It Made A Difference 2

Here are just a few excerpts about how trips in college made a difference for people:

In the summer in 1990, I went to Haiti with a group led by our CCO staff person. Also on that trip was Lynette, my girlfriend at the time who is now my wife of 16 years. The trip served us in an unexpected way.
A small residential college is something of a "relationship incubator." That is, when we met and started dating there, things always happened in the warm fuzzy confines of the campus. We got to know each other well, but only in that context. To know how a girl experiences the stress of finals is, though interesting, not that useful in the rest of life. The mission trip was one thing that broke us out of that. We were with a group, in a foreign country doing tasks that we NEVER did in the college setting. We got to see one another in a new context that was challenging and revealing. If I am ever tempted to disrespect my wife, there is always the knowledge that she can lay brick better than most men.
On other fronts, the impact of the trips are hard to measure. I can remind myself daily what poverty really looks like. I can know that I don't know what suffering is. My job now is about helping others and treating them with dignity while I do so. All things I learned on those trips. Ken '93

I went on two mission trips with Messiah – they all made a difference!
Not that I was very material-driven to begin with, but these experiences made me even less so. I became appreciative of hot water, cold milk, and lettuce – and basically all of the luxuries that we in America have. I’ve encouraged others to LEAVE THE COUNTRY AND VISIT A 3RD WORLD COUNTRY. I think EVERYONE should.
Now that I have 3 kids under age 4, I won’t travel, but I do support folks who are going on missions trips. I believe in it so strongly that I can’t so no to someone raising funds so that they can attend a trip. Stephanie '99

I attended the Haiti trip in 1991 via Issachar’s Loft. The trip made a profound impact on my life and I still to this day remember some of the commitments I made to serve Lord. During that time by God’s grace and the faithfulness of many Godly ministers the Lord gave me an opportunity to help in starting a Classical Christian School in New Jersey. This school has over 50% minority representation and we never intentionally planned that but we are very grateful for the ethnic diversity in Christ represented at the academy. Ralph, '95

Its funny that I just received this email from you. I was just commenting the other day how thankful I am for running water and hot water. I often think about the challeges people face where I served in Honduras with no portable or hot water. I am often reminded of the simple things that we take for granted like taking a hot shower every day or drinking water out of a sink. Nora '99

Did it make a difference?

Alumni,
Did your service & mission experience change your life? Or not?
It's important for us to hear both! Please leave a comment!
Tell us who you are, how you served, and what God did.
Did God use your experience to:
-make you more grateful?
-humble you?
-make you a more committed follower of Jesus?
-forge long-term relationships?
-give you passion to do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God?
-open your heart to service?
-help you discover the richness of other cultures and nations?
-instill generosity in giving to service and missions organization?
-make you less materialistic?
-call you to some kind of life-long service?
-give you new perspective on poverty?
-give you courage to reach out to neighbors and friends?

The only wrong answer is no answer, and its never too late!
Reflect on your trip NOW and God may still use it.

grace and peace,
Matt Hunter

ps- check out other posts to read about alums in mission, student testimonies and this years plans.

An Oasis in Belize (with IPod Worship)

Guillermo (Billy - top left) spent 10 days in Belize and really saw God move in incredible and unexpected ways.

"I think the coolest thing I learned in Belize is that God is interested in every single part of our lives. Pastor Ron Braaten (PR) and his wife Linda, run the Oasis Ministry full-time. Oasis really shows love in an incredibly holistic way that reflects the overwhelming love the Lord has for all His children.

Oasis has a mobile library ministry that allows children to borrow from a trailer full of books they regularly bring to local schools to encourage reading. They also find people to sponsor Belizean children's education. In Belize, there is no free public education. So families must pay for all levels of their children’s schooling. Most families can afford the relatively inexpensive primary school tuition, but the large majority cannot attend secondary school or pursue higher education because it simply costs too much for them.

Apart from Oasis, PR founded a church for the local Belizeans that provides a lot for the people's spiritual and social needs. The church is like a little community spread throughout the nearby towns. PR and his workers use two school buses to pick up the entire church body before every function, which was just remarkably cool the first time I saw it in action. God moved powerfully through their Monday night worship services, where there are no live musicians and the people literally sing their hearts out with recordings off an iPod! Despite this major difference in the set-up of their service, it was awesome to see the Spirit invade our space and help to renew and restore all of his broken children, both Belizean and American.

I really cannot say enough about how impactful this mission was to my life and my faith. I learned an incredible amount about myself and about God’s heart for all of humankind around the world.

Benefitting from the Doubt

"Doubt" is a a popular movie and play right now. It is also popular for contemporary theologians to praise doubt as a necessary component of faith. What IS the "benefit of the doubt"?
Have you ever been wrong about someone? Both my wife and one of my best friends have often
been plagued with others prejudices. It's not a racial thing. They really ARE just misunderstood.
The crux of the problem is that they are both good-looking people who happen to be introverts.
Therefore, they are judged as aloof and arrogant. People rarely give them the benefit of the doubt. They are certainly not the only ones victimized by prejudices, nor are they the most severely victimized. Being human, they "no doubt" (?) often prejudge others as well.

I vaguely remember a conversation I had with a Russian Orthodox Priest. He had two sage pieces of advice. First, and less relevantly spouses should not try to be accountability partners. Second, and more relevantly, he quoted an Orthodox Saint who had suggested that to truly forgive someone, the forgiver should try to come up with a humane excuse for why the offender behaved as they did. This is one way of giving the benefit of the doubt. It is assuming that there is some perfectly humane reason why someone behaves badly. At my church, we sometimes say, "Hurting people hurt people." A humorous essay on the male perspective offers this "rule" to women: "If we say something, and there are two ways you could take it, and one of them makes you mad, we meant the other way." That's a step in the right direction.

Taking self-doubt (and faith?) a bit further, we might become agnostic about the thing that leads to our judgement. This is to say, "I doubt that I know why this person is the way they are, but I take on faith that they are a person of immeasurable value and complexity. Certainly, there is a humane reason for their actions (however deplorable) and they are not innately worse than I." The benefit of the doubt does not suggest that we entrust ourselves to those that have hurt us, or even reduce guilt in many circumstances. It only asks that we don't assume the worst about them.
Dealing (as I do) in service, I sometimes have the opportunity to hear people trying to make sense of their service experiences. Since we often serve outside our own communities, we often find ourselves in contexts that we don't quite understand. Given our own experiences, Christian servants can get pulled into the American tendency of meritocracy that suggests that whatever needs are present in the life of any person or community, personal irresponsibility probably lies behind those needs. In this situation, the benefit of the doubt is to say, "I am not from here. I do not know the history of this community, or what it has been through. I do not know that they are any less responsible than I. I have a lot to learn." The old adage has it: "Do not judge a person until you've walked a mile in their shoes." Doubt should also be a call to learning. Even recognizing the permanent frailty of our knowledge does not suggest that we maintain cold ignorance! If you don't know about a person, get to know them better.

What about our relationships with God. Can they benefit from doubt? Indeed. C.S. Lewis and Fyodor Doestoyevsky have both written about scenarios in which God goes on trial. No doubt Job had the idea first. But doesn't faith demand that we give God the benefit of the doubt? I would suggest that if the God you claim doesn't deserve this benefit, then you should leave aside the worship of that "God" until you can imagine a God that does deserve it. That one is God.

Sufjan Stevens, writing "Vito's Ordination Song" in the vox Dei offers these lyrics:
"To what I did and said, rest in my arms, sleep in my bed. There's a design.
To what I did and said..."As incomprehensible as many apparent "acts of God" (or God's non- intervention in acts of incomprehensible tragedy) might be, if God is God, might the benefit of the doubt include these things?

For those of us who offer God the benefit of the doubt without reservation, and desire it for ourselves, it is time to offer it to those around us who are created in God's image.

Is this a Pollyanna ploy for naivete? I hope it is intentional wisdom for healthy living.
When can we move beyond doubt? When we know fully, even as we are fully known.