Hills Church and helped me put our current church challenges and our Elder’s reluctance to take that leap of financial faith into perspective. That past experience made me realize Woodmont’s Elders are growing and how today’s churches needs Christian leaders with Godly passion to put the wind back into our sails, like Bill did for us in Wilmington. We just need to give them time to grow into being spirit filled Elders, like what happened to our Wilmington Elders. I'm going to tell more of Billy's story with us in our next book ‘Finding My Spiritual Heart in Israel.’ Bill Mattox is truly one of our heroes. Do you know
Sarah and I have stories about Bastle Barret Baxter, Gus Nichols, Jim Bill and Betty McIntire, Bill and Mildred Mattox, Rubel and Myra Shelly, John York and Phillip and Mary Margaret Morrison? You might not know these people, but take it from me they’ve all left or are leaving profound Godly legacies for thousands of people, including Sarah and me. I’ll share some of their stories later. I’ll bet a lot of you have spiritual leaders who made big differences in your life.
Looking back on our lives I now realize that all these Godly Saints and so many more have helped Sarah and me find our Christian mission God has sent us and get in touch with the authentic Jesus and His Father and the Comforter. Thank you one and all I’ve mentioned and those I have not named for your help and guidance. You might want to start remembering those individuals who influenced you and how their influence has made you the person you are today.
Our priorities have changed. Planning our legacy has put us in a different state of mind. It has recast what life is for us today. Building our legacy and getting out of the rut we had dug for ourselves were the reasons why we thought about those forgotten memories, causing us to laugh at ourselves and appreciate our friends and heroes. I’ll never forget a Thanksgiving dinner at Sarah’s Mom and Dad’s home on Granny White Pike in Nashville when Sarah’s Dad, who we all called Grand Daddy, asked me to pass him a bean or two and I dished up two beans and passed them to him. Grand Daddy didn’t have the best sense of humor so my sons held their breath, expecting Grand Daddy to fuss, but he laughed and his laugh caused our boys to laugh, causing all of us to laugh, including Grand Mother. That might not be a big deal for your family, but it was so rare to see Grand Daddy laugh at himself.
Sarah’s Mother and Father were very serious people. Sarah’s Father was a Preacher and Bible salesman and her Mother taught for 29 years at the elementary school at David Lipscomb College. Sarah and her brothers and sister were always taught to be serious children. In the 50s all the Lipscomb kids were taught to be serious. I remember Sarah’s Father didn’t approve of me dating Sarah because my parents were divorced and I drove too many fancy sports cars. He could never understand I sold those little fancy sports cars because that was the best way for me to pay my tuition at Lipscomb.
There were little emotional events in our past childhood and early-married life we had also forgotten about, but were so very important for today’s life. Thinking about the orphans and things we saw on our trips and new people we met brought those enjoyable feelings to our consciousness again. Those memories and feelings, we had forgotten, help bring our current lives into perspective and made us realize how important what we were doing for the orphans really was. Those past experiences helped us solve some of today’s problems. I wonder how important the memories Jesus had of His past were to what He did in the last years of His ministry? Do you think those people who knew Mary was pregnant out of wedlock looked down on Jesus and their possible ridicule of Him might be why he was so kind to the outsiders like tax collectors and Samaritans.
I realized when we helped the orphans get adopted we were giving the orphans the chance to have loving family memories instead of memories of their orphanage life. Sometimes I remember things about my sons when they were babies when I’m holding a baby orphan in China, especially sick babies. I remember the time Sarah was in the hospital in Chattanooga giving birth to our 2nd son Joel and I was keeping our first son Jay.
I turned my back for just a moment and Jay’s fast little reach grabbed a bottle of Flintstone Chewable vitamins from the kitchen counter and he ate them all before I realized it. I could work for General Foods and manage the Eastern TN Territory as a Territory Manager, but couldn’t keep a 2-year-old out of trouble. I called Sarah at the hospital and she said call Poison Control. The thought I needed to call Poison Control scared me beyond anything you can imagine. I can still feel the anguish today I felt back then. I called poison control and they said stick your finger down his throat and make him vomit. I thought at least I could do that??
For an hour, off and on, I frantically tried to make Jay vomit, but with no results. I finally gave up and called poison control again and another person said don’t worry just feed him and probably nothing bad would happen. I fed him, gave him a bath, put his pajamas with the footies on him and put him to bed. It wasn’t 10 minutes before I heard this loud noise. I ran to Jay’s room, which took no time because our first home was so small and there before me was the mother of all projectile vomiting accidents from the mouth of a 2-year-old. It covered Jay and the wall next to his bed was splattered and it was all over the floor. I guess I fed Jay too much? When I see sick babies in China they reminded me of that sweet experience and makes me want to help them and get them a loving family and Father who will love them and help them grow up like I love my sons.
You’re probably asking why is that experience important to living life today. Well, I think remembering that story about 2-year-old Jay turns on my emotions and reminds me why I love him and how good and simple life was, even if I thought it wasn’t so simple back then. You can’t drift through life raising a 2-year-old or a teenager. Maybe what I think is so complex and stressful today is really simple and I should realize that now. Our past, present and future are all part of the greater picture we’re painting with our lives. Remembering those experiences also helps me not to take myself so seriously and focus in on what is really important in life. Ever so often God has reminded me not to take myself too seriously. There will always be someone to pass us a bean or two.
Emotional feelings atrophy if we don’t use them. When I talk about feelings I mean what’s behind the tear that comes to your eye, what causes the chill that runs up your spine, how the cause of a blush makes you feel and what makes your face warm into a pleasant smile. I had stopped experiencing and searching for many of those feelings on a regular basis, because I was practicing the same old dull survival techniques in my dull life’s routine, which didn’t allow for intense feelings or hard to answer questions. Sarah and I no longer have children at home to make our lives exciting. We didn’t have Grand Children yet. My outside work was dull. About the most exciting thing we needed to do was call Critter Rider regularly to catch pesky squirrels and raccoons, which the man promised Sarah he wasn’t going to kill, but I knew better. I remembered how good fried squirrel tasted when I was a kid, especially if I shot it with my Dad sitting with me on a log in the woods.
I had forgotten all those wonderful snapshots from our past. Starting our legacy and all our new experiences gave rise to real feelings and memories that were so much fun to remember and talk about. Feelings we had developed in our past don’t need to be reinvented, because we already own them. They are already in our family picture album in our heads along with answers to current questions. I asked Sarah what she remembered about her preacher when she was young. She said Gus Nichols was ‘LOUD’ just like all preacher’s sounded to a small girl in the 1950s, very ‘LOUD”. I asked Sarah if she remembered any of his lessons and she said she was in so many churches when she was a little girl and heard so many lessons she doesn’t remember anything about what they said. I truly think her church experience when she was a child is why she is such a strong church advocate today.
Our hopes and dreams for the orphans have made us more hopeful about our marriage and our life together today and with the help of God we’re thinking about what we can accomplish in the years we have remaining; at least that’s what I’m thinking and feeling. It’s hard for two individuals to think the same thing all the time. No matter how much time you have spent together and life events you have experienced together you still have independent experiences like childhood and work experiences that are just as important.
You have independent thoughts and unique experiences. I know things Sarah doesn’t know and Sarah knows things I don’t know. When we work together our combined strengths overcome our individual weaknesses. Our lives are like history books with important information in them. Courage is another thing partnership with Sarah produces in me. Back in my past I could really solve complex problems and had the courage to try new and difficult projects, because I knew Sarah was there to help me. I wasn’t afraid of life. What happened to that guy I use to know?
Seeing the overwhelming human needs in the world shocked us out of our complacency. I think why we had forgotten our past experiences and emotional feelings was because over the years we have become so narrowly focused on our immediate life and self-centered thinking, which left no room for anything else. I’ve been so focused on today and worrying about tomorrow I forgot who I really was and what I could become and how easy it is to solve current problems by remembering past experiences.
Making room for new experiences has been made possible by deleting trivial thinking (Spam-self-centered thinking) to free up our mind’s memory for new important files (New spirit building projects). Self-centered thinking and creature comforts are trivial excuses for not doing God’s will. It doesn’t really matter if we can control what we have for supper compared to human needs going unmet. Shouldn’t we experiment with how big we can think, not how safe we can think?
Past experiences of successes can help us realize we can still accomplish big things in life, no matter how old we are. The important memories of my past are what can make me the man I can be and can become. I started deleting unimportant daily details; creature comfort details and selfish thoughts I had been playing like tape recordings in my head, to make room for new and important thoughts and plans which surprisingly have origins in our past. Having steak for supper once a week is not the most important thing in the world for me or anybody else.
That’s what dreaming is all about. I want you to realize starting this journey is helping me discover all these wonderful things that are possible to accomplish. It all seemed to start when I discovered my Bible mission verses. I’ve known the verses most of my adult life, but I never thought about acting on them, until now. Sarah Helena, what we saw on our trip to China and the encouragement I have received when I have shared my dreams became God’s perfect storm to motivate me to action. Nobody is telling me how to do this. I’m discovering what God really wants me to know, simply by starting the journey in the Bible with the authentic Jesus as my mentor and teacher. Most every word and idea, attributed to Jesus in the New Testament can be found in the Old Testament.
Reading my Bible has become like a scavenger hunt for the map to happiness. In my past I read my Bible for information not destination or outcome. I understood the information intellectually, but not emotionally with the purpose of connecting the story to emotions that would cause me to grow into another level of understanding and by reaching that new level, change the outcomes of my behavior. I could either let the information lay on the surface of my consciousness or I could embrace it emotionally, making it a part of me, deep in my bones. I can do that by substituting my name for the biblical character’s name, allowing me to become a part of the story. I’ll give you an example of how to do that in a few minutes, by retelling the story of Abraham and Sarah.
Having important goals strengthens relationships. We’ve found while sitting on an airplane, returning from a trip from a different part of the world, making plans for the orphans we had met, we enjoy each other’s company more than we did when we were at home with Sarah in her office working on her computer and I’m in the den working on my computer with me listening to old movies on television.
The orphans and our travels have brought us together mentally and physically. Our love and respect for each other has expanded and blossomed. I remembered what brought us together in the first place, Sarah’s character qualities. No that’s not right, I first felt safe with Sarah, then I realized I had never known a woman in my past, including my Mother, to be as strong and steady as Sarah was even in her twenties. I see those same qualities in Sarah today when we are trying to help orphans.
Challenges in our lives help bring out our character qualities. Sarah gets to use all her character qualities helping the orphans. I’m also discovering new qualities I never knew Sarah possessed so deeply and passionately. I’ll not try to explain where her passion for life comes from. I’ll accept all her wonders as a gift from God to me. I think Sarah is a lot smarter and more resourceful than I am. Sarah helps me be a better man. It’s so easy to miss all that when you drift.
I’m feeling like I did when we first got married. I was really optimist back then, looking forward to unknown adventures. Unfortunately, I had turned out to be a ‘glass half empty’ old man. The opportunities and challenges of helping the orphans have helped me return to a ‘glass half full’ young man again; at least a young man in my thinking. We’re a team again, working on important things together. I don’t mean redecorating our 1960 ranch style home. Lord knows there is plenty to do to our old home. I mean important projects outside our selves and our immediate personal needs. I’m optimistically looking at new selfless opportunities. I think as individuals we aren’t the people God wants us to be as we are when we are helping others.
You are important when someone needs you. When a child’s life and future depends on us their dependence creates a bond like we had when our baby boys depended on us. 10 or 15 years of empty nest living can take meaningful purpose out of our lives or at least diminish purpose. Maybe it’s because of that narrow focus on our present routine and comforts. We can loose memory capacity, running on autopilot, seeking selfish comforts. I did. Driving the same streets, going to the same destinations day after day is dull compared to the exciting places planning a trip to China lets you visit. You can always plan on including a stop over in an exciting European or Asian city. You might visit one of your email pals who had helped you with your projects.
Big boy and girl toys and property are nothing but burdens, sometimes making us older than we really are. Possessions are burdens, compared to a smiling, laughing little brown face baby whose life represents so much hope, even if they have physical blemishes, medical problems and dirty diapers. When I’m holding them and their head is rested next to mine I can feel God in them as I hear their sweet restful breathing. You see I think God and His Angels hover nearer to orphans, because they have greater needs, than children with parents. I believe what Jesus said when He said, I wouldn’t leave you an orphan; the Comforter is coming to take my place. Maybe I am their comforter or I bring the Comforter, Jesus talks about, to them. The orphans and their needs are challenging in a good way. It’s really a Godly way.
Planning a vacation is not the same as figuring out how to make an orphan’s life better. You can have your vacation and help orphans all in one big happy event. We started saying we need to visit that foster home we heard about over that mountain in China. I wonder what it looks like? I wonder what we’ll find? Maybe we’ll go there on our next trip. A child who needs you or a whole orphanage needing you is a more important reason to go back, than staying at a special resort in a spectacular setting, getting a suntan. A depressing orphanage full of little bright living jewels is more spectacular than an ocean view, at sunset, from the balcony of a 4 star resort. On some trips you can have both. Don’t you know God has a travel agency that can book your trip, giving you all you need? We’ll put you in touch with God’s Travel Agency when you’re ready.
If you don’t want to travel that far how about substituting a dowdy, down on its luck nursing home in your city? I’m sure the residents and workers would welcome your attention. I once met a man in a nursing home who was a Panama Canal engineer. I also met a professional baseball player and the stories of Depression kids help me understand what America was and is all about. I don’t think there is anything as good as hearing another person’s story.
Nursing homes are full of American stories. Just last week there was a senior sitting in a wheel chair wearing a ball cap with his bandaged left foot up. Someone asked me would I like to meet Bill Wade. “The real Bill Wade?” I responded. I met the real Bill Wade, professional football player at a recital Sarah Helena performed in at a local nursing home. Bill Wade was a big football celebrity when I was a boy. He was the quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams and the Chicago Bears. Meeting Bill Wade was such a surprise and made my youthful memories kick in. I remembered the sports writer Fred Russell and I asked Mr. Wade if he was ever the target of one of Fred Russell’s infamous practical jokes. Mr. Wade warmly laughed as his face brightened up. If you get out of the daily ruts you’ve dug for yourself, your visits to nursing homes and the people you meet can spark all kinds of pleasant memories and it pleases God. It also does a lot of good for someone tethered to a wheelchair.
Our consumer society isn’t conducive to meaningful relationships. Looking back on our lives since our sons have left home I think we did a lot of drifting and substituting collecting personal property for real feelings and relationships. I think when you are filled with hopes and dreams for others you stop drifting and discover unfulfilled hopes and dreams for yourself. I don’t think dreams are dreams until you share them with others. I think our dreams should be shared. What do you think?
Have you been reluctant to admit or say out loud your dreams to someone you love and spent most of your life with? Haven’t you ever felt like telling your mate you’re bored with your life, but you didn’t? Don’t you think God intended for us to have meaningful purpose so we don’t need to feel bored? I don’t mean God wants us to fill our homes with new stuff as a substitute for doing His will. Redecorating your home is not the meaningful purpose I’m talking about. For me meaningful purpose is giving justice to His people, taking care of the widows and the fatherless as expressed in the first chapter of Isaiah. Discovering Mission verses have ways to move willing Christians to action.
It took me 2 years to get the courage to tell Sarah my dream after I discovered I had a dream. I made the announcement I was going to quit my job and we were going to start a foundation to help American families with adoption expenses, with some reluctance. I had hinted at it, but I never took the deep breath to announce it. I made my announcement at our home on Christmas morning 2004 after Nina and Sarah Helena came to our home to open Christmas presents. I should have known Sarah would be supportive. If I had not made my announcement I wouldn’t have this picture of Sarah and the little girl at the orphanage in India and we wouldn’t have experienced this wonderful spirit filled life of helping children as we’ve shared.
We can make a difference. I want to be clear about this, because it is an important reason to put yourself out in the world, doing something you’ve never done before. Consider this thought; we can help an orphan correct medical conditions, get them out of an impoverished orphanage into a clean safe foster home and into an adoption pool of special needs orphans.
Every one of those special needs orphans is put on the fast track for a family to adopt them. If we hadn’t come along and helped that orphan, they would spend their childhood in an orphanage and when they turned 15 or 16 they would be put out on the street with little education, a new set of clothes and maybe a little money and if they came to the orphanage with a serious medical condition they probably are going to leave their orphanage with the same medical condition, if their medical condition hadn’t already killed them. That’s happening all over the world, right now today. Orphans are put out on the street to be preyed on by the sex industry and those who would enslave them in other ways. Even in Israel human trafficking is a big business and prostitution is legal and girls as young as 12-years-old, sell their bodies. Orphanage personnel might even molest them.
You are important. Think how we can change their childhood and their future life and we are doing it for someone we’ll never see again or maybe never see at all. Maybe we’ll just have a picture of them. Hopefully we’ll have a picture of them here in America with their new families. What a miracle!
This is a note from a young Chinese girl we helped her parents adopt. We sent her a High School graduation present and she sent us this note.
Mr. & Mrs. Rummage:
Thank you for the Target gift card! It will definitely help me a lot while I attend college this fall! Thank you so much for donating money to my family so they could adopt me. This means a lot to me and my family. Without your help, the adoption could not have happened. Again, Thank you so much! Love Lilly
Lilly was 13 years old when she was adopted. She was one year away from never being adopted according to Chinese adoption laws. We have a picture of Lilly when she first arrived in America and we have her H. S. Graduation picture. Lilly means a lot to Sarah and me.
In most cases a few Americans can pay for children with medical needs without putting a strain on their own budgets. A cleft pallet operation is less than $1,000 in China, including travel to a big city hospital with a Nanny as the baby’s escort. That’s why you create a Circle of Friends to spread the cost. Do you have 10 friends to share the cost? Doing unselfish acts of charity surely pleases God. I think God will be more pleased with our motives and efforts, rather than our money. Our money is God’s money anyway and we shouldn’t be stingy with it.
Have you ever wondered what is in the mind of a mother who adopts a special needs child? This is a snippet from an adoptive Mother’s email about her specials needs orphan. Notice the reality in the Mother’s words concerning her little girls medical condition, but notice the hope her little daughter gives her. You’ll see her complete message a little later. We helped the Foster Home with financial help, which makes us feel a part of this new family’s joy.
The spina bifida for which we researched and prepared for has not been the extent to which we anticipated. The unknowns of other issues have been more than we could have predicted. Her story is a picture that adoption is most always a chance of unknowns; and always, I believe, worthy of the extent it may require.To be a part of changing a life, not only the child adopted, is an amazing process. Not an event, but an experience. One in which only the future will reveal the end of the story.
Her story is one that, while we are happy to be able to bring her home, saddens me. Like so many waiting children with multiple or severe special needs, she was available for adoption a long, long time before we were able to be her family. I hope that her story will be an encouragement to other families to take a chance and open their hearts to a child they may not have initially considered.
Matthew 5: 13 “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.
We are meant to be the salt of the earth and I think helping a stranger helps us to be made salty again. Even if you’ve wasted years like I did, just look at what can happen in 5 years of partnering with God in earnest. If we can make that much difference in a child’s life you can also. It’s not too late for you to become the salt of the earth, even if you’ve lost your saltiness. You’ve got a big selection of God’s children to help. There are obviously the orphans, but there are also the homeless, the disabled, hungry seniors and children and students in your city who need to learn English and eat three meals a day.
Just think how much more this purposeful life can broaden our own spiritual journey, change our own circumstances and change the lives of our children and grand children. I can hear the Godly hope and compassion in that Mother’s thoughts about her little girl in spite of all the medical uncertainties. If we give our help in God’s name and God is with us just think what we can accomplish. Do you remember the Bible verse, which says if God is with us, who can be against us? We are the salt of the earth when we do God’s will and it’s never too late to do God’s will.
Does America have the wrong idea about age? Think how important your life is, no matter how old you are, if you can save a child from a childhood in a bleak orphanage or their illness’s death sentence, because they were born with special medical needs and their parents and their orphanage couldn’t afford to get them medical care. Think how powerful a group of experienced Baby Boomers can be, especially if they enlist God’s help. Sounds like your Circle of Friends, I’m proposing, is a Baby Boomer Peace Corps of days gone by, operated by God. If you’re too old to travel or if your health won’t permit travel your Circle of Friends can finance a younger couple to travel for you and find orphans to help.
We’ve met a lot of Heroes on our journey. Arthur couldn’t travel, but he sent Sarah and me to do God’s work for him in Israel. A little later I’m going to tell you about Arthur, a 97-year-old man who changed the lives of hundreds of orphans and school children in the last year of his life and how he will change thousands of children’s lives into the future. He also changed the lives of two of his Grand Children, because they’ve seen first hand his good intentions and how their Grand Father’s good works became reality. They’ve seen the school his gift built and the orphans whose lives his gift has changed. It made such an impression on his Grand Children they wanted to forgo seeing tourist sights and spend all their remaining time with the orphans.
We haven’t given up anything. Sarah and I still have the lives we were living, but our lives have another dimension and are just fuller and more satisfying, but you can make your own judgment about us as you read our story and see our pictures. I’d also say, associating with people who have big unselfish dreams, like our Heroes, stimulates us to dream bigger and be more hopeful. That’s the way it worked for us. I hope I can help you see that.
This Is What Happened
To Me
Wilderness Wandering
Matthew 4: 1 Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit (is the Spirit the same as our Holy Spirit/Comforter?) into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. 2 And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungred. 3 And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. 4 But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. 5 Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple, 6 And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. 7 Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. 8 Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; 9 And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. 10 Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. 11 Then the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him.
Spiritual Renewal Is Another Benefit Of
Leaving A Legacy
My lack of attention to the needs of people at risk in the world caused God to wait a long time for me to come to my senses. I was like the Prodigal Son. I’m glad God waited.
Change can be challenging. I have to confess not long after we started planning our legacy I was feeling uncomfortable. The deeper we got into searching for a concrete plan the more I was needing to depend on God, which in truth I wasn’t accustomed to doing. Were you frightened when you bought your first house? Buying a house was a big scary deal for me. My Mother and Father lost 2 houses and ended up living in a rented house before their divorce, but I did know people who had bought houses and didn’t loose them. When you buy a house you have all these experts who can help you and give you advice.
Starting a legacy is not like buying a house, it’s actually scarier. We didn’t know anybody who was leaving a legacy, not even at church; that’s because they weren’t telling and we weren’t asking. Our lack of knowledge wasn’t because they weren’t there. You see, selling homes is a big business, which gets a lot of advertising attention, but somehow organized Christianity thinks it’s bragging to tell people about doing God’s work, so they don’t advertise. Too many Christians ‘hide their light under a bushel basket,’ instead of shinning it for the entire world to see. Jesus didn’t hide His light. The ministry of Jesus caused a big explosion in His world. I think we need to change the attitude that telling what we do in God’s name is bragging. Many more Christians would be leaving a legacy if they knew what other Christians were doing.
Some legacy builders were at church, but we didn’t know how to find them and enlist them as mentors. We didn’t even know to call what we were trying to do, creating a legacy. We started calling doing God’s work a legacy after we saw how our results affected those who we helped, our family members, friends and even strangers. God’s work through us and our Circle of Friends was truly a legacy for all of us. In the beginning we were also a little timid about announcing to the world what we were trying to do, especially because we didn’t know how to explain what we were doing or how to answer questions.
We were afraid people would laugh at us for giving our time and money away to orphans in China, but we knew how important Sarah Helena had become to us and how precious she was and the thought of her still living in an orphanage was so unsettling.
I didn’t know how big the opportunity was, waiting for us in China. We were risking a large part of our retirement funds. We had already spent thousands of dollars setting up our foundation. We were contemplating spending the rest of our money on travel and care for orphans. We didn’t know how much all of it would cost and if we really did have enough dollars to see the job to the finish line. I didn’t have a job anymore and at my age the prospects of replacing my income, I had given up, looked to be impossible. Sarah was neglecting her real estate business, because our planning was taking up so much time. Our personal expenses continued to eat away at our money and we were already spending money on our future travel expenses as we stumbled around in the dark. Like hungry wolves biting at our heels, time was ticking away. It was already summer and November was our “D Day” to travel.
I admit I had second thoughts. If I didn’t have the hope I could change an orphan’s life and if I didn’t have Sarah as a partner, I think the process of helping orphans and spiritual renewal, pouring myself out, leaping into the unknown by faith, I think this journey would be beyond bearing. I could not have done this on my own. At the time I didn’t know what we were doing was giving birth to personal spiritual renewal. Taking on the management of a Coca-Cola plant and around 200 employees at 27 years of age wasn’t as scary as jumping into this complicated dark hole. No amount of life experience can prepare you to actually meet God face to face in the “Tent of Meeting.” I’ll explain “Tent of Meeting” a little later. It’s actually in your Bible and I’ll quote the verse. In all my life I had never met God face to face, so I thought at the beginning of our journey.
Please don’t get my intentions wrong; I’m not a Bible scholar. I’m just an ordinary man quoting a Bible verse and I’m interpreting the verse emotionally and practically from my life’s experience, as best I can, not from a scholarly point of view I acquired at a University through advanced study. What I learned about spiritual growth was learned on the job, out in the world full of orphans in need.
I was about to understand a Bible story in a new way. I was afraid I would fail and Sarah would think less of me. Maybe Abraham had the same apprehension of failure and letting down Sarah, his wife, when he packed up and did what God wanted him to do. I wonder if Abraham’s friends told him he was crazy and if moving was a crackpot idea? Maybe Abraham was like us and didn’t say much about what he was going to do, or Who was sending him. I wonder how many people back then, or for that matter people today, believe that God actually speaks to man. How does God speak to flesh and blood man? Does God only use Scriptures, or does he have a voice like we do, or does he speak to us in dreams, or through angels or does He speak to us with gentle nudging, like through a little girl named Sarah Helena?
I could substitute my name for Abraham’s in their story. I don’t know how Abraham felt about failure and letting Sarah down and leading her into a wild place where they might die, but his actions sure fit with my own experience. It’s very human to be afraid of change, failure and unknown places. I think because Abraham introduced Sarah as his sister, he must have had some of the same fears I have. Maybe Abraham was still holding on to the false belief he can control events in his life. Maybe I acquired that silly idea from Abraham, along with some other bad habits. I understood Abraham’s story differently as an adult dreamer about to embark on a journey I had never made into the unknown in China rather than a journey, from a boy’s perspective, in my parent’s car driving to the mountains in East Tennessee for a vacation in the 1950s.
I’m going to include a lot of Bible verses and stories in our own story. You see I discovered being a know-it-all, thinking I knew everything there was to know about the Bible stories I learned a long time ago, didn’t quite help me know what I needed to know as an adult, today. I had no idea the old Bible stories have new meaning when you put them into the context of your present circumstances, if you read their stories on an emotional level, if you read them with an open mind, if your circumstances have changed enough to make you uncomfortable with the status quo and if you’re dreaming dreams you’ve never dreamed before; dreams you are finally willing to share with others.
The Bible is not a guide for picking out the best new car or the best steak at the supermarket, even if I tried making it a guide for trivial decisions, but it is the best guide for developing character, a spiritual relationship with God and solving problems; the solutions of which will please God. You see character, relationships and solving problems are all best expressed as emotional activities. I think if we limit solving problems to our intellect we won’t recognize all our potential solutions. Intellectually I would have never understood the problem I had with a weak spiritual life or how to have a strong spiritual life. It was when I considered my spiritual life with my emotions did I feel the true depth of my spiritual hunger. The same is true for character and relationships
Genesis 12: 1 The LORD had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. 2 “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” 4 So Abram went, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old ( Abraham was past RETIRMENT AGE! ) when he set out from Harran. 5 He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Harran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there. 6 Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 The LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built an altar there to the LORD, who had appeared to him.
8 From there he went on toward the hills east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the LORD and called on the name of the LORD. 9 Then Abram set out and continued toward the Negev. 10 Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while because the famine was severe. 11 As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, “I know what a beautiful woman you are. 12 When the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ Then they will kill me but will let you live. 13 Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you.” 14 When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that Sarai was a very beautiful woman. 15 And when Pharaoh’s officials saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh, and she was taken into his palace. 16 He treated Abram well for her sake, and Abram acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, male and female servants, and camels.
17 But the LORD inflicted serious diseases on Pharaoh and his household because of Abram’s wife Sarai. 18 So Pharaoh summoned Abram. “What have you done to me?” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me she was your wife? 19 Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her to be my wife? Now then, here is your wife. Take her and go!” 20 Then Pharaoh gave orders about Abram to his men, and they sent him on his way, with his wife and everything he had.
I always thought Abraham’s story was only about obeying God. I never considered Abraham’s feelings or his failure to be honest. Try rewriting this story with you and your family in it. Maybe it was taking a new job that you were afraid was beyond your skill level of maybe you got transferred to a new city in a new state where your family didn’t know anyone. Write how you felt making your move in a rented truck you packed yourself or a company paid moving van. See if you can enjoy all of Abraham’s or Sarah’s emotions concerning what was unknown, feelings and mistakes by considering how your emotions, feelings and mistakes made you feel back then. May be you were leaving home for the first time. I wonder if Sarah was sexually compromised in order to cover up Abraham’s lie?
Think back to your past. I’m thinking of the decision Sarah and I made to move to Wilmington North Carolina and how it changed our lives. I’m also thinking of Nina’s decision to get her law degree from Pepperdine and after graduation, moving from CA, taking a job at a health care company in Chesapeake Virginia and go to a little community church meeting in a public school building cafeteria and meeting a couple who went to China to adopt a little girl, which gave Nina the idea and courage to adopt a little girl baby from China. Now I understand those decisions we made were truly God driven decisions.
When I write our names into Abraham and Sarah’s story it sounds like the following. “John, Sarah and Nina I have some things I want you to do. You won’t understand now, but you’re going to be a part of a great spiritual nation I’m going to make. Nina you’re going to have a baby.” That’s what God said. Nina said, “But I’m not married!” God said, “Don’t worry Nina, I’m going to take care of everything.” Sarah and I said, “Moving to Wilmington sounds like a big scary move! It’s so far away from home and our family.” Over 30 years passed from the time we moved to Wilmington to when Nina and Sarah went to China to get Sarah Helena. A lot of things happened and didn’t happen in those years. I haven’t really begun to tell you what happened to all of us during those years.
Those decisions were just to complicated to be serendipity. I’ll talk about this idea of being part of God’s plan and what happens to us not being serendipity, a little later. I believe God has a plan for all of us. God will make us feel alive if we’ll just let Him have His way with us.
I started remembering important experiences. I was feeling like I felt after a doctor told me I had cancer in the center of my chest, which complicated operating on me and I should go home and write a Will. I was devastated. My prayers were prayers of desperation. I prayed so hard, if I could have sweated blood I would have. I was so frightened. I had so much to loose and so much responsibility and so much more of life to live. I had an exceptional wife and 3 beautiful little boys and I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving them for some Pharaoh to take my place and sleep in my bed and raise my children with weird ideas I wouldn’t approve of. I had a career to die for and that seemed to be exactly what it looked like I was going to do. I thought with all that I had and such a bright future, it would be a waste of a good life to die and leave it all behind. I felt like I was being cheated. I would go in the bathroom, lock the door and sit on the cold floor and pray desperate prayers for God to save me. I even made promises I wasn’t capable of fulfilling.
I remembered a Bible concept that gave me hope. The first thing I did after the Doctor told me about cancer was to go to my Elders and ask them to pray for me and lay hands on me. That’s what the Bible tells us to do. I looked at God’s instructions as a promise He would heal me.
James 5: 14 Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: 15 And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him. 16 Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.
My Elders said they didn’t do that sort of thing, but our new preacher, F.W. ‘Bill’ Mattox said, “you do those things” and he said he will show them how to pray and lay on hands. I wonder if God was responsible for sending Bill to Wilmington, N.C. just for me and the training of men who just months before had been the church’s business committee and had no idea of the responsibility of Elders, beyond managing the church money. The Wilmington Elders didn’t understand they had the full authority of Elders to do that sort of thing. My crisis was part of their spiritual journey. I should have asked them what they thought about me not dying. I also wonder if the power of Elders praying for healing really sunk into their consciousness, since I was their first experiment into praying for healing.
A cancer diagnosis is one of those deep dark holes you can get sucked into without the hope of surviving. Everybody I ever knew who had a cancer diagnosis died a very painful death. My Father’s brother died of a painful stomach cancer. As soon as the family heard the diagnosis they prepared to bury him. I remembered my Father coming home from visiting my Uncle Beau in the hospital and he said Beau had started vomiting up his stomach and he threw away a handkerchief he used to wipe Uncle Beau’s blood and stomach lining off of Beau’s mouth.
The two weeks before my operation I read two novels about death. I re-read Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ and Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal.’ My spirit was so dark and morose and I was wallowing in the idea of dying. And then in Time Magazine or News Week I read a letter from a woman who had cancer and was dieing and was also wallowing in the prospects of her death. She explained she had determined she wasn’t going to spend any money on herself and isolate until she died. She went on to say she got a toothache. She thought she would tough it out until she died, but the pain became unbearable so she gave in and had a dentist fill her tooth. Then she said “what the heck,” those are my words from memory, and went out and bought a new dress. Her Letter to the Editor helped me stop feeling sorry for myself. I renewed my hope that maybe I could make a deal with God. I started praying give me time to do a good deed in my life as in the ‘Seventh Seal.’ In the weeks before my operation I also did a lot of searching for human understanding like Abraham and Sarah searched for understanding with human eyes and experience, instead of searching with spiritual eyes and spiritual experience.
My prayers were still all about my needs. Can you sense I still thought I could control events in my life, even control something as powerful as cancer? I didn’t even think in terms of waiting to see what God had in store for me. I just jumped into the cancer dilemma and was going to figure it out for my self. I even got the address of a Mexican clinic, which had an experimental cancer therapy and I made a plan how to get there and when to go. I think I was thinking, I’m going to die so I’m not going to wait for God; I was going to figure out death for myself. Thinking back to that time I now see while I believed in the Bible, I wanted to embrace human suffering on my own terms, in the words of human beings who knew about death. I took comfort in knowing that from the earliest history of mankind, human beings have always feared death and I was looking for a human process, an example of dieing to express my fear, give words and images to my feelings of desperation. What a contradiction when you consider I continued to pray for God to save me, give me more time so I could accomplish something really big and great for God and mankind. I think I was like Abraham and Sarah who heard God’s promise of a child, but they used human reasoning and sought out what they knew would work, a man having sex with a woman of childbearing age.
I was vacillating between faith in God and faith in human reasoning. I anchored my human reasoning in Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge,’ Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’ and my personal life experience of people dying of cancer. I anchored my faith in God from my understanding of what God had promised about healing. I thought God had made me promises and I could show him the warranty agreement for life, it’s right there in the Bible, ‘thump-thump’ and He would remove my cancer by me going to my Elders to pray for my healing and for them to lay hands on me, following His warranty like I do at the dealership where my new car warranty is enforced. I believed He would heal me when I went to the Elders, but then my confidence wavered, so I was back to human reasoning and getting ready to go to Mexico. My thinking raced back and forth with the possibilities. God was about to show me His will is the only thing certain in life, no matter what I wanted. I’m afraid you really won’t understand all this until you face a death sentence type experience. Contemplating your own demise through the filters of your intellect and religion doesn’t really do justice to the act of dieing viewed personally through your own emotional journey initiated by the sudden collapse of your health or diagnosis, treatment and the agony of personal pain.
I continued to have second thoughts about going to China. Sarah and I had made a commitment to help orphans get adopted. I had quit my job. We cashed in and spent a large part of our retirement before we knew how hard it would be to get started and we might fail. I don’t know that Sarah had the same fears I had. We didn’t talk about our fears. If I had not had the hope, when we started, I can change an orphan’s life like Nina changed Sarah Helena’s life, which I had no assurance I could do after weeks of struggling to make a plan, I would have almost abandoned leaving a legacy and continued to cling onto my old excuses and religious beliefs, which were so familiar and comfortable, even though I knew deep down in my soul they don’t work and they don’t please God, but in spite of all those old comfortable excuses and religious beliefs I didn’t give up trying to change orphan’s lives.
If I gave up and didn’t follow through and help the orphans would I be like the Rich Man? I think about the sheer terror I hear in the Rich Man’s plea to Father Abraham, imploring Father Abraham to warn his family to give justice to God’s people and take care of the widows and the fatherless, so his family could be in heaven with Lazarus and not in hell with him. Could I end up being like the Rich Man after I die, pleading for my family not to make the same mistakes I made concerning God’s needy? So much of me doing the right thing in my life could be characterized as ‘too little too late.’ I didn’t want to be responsible for my family going to hell, because I was a weak or bad example about following God’s will.
In life the biggest things I had been praying for was God to let this cup of cancer’s pain, early death, a new career when I decided to change jobs and finally ordinary middle age boredom to pass and oh yes, the effects of a stroke in 2005 to go away without any lasting damage. If you throw in me praying for good health and material blessing you’ve pretty much described my prayer priorities. If you had asked me if I was like the Rich Man I would have to say no, answering that question in my worldly frame of mind, but then I think people like Lazarus have always been invisible to me or at least I’ve never really gone out of my way to help them and for sure I need to admit they’ve never laid heavily on my heart, until now.
By my own admission I was condemning myself to be just like the Rich Man if I gave up and didn’t journey to China, because helping orphans was too difficult, complicated, messy and it would bring up feelings and emotions that would make me feel too uncomfortable. All these years I thought I deserved and expected God’s help for my trivial needs just like the Rich Man probably thought he deserved to have Father Abraham’s help. He probably attended Synagogue like I attended church. He probably compared others to himself and thought he was glad he wasn’t as hopeless as they were hopeless, just like I compare myself to others seeking delusional comfort. In the end he thought he deserved God’s help for his intractable problem, but as we learn it was too late for him to make a difference. I think I thought I was different and wasn’t at risk like the Rich Man was at risk, because I certainly wouldn’t pass up a poor person sitting at my front door without helping them. I think I’ve actually diminished my relationship with God that desperate prayer about someone else’s problems can foster. I was only praying for selfish needs with ME as the recipient of God’s blessing instead of praying for needy people who needed God’s blessings more than I ever did.
I don’t understand why I ever doubted God’s sincerity, with this Bible example challenging doubt head on?
Genesis 18: 10-14 The LORD said, "I will surely return to you in the spring, and Sarah your wife shall have a son." And Sarah was listening at the tent door behind him. Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women. So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, "After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?" The LORD said to Abraham, "Why did Sarah laugh, and say, 'Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?' Is anything too hard for the LORD? At the appointed time I will return to you, in the spring, and Sarah shall have a son."
Genesis 21: 1 And the LORD visited Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did unto Sarah as he had spoken. 2 For Sarah conceived, and bare Abraham a son in his old age, at the set time of which God had spoken to him.3 And Abraham called the name of his son that was born unto him, whom Sarah bare to him, Isaac.
I think ‘at the appointed time’ is the key phrase. My appointed time was when I realized I needed to help children like Sarah Helena. I felt shame when I considered the overwhelming needs of children like Sarah Helena in orphanages all around the world compared to my trivial needs, which I could provide for myself anyway and if I couldn’t, I probably could have done without what I thought I needed. You see when I asked for God’s help through prayer and I didn’t see results or like the results, I just went out, by myself, and did it like I thought it should be done.
God had faithfully waited for me so He could accompany me on my journey to find my spiritual life after my 30 years of wilderness wanderings. God did come to us in the spring of 2005 after our journey to China in the fall of 2004 and gave us proof and reassurance, but like a drunken fool I still didn’t understand how God works in our lives. I should have realized we couldn’t have succeeded without God’s promise and help, but I still held on to the idea God needs our help, like Abraham and Sarah thought. I wonder if I misunderstood God like the Apostles didn’t completely understand Jesus and His life’s work.
I was thinking new thoughts. I’ve learned that spiritual renewal doesn’t mean retirement from worldly responsibility or giving up pleasure. I’ve found that a life of giving has unexpected rewards. When you look at the rewards of giving they don’t appear to have the adrenalin rush, glitz or pizzazz of self-centered living like when you buy a new car, a new couch or eat at your favorite restaurant every Friday night, but a life of giving rewards you with peacefulness and restfulness that energizes you like waking up in the morning after a good night’s sleep. Self-centered living compared to a life of giving is the difference between going to bed after drinking and waking up with a headache and going to bed after working on saving an orphan and waking up with hope and feeling blessed and being at peace with your existence when you go to bed.
My Old ways of thinking started unraveling. My religious routine, church service and Sunday school classes every week were taking a back seat to helping the orphans. Bible stories and individual verses took on new meaning. My life was evolving into a completely unrecognizable routine. The time I was spending on our trip and making plans, made me feel closer to God than I did at church. The truth was I had stopped sensing God at church a long time ago. I’m thinking a lot of church experience for me had become hearing someone talking about God and talking at Him, but not really helping me make Him part of my DNA; at least I thought church had not been successful at making God part of my DNA. I had become a simple spectator, maybe like the people who witnessed the spectacle of the last hours of Jesus, wondering what it was all about because they didn’t have all the facts.
I’ve started questioning if personally working in the lives of God’s needy and imitating Jesus is more productive in making God part of my DNA than being a spectator in church. I was giving working in the lives of orphans and imitating Jesus a try and it was working for me. I think what I’m talking about is like the difference between dating a person and making a commitment and marrying them. They become intimately part of your DNA after you’ve really lived with them and maturely desired them to be part of your DNA.
I understood the authentic life of Jesus more because I was looking at what He did in His life and I was trying to imitate Him. Jesus was a Jew whose belief in God was founded in the Torah, the Prophets and the Psalms. I started studying what Jesus would have studied. I was praying more for understanding Jesus and myself, saying less and listening more to the answers I was finding. I came to realize that praying could be more rewarding just being quiet, listening to God, searching for answers in the Scriptures and in a real life rather than superficially talking at God or listening to somebody superficially talking at God. I found myself praying in a new way.
At night I was praying, “God show me what I need to know” and He was giving me new understanding the next day by allowing me to explore new ideas in a lot of new places with new people. Just yesterday in our Sunday school class we had a university professor talk about prayer and the research he had done on prayer. Last night I prayed for understanding the power of prayer and if it really worked, like if I could give peace to someone in a stressful situation just by praying to be able to help them. This morning, before dawn I was awake and thinking about prayer when I remembered one of my lunch periods in the Vanderbilt University Library where I discovered that our bodies have electrical fields and we could transfer electrical energy to another person. I wonder if there is good electrical energy and negative electrical energy?
I’m wondering if I could transfer my good feelings to another person who was really troubled? It can’t be such a far-fetched idea if my body has an electrical field that can be measured. If I’ve got good feelings within me, could Itransfer those good feelings to another person who has negative feelings? It’s printed in a scholarly book, by a doctor and on the University library shelf for everyone to read. I Goggled, ‘can one person transfer electrical energy to another person.’ I found empathetic blending and it can be done. I think I’m getting closer to the answer to my questions about the power of prayer, even thought I’ve never heard in church the answers I’m finding. I’m thinking the power of prayer is invisible like my body’s electrical field is invisible and I can’t know either unless someone shows me how to use the power that prayer and my electrical energy can produce.
Well, I’m guessing I’m scaring some of you and you’re going to start discounting what I’ve got to say. If you’re doubting what I’m saying think about a crying baby and how when you pick that baby up with good peaceful feelings for that baby, maybe that baby is receiving your good feelings and intentions from the electrical field in your body and touch and our good feelings are what sooths the baby’s fears and stops the baby from crying. I know those thoughts about positive electrical energy transfer are so foreign to our intellect, but are those thoughts foreign to our visceral experiences with babies. I think our experience tells us babies stop crying when we lovingly pick them up, but our experience might not explain the scientific reasons why.
1 Corinthians 12: 1 Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, I would not have you ignorant. 2 Ye know that ye were Gentiles, carried away unto these dumb idols, even as ye were led. 3 Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed: and that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost. 4 Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. 5 And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord. 6 And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God, which worketh all in all. 7 But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal. (The following makes what Paul is trying to say clearer to me.) 8 For to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom; to another the word of knowledge by the same Spirit; 9 To another faith by the same Spirit; to another the gifts of healing by the same Spirit; 10 To another the working of miracles; to another prophecy; to another discerning of spirits; to another divers kinds of tongues; to another the interpretation of tongues: 11 But all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will.
The Message actually makes the verses clearer. I Corinthians, 1-3: What I want to talk about now is the various ways God's Spirit gets worked into our lives. This is complex and often mis-understood, but I want you to be informed and knowledgeable.
4-11: God's various gifts are handed out everywhere; but they all originate in God's Spirit. God's various ministries are carried out everywhere; but they all originate in God's Spirit. God's various expressions of power are in action everywhere; but God himself is behind it all. Each person is given something to do that shows who God is: Everyone gets in on it, everyone benefits. All kinds of things are handed out by the Spirit, and to all kinds of people! The variety is wonderful:
What do you think? Could this mean you could be empowered to participate in some of these activities? Do you think what these verses talk about is no longer available in modern times? Do you think Paul could be misleading us? I don’t think so and I don’t think it’s far fetched to think I could pass my good feelings, one of the gifts God has given me, on to someone who is suffering without me using words, using nothing but my feelings, touch and my prayers for me to be of comfort to them. I’ve tried it. If you find it hard to believe, why not try it for yourself? Go to your nursery at church and pick up a crying baby or go to a nursing home and hold the hand of a sick person. I think we all need to believe in the ‘signs and wonders’ Jesus told us about.
The deeper we got into planning our trip to China the more I was sensing a new path. I was sensing new personal information and Bible understanding. I almost believed I could experience a new adventure, but it had been so long since I had an adventure I couldn’t quite believe it could happen to me again. My intellect still wanted to control the process, but my emotions told me control took the adventure right out of our future. I just knew I had to let go because, Sarah and our future Heroes were revealing things to me I couldn’t have seen if I controlled the process. I started to realize if I were in control of our new adventure it probably would turn out like all the trips I had meticulously planned all my life. It would have turned out to be just another business trip. Helping orphans would turn out to be like selling Post Toasties, Coca-Cola or real estate, not the glorious adventure God had planned for us, helping orphans. I started to feel an inkling of what blind, out of control faith really meant; not the stingy kind of faith I had always practiced. God, Sarah and a lot of strangers needed to be in control of this adventure, not me. I had never been in an orphanage in China or held an orphan or met people who took care of orphans.
I had mentors in my early career, which gave me the chance to grow. Our ‘new path adventure’ reminded me of the way I felt when I was 27 and given the control of a large Coca-Cola plant, or at least I thought I had control, but in reality I had little idea of what I was doing or that genuine control came from real hands-on experience, which I had not achieved. I was taking a job recent managers had failed at. I got the old employees together and asked why did the old managers fail and everyone of the employees, who had been there most of their work career, said the failures were because the old managers had their own agendas and never asked the experienced employees what they thought.
Memories of my Father started coming back to me. I remembered what my Father told me. He said, “Johnny you are smart, but you need to stop telling people how smart you are, ‘dumb down’ and listen.” I also remember my Father telling me how he always asked the old guys at his work how to solve problems. If old guy’s wisdom was good enough for my Father, it was good enough for me. I asked the employees what were the problems and how they would solve the problems. They gave me their suggestions and I gave them the authority to implement some of those solutions. We all worked together and it worked. Their will, not mine be done. You see I started to realize then that past experience, my Father’s advice, can answer present problems and it was coming back to me now. Those old-timers at the Coca-Cola plant had been my mentors.
Looking back on my work careers I always thought I had been the boss in my important careers, because I had the title, but now I was remembering I succeeded because I empowered others. Sarah and our new friends were making more of the important decisions and I quit resisting them and by letting go of my control God was empowering all of us.
My life wasn’t always pleasant. My life has had a number of sobering moments, like leaving the hospital after my operation for the cancer in my chest. After the operation the hospital said I would need to go home early. I begged to stay, but there was a northeaster blowing outside and a lot of sick people needing my room. An elderly Candy Stripper, in a rain slicker, came to my room and helped me into a wheel chair and rolled me down the hall into the elevator and down to the first floor, through the entrance, down the canopied walkway to a spot where I saw Sarah. The rain was blowing sideways. I was soaking wet and shivering cold.
Sarah was standing next to our station wagon and without warning the Candy Stripper gave me a push towards Sarah and I was immediately freewheeling down this incline. I felt helpless. I was picking up speed and Sarah looked like she was a mile from my out of control wheel chair. The wheel chair drifted first one-way and then in the other direction. I couldn’t reach down with my right hand to grab the wheel because my right side hurt so badly. I couldn’t slow the wheels with my good left arm and hand. The more I tried to slow the left wheel the more I veered left. Sarah was shifting back and forth with out stretched arms, waiting to catch me.
When I got home our house was full of church friends waiting to greet me with fellowship and food. After a couple of hours of friends coming and going I was frantic and talking about taking the car out and going to the plant. I thought my office, with its closed door, would be sweet refuge from all the commotion at home. Sarah called Joe Mattox, Billy’s son, and he came straight over and gave me a shot of something to calm me down. I think it was what he gave pregnant women. I went to bed and rested all night.
That was the beginning of my dark 15-year journey to recovery and the hole I was digging, searching for control, thinking control was the real meaning of life. My cancer experience terrified me. I was so out of control being told what to do at doctor’s appointments, during test and at the hospital. I was so helpless, sitting in those flimsy gowns, having people poke at me with sharp, cold instruments. I felt like I always felt, but everybody and everything that was happening to me told me I was going to die. Cancer is such a dramatic diagnoses and it’s easy to get sucked into unavoidable emotional conclusions.
Some how I forgot my new beginning at the Coca-Cola plant and the power of empowering other people. I started owning my employees successes, another dirty little lie I told myself. I thought I was the boss at my work and yet I couldn’t change what was happening to me, right then or ever again. I could change the lives of my employees, no I could only change their work circumstances, but I was helpless to change my own life’s circumstances. I was determined never to be out of control again, sort of like Scarlet O’Hara’s promise to herself to never be hungry again. That kind of thinking is what gets us into trouble. That was the same kind of thinking Sarah and Abraham had when they took having a baby into their own hands. I spent the next 15 or so years in a fog of delusion. Oh I functioned, but I can’t say I was happy.
All those years I struggled with control issues. As much as I wanted to let go of control I wasn’t ready to completely let go and let God lead me. In my work career I was accustomed to reluctantly adjusting my expectations, calling all my failures anomalies and now when I was about to go to China I was making the same mistake by making just one more adjustment, justifying my need to exercise control over our trip. It was like I had amnesia when it came to remembering the past and how my ideas didn’t always work. I had lost contact with the fresh young man with so much to live for. I can see now I had actually stopped looking for adventure and started looking for problems. I was lost in a forest of opportunity which years earlier I had navigated so easily, but now I just wanted to limit the opportunity to fit my need for control. Everyone around me suffered because of my stupidity. I’m so blessed Sarah stuck with me.
I also thought I would always have my religion as an anchor. I was dead sure everything I believed or didn’t believe about God was written in the Bible and I already knew all about it. I went to a college that taught the Bible for God’s sake and those Bible classes gave me license to think I knew all I needed to know about the Bible and besides, I’ve been studying it all my adult life. I didn’t realize God was always writing new stories into the lives of His people, even today and He’s telling His old stories in new ways I had not yet come to realize. I’ll explain about that a little later. I think I’ve already started to explain what I mean with Abraham and Sarah.
I was discovering my belief in the Bible was wavering and I was ignoring the stories God was trying to write on my heart, today. Simply going to church was no longer satisfying. I started seeing verses and understanding ideas I didn’t know was in my Bible. My safe, comforting book was becoming an indictment of my life and my lack of participation in doing God’s will. Everything was becoming a mystery that was condemning me and without knowing it, I was heading for a train wreck. I wonder if God was making me uncomfortable to get my attention? I’m describing a dark uncomfortable journey taking years for me to make.
Sitting in the airplane I contemplated the prospects of failure. It was time to travel. I realized I couldn’t control the events hurtling us towards the airport and a 14-hour flight to China. How could a 15-month-old baby girl named Sarah Helena have made all these changes in my life? What if this plan, we thought God had helped us make, failed and we couldn’t help an orphan get adopted. I never liked failure. I finally had to give up and put my fate in the hands of God. Life got better from that point on.
This kind of revelation could not have happened to me back home. Back home I still could hold on to false ideas, actually the dirty little lies I kept telling myself, like Abraham did when he said “she’s my sister Mister Overseer!” I was still thinking if I was clever enough and worked hard enough I still could control some of the events of my life. My thinking kept drifting between I thought up this idea myself to help orphans in China and who talked me into this insane trip? Was it God sending us to China like He sent Abraham and Sarah to a new home in a new land? There are so many ways to connect our current lives to old Bible stories, if we try and use our imagination.
Life back home, living that lie and letting God plan our trip, what a contradiction, was just part of a new birth for me. It started back home, but only materialized in China where I was hopelessly out of control and no matter how clever I was or hard I worked I couldn’t change being out of control.
In China the only person I had to wrestle with was my self and I didn’t have all the distractions of false supports I had created back home; so who I was fighting with became crystal clear in China. Without the distractions I needed to realize I was only fighting with my self or fighting with problems I had created on my own. Distractions were the routines I invented to keep my flawed ideas propped up. I had to come face to face with how hard life is for most of the people in the world, especially children and orphans. They didn’t have time to fight with themselves; they only have time to survive. I realized how easy I’ve had it. My failures were because of my false ideas and bad decisions, not the harshness of life in America. I had started out living a privileged life, but looking back I never really thought I deserved such good luck and probably I was and had been sabotaging myself.
I wonder how the Tent of Meeting plays into us as individuals seeing God face to face. I think maybe clearly seeing God’s will is another way of saying seeing God. I don’t have all the answers, mainly I have questions, which I’m beginning to think I get answered only when I take the journey with Him and act without a guarantee of the outcome. I think if I don‘t go, I don’t get the answers.
I fight with my self and I fight with God. I say to God I won’t stop fighting until you bless me and God says I’ve already blessed you. God says, “John wake up and look to your past to see My blessings.” I say to God, “that’s not what I wanted.”
This new birth I was experiencing held all the uncertainty and problems a child faces growing up. The importance of the change, which was happening to me, was for me to be completely out of control without any hope of being able to function on my own. I was in China and had American money in my pocket, which wouldn’t buy anything and needed to be exchanged for Chinese money, but where? I had good sturdy shoes and warm clothes, but I felt cold and homeless like those homeless men standing on street corners back home in Nashville. I found myself in a packed airport foyer with what seemed like a thousand Chinese people speaking a language I didn’t understand. I kept telling myself to keep my left hand in my front pocket to keep a pickpocket from stealing my wallet and Passport.
We were looking for our Chinese guide, but everybody looked alike and when I tried to communicate with the people standing around me, “where are the guides,” they just shook their heads and turned away. We were so tightly packed in that sea of people we were being led by the crowd where they wanted to go. In America people respect your space, but in China personal space is not understood. In China tightly packed bodies everywhere you go is the norm, especially on public transportation and in public places.
Part of my fear was I would get us arrested and immediately sent back to America. I had heard of circumstance where foreigners were immediately sent home, or worse arrested and put in jail. Haven’t you heard how Christians are persecuted in China and even put in jail? As I write this I can’t help but think of how Abraham must have felt real fear when Pharaoh took Sarah into his house.
Genesis 12:14 When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that Sarai was a very beautiful woman. 15 And when Pharaoh’s officials saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh, and she was taken into his palace.
I was still fighting with myself. My mind was spinning out of control with negative possibilities. I was still trying to depend on myself to get us through all this uncertainty in the Beijing airport and then in the midst of all that confusion was this little white sign, popping up and floating above all those Chinese heads that read, Rummage. The opposite of fighting is letting go. What a relief to see our name in big black letters.
God was saying to me, “John wake up and see my blessings for you.”
That’s how I gave up, more than I ever had let go of control in my whole life and started welcoming God’s control of the events during our trip. That was the first of many problems in China I couldn’t solve myself, but they all got solved. God was in control and I couldn’t do anything else, but accept His help. I was so relieved. I had forgotten we had booked our trip with God’s travel agency. I didn’t know our guide would have a little white sign and he could spot two white American giants towering over the Chinese crowd. God blessed Sarah and me and I recognized the event for what it was. I didn’t say, “It wasn’t what I expected.” I just said “thank you Lord,” relieved like a drowning man, finding a floating log, in the midst of a raging river.
God’s way always has surprises. Leaving a legacy has taught me something about spiritual renewal. You need to pour yourself out completely before your spirit is renewed. The process of pouring yourself out is painful, but you’re making room for a healthier spirit, a fuller life with your loved ones and God. This spirit is not one a child knows, but a spirit a mature person can only understand. That’s why children don’t marry adults. It takes two adults to enjoy the benefits of a mature marital relationship. Sometime an immature adult marries with unrealistic or immature expectations, desiring a mother or father from their mate and the marriage fails. Sometimes an immature Christians seeks a spiritual life with unrealistic expectations and that spiritual life never materializes.
I think for me I was beginning to understand the worthlessness of an old spirit that was tired of chasing after childish understanding. I was exhausted from false starts leading to disappointments. I was praying God would heal my spirit from the cancer of being neglectful and the unknowing neglectfulness fosters. I wanted to see the signs and wonders and the invisible things Jesus promised, just like the simple little white sign with my name on it. I really hope you can have the same intense God planned experience as I had in China.
It worked something like this; at least it did for me. Think of your spirit as the contents of a glass. You are the glass. We Christians have been filling our glasses over a lifetime. We read and study, go to church and hear sermon lessons and we go to Sunday school classes for more information. Week after week we keep trying to pour more information into our full glass. What happens when you try to pour fresh wine into a glass full of stale wine? The new fresh wine just spills out and is lost and all you’re left with is the same old stale wine and just maybe a taste of the fresh wine floating on top of all the old wine. You get a taste of the new fresh wine big enough to leave you dissatisfied with the old wine. What did the wedding guest say about the wine Jesus made for his Mother? I think it was something like why did you save the best wine for last. Thank you God for saving Your best wine for a time I could understand what you were offering.
Spiritual renewal happens when you are able to empty your glass and pour new and fresher wine in. For me it was the new fresh wine, new experience and understanding, inside my empty glass making me different. I still had the same glass, but new spiritual contents in it. My new spiritual contents came with the struggle to help the orphans in China and seeing the results of depending on God. The new wine for me was doing God’s will concerning the orphans and the new physical and mental experiences I was encountering while helping the orphans. Doing God’s will also allowed me to understand Bible stories in new and more meaningful ways.
Leaving a legacy allows me to pour out my old spirit, which wasn’t working well for me anyway, by serving the orphans in need, and only then was I ready for renewal. That pouring out of the spirit happens during the legacy process, or at least it did for me.
Isaiah 58: 10 And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noonday:
Let me say that verse in my own words. John, if you pour out your spirit to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted spirit of My children, orphans in my case; then John, your spirit will rise above obscurity (boredom), and your old spiritual darkness (understanding the word of God as a child and living a self-centered life taking care of my own needs) and your old spiritual darkness will be as bright as the noonday sun (smiling orphan’s faces and the glow they put in Sarah’s, mine and your faces). That’s how it sounds to me, and the only way I can make sense of it’s meaning. If I pour out my spirit to the hungry, I have an empty glass ready to be filled with fresh new spiritual wine (God’s work in the world with me helping real people, understanding Bible wisdom in new ways) and my darkness will become bright as the noonday sun.
John 14: 26 But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.
How can we be sure we are doing God’s will? It takes us about a year to plan how we are going to do our legacy building work. We start out unsure of what we are going to do. Because we are serious, the process requires a lot of soul searching and prayer. Our soul searching and prayer grows stronger as the uncertainty of our work intensifies. We depend on God. We expect Him and we need Him to answer those prayers. At first we don’t know how God is going to answer our prayers for us to find the right orphans in need or the things we’re going to do to help them or who is going to perform their medical procedures. We send out a lot of emails to people and organizations we don’t know and we don’t know what they do or if they are reliable. We start a dialogue and during our dialogue process, while we are fervently praying for God to enlighten us, some how it becomes clear what God wants us to do and where He wants to send us, or so it seems in the planning stage. I know that’s not at all comforting to Baby Boomers who built the Space Station and whose mantra is always ‘be in control of the outcome’.
Why aren’t my prayers answered? In my past, I can’t say I saw answers to my prayers. I think the reason I didn’t see answers to my prayers was because I had my agenda laid out all nice and neatly planned before I went to God in prayer. My prayer life didn’t work for the same reason the old manager’s agendas didn’t work at the Coca-Cola plant. If all the answers to my requests weren’t worked out like I thought they should be worked out, I just thought He wasn’t listening, so I stepped in and tried to make them happen for myself, the way I thought they should happen. I was always asking God to endorse my plans, without including Him in the planning. Authentic praying is messy.
In my prayer life I never really put myself completely in God’s hands and admitted I didn’t know, like I needed to do in China. Abraham and Sarah wanted a child and they didn’t believe God could or would fulfill His promise to give a child so Abraham and Sarah took matters into their own hands and involved child bearing age Hagar to be the Mother of their child. They were impatient with God’s timing. Their thinking was my thinking. I never really considered that aspect of their story. I mean being impatient with God’s timing and not believing His word.
Leaving your future to God may be too uncertain for the Baby Boomer and pre Baby Boomer generations. Don’t we believe individuals can do anything they want to do? Isn’t that what we believe? We’ve created the computer generation, built a space station and created 3D TV, haven’t we? And we’ve ruined a perfectly good 356 Porsche by replacing it with the complicated and ridiculously priced 911 series. I’ve sold them don’t you remember. I haven’t been especially fond of change, especially change making things more complicated.
God did provide for us in unexpected ways. It usually takes us a year of prayer and faith to plan one of our trips. It truly becomes a leap of faith finding the orphans to help, funding our project and finding the people who are going to help us. None of our trips have been the same. When we get to where God has sent us everything is new to us; new friends who start out as strangers, new food, new places to stay that don’t look like American hotels, and new orphans, all of which create new purpose filled adventures and it’s all very scary, but turns out to be exhilarating. We usually spend 2 weeks on the ground. It takes about 14 hours to get to China and another 14 hours to come home. Sarah and I are sitting side-by-side talking small talk, orphan talk and dream talk about where God is going to lead us next.
We’re a little unsure. At least I am unsure, but brave and so hopeful. We are wearing our best faces with big reassuring smiles. The process is fraught with troubles, dashed dreams and human needs that are gigantic. Sarah ordered a kosher meal on one of our flights to China. When the attendant served us she leaned down and in a low voice said, “I’m afraid you’re not going to find many kosher meals in China.” Some of our trip is ‘hurry up and wait.’ Sometimes the wait is so long you can take a nap. There’s also a lot of humor and fun and sights you’ll never see in America, which will make you think you’re a time traveler, into the past. Then there are the times you can really feel the presence of God, or probably to be more precise to feel the presence of the Comforter.
Did you know a lot of poor people in India don’t use toilet paper; they use their hand? That really makes shaking hands in India a leap of faith, just thinking about which hand does the wiping. The informed advice is they use their left hand, but who really knows. When I was a social worker for the mentally challenged I had this client who had hemorrhoids. His right hand was always moist from the ointment he frequently applied directly to the pain. I tried to warn people not to shake hands with him, but I finally gave up, because nobody could believe what I was telling them, until they felt his moist hand. Isn’t it funny how our past experiences can become our new experiences? Back then I never dreamed I would go to India, let alone for the reasons I went. That’s what I was saying earlier about remembering our past. I didn’t shake many hands in India on our trip to see the school because of what I know could be happening to their right hands. Real life experience is priceless.
We fail ourselves and others fail us. Sometimes the task God has put us to handling just seems beyond human comprehension and then through prayer God starts supplying the answers; in the trouble and unknown is the fun, maybe it is best expressed as deep abiding joy, knowing God is present and He loves us; all’s right with His world. I think I never really felt deep abiding joy, except in those moments Sarah says something to me, revealing she really loves me. It’s the simplest things that reveal person-to-person deep abiding love like a reassuring touch and smile and the sincerity of one of her surprise kisses on my cheek or the back of my neck. I felt deep abiding joy holding my sons, grand children and baby orphans, having them peacefully fall off to sleep in my arms.
I first felt God’s presence in China when I first walked into Amanda’s apartment with all those orphans and her helpers, I knew God was there, watching over His babies and His helpers. Knowing God has helped me help a baby also gives me that feeling, even when I’m at home reading emails from our Heroes about the babies.
Do you remember the joy you felt the first time you got to hold your just born son or daughter hot out of Mommy’s tummy, or saw them walk for the first time, moving from one piece of furniture to another, holding on for dear life with the expression “look at me, look at me! I did it!” Just think of the thrill of independence a baby must feel when they can walk from one side of a room to the other side, able to climb up in your lap for a big hug, or reach up on a table and get a snack. Think back to how you felt when you got your first grown up job.
Have you ever been to Jericho or the Mount of Olives, the Taj Mahal or the Great Wall in China? Have you ever seen Christians from India being baptized in the Jordan River, singing Christian Hymns in the very place Jesus was supposed to be baptized? That feeling of discovery and the certainty of God’s promises is what I’m talking about. I wonder if God arranged our trip itinerary to bring us to the Jordan River just when the Indian Christians started their baptisms and their singing.
Amanda is one of our Heroes. We have over 20 Heroes. Here is part of her story in pictures and in her own words through an email.
A Legacy Started in Your Home Caring for Sick Orphans
Amanda in Xian
Sarah is holding the baby on the left. The baby has cast on her arms to keep her from touching her stitches from her recent cleft surgery. Amanda is in the middle. She came to Xian to teach English. She was bored so a friend of hers told her to go to an orphanage and play with the babies. She started bringing sick babies home and ended up with 30 sick babies at one time.
This is one of Amanda's bedrooms. Her home is filled with baby beds. Notice the clothes hanging out to dry on the balcony. We gave Amanda enough money to buy a washing machine.
This is Amanda's building. Her building is in a gated complex. Notice on the left in the background is the Chinese national bird, the crane. Recently a baby was place by the gates with a note to give the baby to Amanda. This is the first time a baby has been left at her gates. The first time we went to Amanda's home the driver said you're going to see Amanda, I've seen her on television!
Amanda’s Newsletter May 2010
Notice how Amanda bares her soul and admits she has dreams bigger than she knows how to accomplish. Also notice how she handles being told no. Ever since I started the foster home, I was fascinated with the idea of arranging an opportunity for surgeons to come to China with a medical team and help the babies. My very first medical mission was at one of the fanciest hospital in China, the Shanghai United and I was there when Dr Lazareff and his team did 13 Spina Bifida surgeries in December 2005. I was so impressed that he would leave the US and come to China and help children that he often never heard of again.
This dream stayed in the background while I traveled often to go with the children from Starfish to find doctors on medical missions. I watched and learned, hoping that one day I would get a chance to do something like this. I asked everyone I knew and was repeatedly told to give up, that it could not be done. I had the idea of doing surgeries in Xian and after 16 months, the answer was still: It is not possible. One day I was asked to see about an orthopedic mission and called the only person whom I thought could help, the director of the Xian Red Cross hospital, who had offered free surgery a few months earlier to one of my babies.
He had said to contact him if I found a medical team. It was a shot in the dark. He graciously agreed to see us. At the end of the conversation I could see that the whole idea that the team was proposing was not going to happen. I asked if he knew other hospitals that would be interested. I got on the phone and called the director of the biggest children's hospital in Xian. We were driven over there and in an hour we got in touch with everyone who could make a decision at Xian Children's Hospital (XCH). They told us that they were eager to help us, and it gave me so much hope that they wanted to have medical teams come often.
Brennan
A few weeks later we submitted our Dutch medical team's dates and what they were planning to do and soon we had their medical requirements to issue licenses to operate in China. XCH were so extremely generous in the hospital fees and asked a fraction of the usual costs. I extend my most grateful thanks to the XCH and the doctors and staff who worked with us. We made history! In the 80 years the hospital had existed they had never had a foreign medical team.
Cailean
We had everything ready in China but never did we expect that volcano erupting. It grounded the whole medical team and caused a week long wait and cut the time in half, and we helped less babies than we wanted. The upside was that the medical team was on TV and that helped to get them seated on a flight to China sooner. However, eight babies had their lives changes and that was worth everything. Dr Johan also looked at David and made some recommendations for his care in the future, and he later went back to Guiyang, but not before we had all fallen in love with him. He is already tri-lingual (Mandarin, English and Dutch), as his foster family is Dutch.
Sarah’s Operating Room Nurses
We also found a boy with a cleft who needed surgery but his parents did not abandon him. The doctors found a previously undiagnosed heart condition that needs to be taken care of first. I feel that if we could offer some care and information right after birth that so many of the children will not be abandoned.
My most grateful thanks to Dr Johan Verhof, Dr Hing Gwan Kho, Astrid Paauwen, Elise van Haalen for their superb effort in helping the children. I got to watch them in action and I have to say I covet their skills, especially since I think I would be very happy to do something similar. I just loved watching Dr.Johan transform a baby's face. A great gift that will stay with the children through their lives.
Sean needs to take a break from a busy day of playing.
I also have to thank Elsie and Tineke from Care 4 Tina Foundation, who raised the money for this medical trip when they were in Holland. They worked so hard on that and have had so many creative ideas that they have still to execute, that there will be even more funds for the babies. They both feel so passionate about this and it is wonderful to see what a difference they can make.
The 3 Amigos before surgery.
The result of the medical mission: Eight babies got surgery, the Dutch and the Chinese formed wonderful new relationships, Elise and Tineke are working on getting two doctors invited to Holland for a trip to learn more about special techniques for cleft palate surgery. It would seem that the Dutch medical team plans to come back again next year. As for me, I fulfilled a dream. I am working on more medical missions, three teams before the end of the year, if everything goes well. Organizing a medical mission check that, a dream fulfilled. Life, love and laughter, Amanda
Helen is another one of our Heroes.
Helen started a street ministry, including feeding the homeless. She has baptized over 1,000 homeless souls. Everyone who finds out about her work on the streets thinks her work sounds dangerous, but Helen says she doesn’t fear for her safety when she is on the streets. I’ve already told you about the summer she revived a homeless man who had fainted, by giving him water. A few years later the same homeless man gave her water when she had fainted from the heat. Helen went to David Lipscomb College. The following is Helen’s story in her own words.
II Cor 5: 7 “For we walk by faith and not by sight.”
This scripture is a hard truth to learn and to be nurtured by. Yet, once taken into the heart, believed and followed will lead us to a great blessing, which will fortify everything else we try to do for a lifetime.
In the early nineties I had just come off of two jobs, which rounded out my career in the corporate world. One of those jobs was being the Coordinator for Institutional Advancement at David Lipscomb University in Nashville. The other was working as an Associate with World Christian Broadcasting in Franklin, Tennessee. World Christian Broadcasting is a short wave Radio station that prepares its radio material in Franklin, Tennessee, ships it over night to Anchor Point Alaska, and broadcasts it across the Bering Straights into Russia, China and the Pacific Rim. Though both jobs were appreciated and had their own appeal, like many others in that time I was caught in two back-to-back layoffs. Donor bases were declining; money was short, frustrations where high.
For a time I developed my own business teaching computer training. It was needed. We had just been given “Windows 95,” which opened a new playing field in the business world. People who could not master the old Binary Number and Code system could operate Windows 95 with very little effort. Over night America had changed from being an industrial nation to becoming an age of information. Jobs changed, benefits changed, the way we did business changed. We begin to hear words like “P.C.’s, Lap Tops, Internet, online, surfing the net, and e-mail. And as we became more acquainted with these terms something of the era gone by was slipping from us. With all the new information we begin to loose our precious privacy. Now one can sit and talk with someone across the world on something called “Skype.”
Both parties can see each other. I personally have no desire to sit in my hair rollers, in my pajamas while someone looks on.
After three years I had fewer students. Windows was not difficult to learn and the market was simply drying up. Once a student mastered Windows 95 they could easily teach themselves as newer soft wear came out.
Simultaneously to all these others things I had been taking care of a sick friend at church who had no family. Her experience had drained my bank account completely. For the first time in years I was on tile one with my income and assets. I would have done it all over again. She was a loyal and true friend. We were very different women. We dated different kinds of men. We like different kinds of things, read different books. Once we went to New York City. She insisted we go to the top of the Empire State building. I told her “I drew the line there because I hated to be up so high.” She pleaded all the more for me to go with her. I asked, “Why this was so important to her? “ She paused then said with great excitement, “Helen this is where King Kong took his last plunge and died!” She was my friend. She had cancer, I was willing to help her, but I was not going up to the top of that tower of Babel.
The previous three paragraphs are a brief overview of twelve years of work, care giving and struggle. Instead of traveling “The Road Less Traveled,” I was going down “The road less graveled.” One day I sat in my living room, looking over my bankbook, which revealed I had $2.00. I had nothing in my purse. Now I was precisely where God wanted me. I had had no income for ten months. This was where I came face-to-face with the scripture that says, “For we walk by faith and not by sight.” I feel very sure until that afternoon I had never believed or been obedient to that passage. With tears and frustration I began to pray, “God, I have always walked by what I have seen around me. I have walked believing I was taking care of myself. I have been filled with pride. Teach me now to trust You and begin to live in a real believing faith.”
The next day the mortgage was due and walking by the promises of the Lord I wrote out my full mortgage payment. On the bottom of the check I wrote, “Lord I praise You for what you are about to do.” The same day I drove to the post office and mailed the payment. When I returned home I brought in the mail. In the mail was a check from some friends in California. Their note said, “We never did thank you for helping our son when he was in college.” The check was for the exact amount of my mortgage payment.
The next day the car payment was due. Determined to not live by what I saw, I wrote a check for the car payment and mailed it that day. On the bottom of the check I wrote, “Lord, I praise You for what you are about to do.” When I returned home I checked the mail. There was a check from an over payment on my taxes for the exact amount I had written for the car payment plus one dollar. Now the mortgage and the car payments were paid and I still had $3.00. I was making money walking by faith.
The next day I needed some medicine. I went down to Walgreen’s and ordered them. I wrote on the bottom of the check, “Lord I praise you for what You are about to do.” When I returned home there was a check in the mail from an elderly friend. The note read, “Helen I wanted to thank you for helping me shell the lima beans last week.” Her check covered the medicine and I had twenty-five dollars left over. All of my most immediate needs where met. My two dollars had swelled to twenty-eight dollars. During the next six months this happened more than ninety times. God was faithful to take care of every single need and more. He was “Pouring out a blessing from the windows of heaven, pressed down, shaken together and running over.” God is not waiting for us to be people of ability. He is waiting for us to be people of faith. I have learned that faith is a practiced behavior. The more we practice not walking by the things we see, but rather by faith, the stronger and more powerful our faith becomes.
The point of my misery became the beginning of ministry. When we are experiencing a “simple, trusting faith,” we are ready to yield to what it is that God wants us to do. My story is a simply story. I have learned to work like I do not need money. I have learned to love like I have never been hurt, and I have learned to dance like no one is watching. I do not burden myself with the doubts and fears as to the obstacles that may block my progress. I can only take one step forward at a time.
You may be curious as to what I did with the Twenty-eight dollars in the till. I went to SAM’S bought peanut butter, jelly, bread and bottle water. The next morning I took sack lunches to the homeless in downtown Nashville. They were thankful to get it. This became a routine over the next months. I knew I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, and moving into a new effort that would become my work. As time went by I understood that it was easy enough to hand out food but I really didn’t understand their lives.
This led me to decide that I would go out on the streets and live with them for one week. Out I went to live among them. I ate the same garbage they ate, I slept in the same allies, had to search for rest rooms, drank from public fountains and fought the heat and rain right along side of them. After one week I returned to my home a changed woman. Now I understood the deeper hidden shadows of what they feel.
And so Fresh Approach Ministries was born. To work on the streets I added teaching classes to women inmates in our local prisons in Nashville. The following are brief encounters I have had with street people and women in the local prisons.
# 1 Coffee in a pineapple can
The Cumberland River banks are teaming with whole communities of homeless people. A homeless woman with whom I had shared some food invited me to come to her house. When we arrived at the riverfront she led me to a large box, which had been a deliver box for a refrigerator. She had all of her belongings in the turned over crate. She asked me “if I would drink some coffee with her.” She left for a few minutes and retuned with some river water in a coffee can. She boiled it over a small fire outside the box and handed me in a cup of coffee in a pineapple can. For several hours we shared about our lives. She was very opened to hearing about Jesus. Later that day I baptized her in the Cumberland River. She had no intention of leaving her box. It was home. My job wasn’t to get her off the street. My mission was to share information that could make an eternal difference. When we hold up Christ—people are drawn to Him. Whenever I eat pineapple I think of this woman, of a simple exchange, a brief encounter with a profound results. I had gone to share Christ with her. I came home with a far clearer picture of God for my own life.
# 2 Living water makes all the difference
It was a hot, sultry day in Nashville and as I drove toward down town I saw a man lying on the sidewalk. I pulled the van over and got out. He was so weak he could not even sit up. No smell of alcohol. I always carry a washtub filled with ice and bottled water. I pulled him into the shade and began bathing his face with the cold water. Drop-by-drop I let water drip from my fingertips into his mouth. After a while he began to speak very softly. He had simply collapsed due to the heat. He also had not eaten in several days. After some water and a sandwich he was able to sit up. He asked, “Who are you?” I replied, “A friend who wants to tell you about Jesus—who is the Living Water.”
Three years later I was working on the streets one day and had a bout with my blood sugar and was not able to stand up. The heat was so oppressive that day that it was difficult to keep working. Finally I had to get down on the curb and stay down. I felt a kind hand bathing my face with cold water. Back to me this stranger had come and was giving me cold water and a sandwich. Little-by-little he brought me back to life. When I realized who it was I was amazed.
“I met a stranger in the night whose lamp had ceased to shine.
He paused and lit his lamp from mine.
But then a storm arose and shook the world about,
And when the storm was gone my lamp was out.
Back to me the stranger came, his lamp was glowing fine.
He paused and lighted mine.”
Anonymous --
# 3 Learning to be free on the inside
Up at the “Big House,” there is one cellblock of thirty women who are “lifers.” Most of them are there for murder or being part of drug rings that sell to children, or sex trafficking. I was allowed to go in and teach Life Skills like reading and writing and also Bible lessons. One hot summer day we were allowed to have our class in the cage out doors. As I was teaching two women came from the back of the cage and began to taunt me calling me “religious girl” and other unsavory things. One of them stepped right in front of me and grabbed my blouse and with one fast jerk ripped it right off of me. The next one got my under garment. Boldness came over me that I have never felt before. Why should I fear what these women could do to me? I said, “You need to understand that there are angels all around me.” The one who had gotten my blouse dropped it, got her feet tangled in it, tripped and brought both of them down to the concrete. In the mean time one of the other inmates ran for a guard. He quickly gave me his shirt, which by the grace of God fit perfectly. Two months later with a little persistence I was able to baptize both of those women. The lesson at which they responded was entitled “Learning to be free on the inside.” They will never be free to live in society again, but they are learning to walk in peace and in the love of Christ day-by-day.
# 4 Don’t make me have to stop this car
The chapel at the Davidson County Correctional Department was filled with women inmates who were far more interested in getting out of their cell blocks for a while than they were in listening to me teach a Bible lesson. Nonetheless I began talking about the great struggle Jacob had with the angel of the Lord. It is a great story to share with inmates because they very much relate to struggling with life, long after they have lost the strength to do so. I noticed two women at the back of the chapel who were doing lewd things in broad daylight. So without missing a word I strolled down the middle isle, stopped in front of them and said, “As my daddy used to say, ‘Don’t make me have to stop this car,’ “They threw out some obscene comments and I asked one of the girls to go get a guard. When he came in he began swinging his club at the two women. By this time class was over. I stepped in between them and asked him not to hit them. Before he could draw back his club it came down across my arm. He hauled them out and put them in the hole for a week.
Some weeks later they returned to class. One of them asked me, “Why I stepped between them and the guard?” It was the perfect time to share with them how Jesus had stepped in for us. Both of them began to cry and one said, “You will never have to stop the car for me again.” Both became Christians. They are out and working and learning the secrets of the kingdom life.
We make “Ministry” to difficult. The condemnation of life so often is that hurting people are hungry-hearted, and we give them no sweet sympathy. Many are thirsty for love and we give them no cool, comforting drink at the fountain of our hearts. Many are strangers to the locked up, sealed things of life, and we do not take them into loves warmth and shelter. Many are sick with emptiness, misunderstanding and with the pressures of a day’s hard work, we do not visit them with words of encouragement. Some are in the prison of their small narrow rooms, and we do not come to them with the companionship they crave. They are not far away in third world countries. They are here, next door, down town under bridges, along the river, on park benches. They are nearer to us than we realize.
There is no great mystery to ministry. It is simply developing all of our senses to such a peak of awareness that nothing good or helpful will escape us. The secret to serving others is in developing understanding, sympathy, love, unwavering loyalty and a heart that sees the possibility of Jesus in every life.
In John’s account of Jesus washing the disciple’s feet (John 13:5-13) there are many clues for us regarding service. The clue I love most is that Jesus knew what to do and when to do it. The Bible says, “When supper was over Jesus laid his garment aside and began to wash the disciple’s feet.” It is a natural thing for us to want to sit at the table and be served. But there comes a time we understand that supper is over. Dishes need to be washed. People need to be loved and cared for.
The first step to ministry is to, “Lay aside your garments” like Jesus did. Lay aside whatever might be keeping you from investing your time, your money, your heart. The more we “Love our neighbor with all of our hearts,” the more heart we develop with which to love our world. God is not looking for “gifted” people. He is looking for “willing” people. Many times “gifted” people are perfectionists who get very little accomplished. It doesn’t take perfection to give someone some food, or to take a neighbor to the market.
Too often we try to commence, to begin to do or fix something. That would be the Southern way of saying, “We spin our wheels and never get on with the thing at hand.” Simply get up from the table of life, lay aside things that hinder you, and do something for another person.
Make no mistake God will reward the slightest effort. He loves to see His children reaching higher. Don’t you? Whatever we do “In word or deed, do all in the Name of the Lord.” When I am on the streets feeding hungry people I do it for the good pleasure of the Lord. When I am sitting in the rain talking with a woman who is holding a three spoke umbrella over her head and telling me her story, I listen for the good pleasure of the Lord. When I am ankle deep in mud baptizing someone in the Cumberland river, I am doing it for the good pleasure of the Lord. When I am teaching Bible classes in the women’s prisons, I am doing it for the good pleasure of the Lord. When I am praying with groups of women who have AIDS, I am praying for the good pleasure of the Lord. When I am reaching out to prostitutes and sharing with them about the power of God’s Grace, I am sharing for the good pleasure of the Lord. When I am giving a Bible lesson over WNAH radio, I am teaching for the good pleasure of the Lord. And always He receives the glory for any good accomplished.
As we grow older we can park our life in front of the computer or the wide screen TV, but ultimately it will not be very fulfilling. We were made for such times as these. Our world is scrambling to keep pace with the latest fades, to earn money we don’t have, to buy things we don’t need, to keep up with people we do not even like. It is hard to slow down and take a good deep breath when life is going by like a speedboat. We must ask what is really important. People are sitting in great darkness, and we are the “Pillars of the Earth.” How to be a Christian and how to serve the world is the real question?
Our neighbors are the world now. They are of every nation, every race, and from all background. I do not get evolved with too many arguments, too many issues, too many problems, or too many differences. It would hinder me from serving. We must recover our vision of our world as it is. The most important thing is how to be with another person. This is the pure gold of life, especially if what they see in us is Jesus.
I was driving in Hillsboro Village one afternoon in Nashville. I stopped to help a homeless man. As I drove away a friend who was with me said, “Helen we need to get ‘sucker’ tattooed across your forehead. I asked, “Why?” She replied, “Didn’t you see he was wearing new tennis shoes?” It never occurred to me that he did not deserve our help. I was happy he had good shoes on his feet. The gracious presence of Jesus would teach us to give people more than they might deserve. That is exactly what Jesus did for us. We deserved to carry the cross. We deserved to die. But with every ounce of love in heaven He stepped forward and took the crushing blow. Let us be people who are known for our generous ways.
Fresh Approach Ministries is a non-profit ministry, which was established in 1998 to serve the needs of hurting people. We have learned a lot about how to do that. God has blessed us over and over by bringing people to partner with us in our efforts. We also help to serve the needs of children in Nashville, and in the Appalachian Mountains with food, clothing, shoes, and school supplies. For the past twelve years we have also helped to supply items that are needed by the Saratov Children’s Home in Saratov Russia. We are thankful for the opportunities we have to serve. We are pleased to have a Board of Directors who support and guide our work.
I appreciate this opportunity to share about Fresh Approach Ministries with anyone who might be interested. We encourage all with the heart to serve to reach out to others. The blessings are many. Every person can do something. If you are not able to do great things, do what we try to do; do small things in a great way. Keep your eyes and hearts on Jesus. Watch where He went, you do what He did. His was a love that came at a great cost. As we serve may we all serve for His good pleasure?
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