Missions

Its missions week out here in Texas. The chapel speaker from today encouraged all of us good seminarians who go (cough...are forced) to chapel to be open to the work God has for us in international missions. He had a nicely worded sentence that was supposed to be easy for me to remember that has now escaped me, but that was the general idea. Leaving chapel, I wondered out loud to a friend of mine how to equip, encourage, prepare, involve the local church in international missions. Its an area that I feel ill prepared for. I have not yet had the opportunity to be apart of any such project. We're planning on it, and you can send me some money if you want, but as of right now I don't have much to go on. Furthermore, I'm ignorant. When missionaries give messages about the needs of the world, I am learning. That isn't really a good thing. They breeze through a grotesque list of things that I know nothing about. Today's specifically included things like kids being chained to a board that they sleep on, 1.3 billion people who had never heard Jesus' name before, and oh yes, the people of somewhere who sell their children into slavery. I don't know where most of these places are. I don't know what the people in those places are going through. I certainly don't know how to instill a sense of responsibility to help or to facilitate an ability to follow through for the members of First Church USA concerning the people of... somewhere.

I'm called to student ministry. I have a booklet thing that an IMB guy gave me today. Page 16 has a picture of a 16-17 year old girl named Nic who is apparently a skateboarder from South Carolina (go figure) holding a naked baby in Bratislava, Slovakia. I'm not really sure what to do with that.