Week 7 – Missions/Living in Community

This week we had a man named Joe Lieway come speak for both our Monday and Tuesday night main sessions. He is a contact that The Revolution (the GCM church at Ball State University) has from Liberia. He talked a lot about the subject of missions and told us stories of their time working in Liberia. He reminded us that our God is a global God and he is looking for a shepard, like David was, to take care of his people. Also, that God uses the few to reach the many. But, we are called to be like Abraham: to possibly leave our family or our people, and go out into the world. God may call you out of where you are in order to make you into something else. God can still use us despite our weaknesses and in our darkest night, but it usually requires sacrifice.

There were two stories of his from Liberia that stuck out to me. First, there was a story of this young man from a village and his grandfather was being falsely accused of witchcraft, which is still punishable by death there. But, to save his grandfather’s life, the young man went all the way to the government council by foot to have the charge removed – a trip that was miles and miles long. He got a paper signed from them to release his grandfather and ran all the way back to his village. But, as he was only about 8 more miles away, he saw some berries on the side of the road and decided to stop to eat them because he was very, very hungry. Soon, he realized how long he had been eating and resting, and started running as fast as he could towards his village again. As he reached it, he heard a gunshot. He walked up to the crowd of people gathered around and handed the letter to the executioner. The executioner informed him that he was too late to save his grandfathers life.

We hold the letter of life – eternal life – in our hands … are we going to choose to save the life? Or are we going to wait until it’s too late?

The second story was about a type of bird that lives in Liberia. As people have seen, this type of bird nests in trees. When the mother bird sees that it is time to teach the baby bird to fly, she pushes the baby out of the nest. Meanwhile, the baby bird is holding on to the nest with all its might. It simply does not understand why its mom is doing this to him – she is taking away all of his comforts. As the bird starts to fall, it starts to flap its wings and try to fly, but is still struggling and freaking out the whole time. But as the people watching can see, the mother is there the whole time flying underneath the baby bird, so just as he is about to hit the ground, the mother swoops under and catches him.

What a real life metaphor for God our father! He starts to take away everything that we know, all of our comforts, and we simply cannot understand why He would be doing this to us. But as we freak out and begin to stumble, we can’t see it and don’t even recognize it, but God is right there. And just as we are about to fall, He catches us.

On Project Day, we spent the day with our houses. We began the day with a morning devotional with the people in our houses. Then, we were given time to choose whatever service or evangelism project we would like to do during the time. Our house chose to serve the landlord of our condo complex who is extremely sweet, Suzanne. We wanted to make lunch for her and spend time with her, but she had other plans. So, we baked her cupcakes and assembled a wonderful and fun gift basket full of fun goodies for her (things like a dog toy for her precious dog that she loves), nail polish & pedicure kit, fresh fruit, candles, and more). We were able to catch her just before she left her house and take everything over to her. She was so surprised and loved it so much that tears came to her eyes. She gave all 7 of us a hug and a thank you :)

Then, for the last part of our Project Day, we had a talk from Neil Kring from Ball State University about conflict resolution. Basically, Neil spoke to us about how we have to learn to operate as though conflict is normal and healthy, not terrible and awful. We are creatures that were created by God to be in relationship with one another, and in relationships we also learn a lot about ourselves. In the case of resolution, Neil spoke about Matthew 7:3 and how it places priority on reconciliation, not the worship, first. We need to learn how to step up and deal with it right then, not sitting on it. But, remember that if you are confronted about something it is out of love and it took courage for that person to confront you. In Proverbs 27:1, confrontation is regarded as a form of love from someone. They care about you enough to want you to grow in that area. Also, Ephesians 4:15, which talks about speaking the truth in love. Confrontation is the responsibility of all believers.

After this talk, every house had a group meeting together accompanied by a staff member, so that anyone had a chance to bring up anything that was bothering them or hadn’t been resolved. For our house, we had some things to talk about, but overall I think it went really well and that it was needed.

So, the week was a mixture of themes but was still very good!