Living with Abandon as a Norm

Last week we got a letter from friends in the Philippines who were planning to share the Gospel for the first time in the small village where they serve. This week we got a letter from Venezuela about how many people it takes to reach a group of people, about how believers from one group are helping in Bible translation and sharing their testimony in national churches. This Sunday in church we were encouraged to bring neighbors and friends to church, to start conversations about God and the Gospel. Yesterday we attended a prayer meeting with Moody students, faculty, and staff.

These things reminded me how different it is to serve in your own culture-- how relatively simple it is to share the Gospel with native English speakers in America that live across the street: and yet that can still be challenging!

How much investment does it take to reach a monolingual group of people in a remote area? How amazing is it really that my boys grew up surrounded by people who were willing to move to foreign countries to share the Gospel with people they'd never met, living in often uncomfortable places and doing things they'd never even dreamed of doing. And yet, within that context, it seemed the most normal thing in the world.

Which challenged me to do my best every day to make total surrender to God seem like the most normal thing in the world, to live consistently with the kind of abandon that makes it seem normal. To make the choices in each environment to live in obedience to the Father who is desperately seeking to save the lost, to redeem the world.

I think these choices to do become normal as we repeat them day after day. Obedience changes us and the Spirit enables us. And we stand in awe of what God is doing. We had those moments this week, hearing testimony of what God has done, meeting a young man from Venezuela who is pursing his pilot & mechanic license, chatting with friends, attending a prayer meeting where God was so evident, and reaching out to neighbors.

Sometimes I think our lives are so ordinary I have no clue what to say, then I realize that our lives are ALWAYS ordinary, but God is NEVER ordinary. He goes beyond our wildest dreams and amazes us. It is our privilege to know Him as Father, King, and Lord. And His story is ALWAYS worth telling.