Tuesday, May 14, 2024
Feast of Saint Matthias, Apostle
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Story from the front
Who is like the Lord, our God, who is enthroned on high and looks upon the heavens and the earth below?
Our friend’s newsletter told this story about a missionary helping program she works with. It’s called Member Care, “walking along with helpers in their tiredness, suffering, pain and confusion, helping them encounter the living God who loves them and wants to help them.”
Our next trip was to Ukraine where we worked with the YWAM leaders serving there. Definitely a group of weary workers! We daily spent the mornings with worship and teaching on trauma to help normalize some of their feelings and responses to the war over the past two years. I was privileged to work with a young leader who did not want to be at the retreat. She told me that she had only cried one time since the war began, despite losing friends and staff during the war. As we then began to sort through her losses, I asked her what her greatest loss was and she simply said, “God.”
I asked her where God was before the war and she said He was all around her and walking with her. She did not know where He went but she was certain He was quite upset with her because she didn’t read her Bible any more and couldn’t pray.
Together, we spent the week understanding God’s character and exploring her inability to concentrate enough to pray and read. She wasn’t so certain.
At the end, leaders were asked to write down what they wanted to leave in God’s hands so they could move forward, and then nailing those thoughts to a cross we had brought. While we all moved outside for this, she took off a bit abruptly and headed up a hill nearby. She did not return for several hours. I went out to meet her as she came down the hill, and she had the most peaceful, content smile and told me that she met with God and everything was now okay.
It was such a sacred moment for me seeing what happens when our suffering collides with God’s grace and the redemption that follows.
We talked Sunday in our class about how awareness of God’s presence is mirrored with a clearer and sharper recognition of our own depravity. St. Augustine famously filled his pillow with tears, and as he got older he filled bigger pillows, as he felt his own sin more and more directly. In the diagram God is on one side of a triangle and my sin is on the other. In between sits the cross, which gets bigger and taller as we move on through our own gift of years. This is the picture, except the cross does not shrink!
Whether I am in Ukraine or recovering at home from cataract surgery, God’s presence and his faithfulness never changes. Our friend in Member Care was overjoyed to watch the girl from Ukraine rediscover God. The girl’s felt abandonment was transformed, and so was she. She will be, without doubt, a better helper for others she encounters who are living in the same lonely isolated place.
I chose you from the world to go and bear fruit that will last, says the Lord.
 (Acts 1, Psalm 113, John 15)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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