Re-commissioning

For the past month Nancy and I have been traveling. It was kind of late in the year for a road trip, but we had relatively mild weather throughout. We took our tandem bike with us in the hopes that it would be mild, but we only got in a couple of short rides. The mildest days seemed to fall when we had obligations rather than when we were free. Otherwise we might have put a few more miles on the bike.

We covered 15 states and about 4500 miles. We slept in our teardrop trailer six times, stayed in motels only two times and the rest of the nights we were guests in someone’s home or lodged at a conference. We visited family, friends and former colleagues along the way including someone who taught my children Sunday School as far back as ’79, colleagues with whom I attended Jungle Training Camp in Mexico as far back as ’74, a few SIL colleagues going back to ’73, and dear friends of Nancy’s from Tulsa whom she has known since the late 80s. And that doesn’t even cover Nancy’s in-laws in Chicago, going back to ’67, and her brother in Nebraska going all the way back to when she was born!

We visited the home office of our new mission, Barnabas International, in Rockford, Illinois, and the offices of Advancing Native Missions in Virginia. We attended the Mental Health and Missions conference in Indiana and the Pastors to Missionaries conference in North Carolina where we made wonderful connections with people with lots of experience in our new field of “member care,” and reconnected with a few people we had already known. I even met two of the people who were on the Wycliffe candidate committee that had approved me as a candidate in 1972. The latter conference was held at the JAARS Center, where I “happened” to bump into more former colleagues.

We gathered resources along the way and took notes on other resources that we are determined to find. We spent many an hour hearing people’s stories and sharing our own. And we even received word along the way that the elders of our home church had voted to make us their own Foothills Bible Church missionaries.

One day at the PTM conference Nancy and I were just looking for a table in a crowded lunch room where we might sit down to eat. At one table there were two empty chairs but a stranger was sitting in between them. He must have noticed our need because he moved over one chair without even interrupting the story he was telling to the others at the table. We murmured our thanks but he kept right on talking to the others at the table.

We couldn’t help but listen in as he spoke with passion about the opportunities that were now coming the way of his organization because of a new national language translation of the New Testament that had been finished recently. He went on to add that Psalms and Proverbs were now completed as well and the whole Bible was projected to be finished the next year. Yes, you guessed it. He was talking about the same project that I had helped to get started and about which I wrote in “A Day to Remember” a week or two ago. Nancy and I sat there gleefully anonymous as he went on and on. Of all the tables we could have sat at, the Lord directed us to that one for his mysterious purposes. Apparently He didn’t want us to think that the “Day to Remember” was an accident. We felt doubly affirmed.

The trip served so many purposes! All of the contacts with people from our past served to give us a pretty thorough review of our lives, with many reminders of how the Lord has blessed us in the past. And in the present it gave us many rewarding relationships and profound training. And it served to launch us into our new role and some new relationships for the future. And throughout the trip, it seemed the Lord’s hand was upon us to bless us in incredible ways. Indeed, we felt as if God himself were re-commissioning us for those good works that he prepared in advance for us to do. (See Ephesians 2:10)