Into the Future

(The following text is from my e-mail "diary" I send out every few weeks. It's something I started way back when we first went to Kazakhstan. You can get these via e-mail by sending an e-mail to Ramsays-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.)

Weekend before last Shawn, Naomi, and I were in Western NY to attend Rebekah's graduation from Houghton College. We are very proud of her accomplishments and look forward to seeing what the Lord has in store for her. She majored in History. For her senior seminar project, she studied the culture where she grew up, doing a major project on the impact of collectivization on the Kazakh people during Stalin's years. It is neat to see how the Lord is already integrating the experience our children had growing up into their adult lives.

As the graduates paraded across the stage, I could not help but wonder what the future holds. What sort of world will they be ministering in? The week before her graduation, we had a 2-day intensive session with a handful of staff and missionaries at The Mission Society to consider that question for ourselves as a ministry. We took a look out 25 years and gave thought as to what sort of world it might be - painting a picture of the horizon out there and our place in it. It was a good exercise to help move us away from thinking in today's set of assumptions. We all know that the rate of change seems always to accelerate.

We tried to imagine what the world will be like in 2033 and what would be the shape of the religious landscape. We know that mission will be a calling for believers until Christ Himself returns. But what forms will it take then? How will those who call Jesus Lord and Saviour best communicate that Good News to others? And given those possibilities, what do we need to be doing now as believers and as a mission agency to prepare ourselves for that world? This whole process is a precursor to a year of long range planning we will be doing with our missionaries worldwide. When one begins to look ahead, it can be overwhelming. Just looking around at the world today can cause a person to want to retreat into a fairly closed-off, isolated life, just ignoring the world. 80,000 dead in China. Conflict in the Middle East that seems it will still be going in 2033. Election years that evoke ever-increasing cynicism. AIDS in Africa. The warnings of limited oil from my childhood seeming now to become reality. Collapse of morality and basic social institutions. The list can go on and on.

But this should not scare us off as believers. God does some of His best work in the midst of human chaos and tragedy. He does not call us to be ignorant, nor does He call us to despair. But we are to fully engage the world in whatever location He has placed us.

That's what comes to mind as I think of these young folks completing their studies. I've gotten to know many of Rebekah's friends -these and other young folks I've met among our other children's friends and our young interns serving with The Mission Society. I think of the young believers we worked with in Kazakhstan. When I think of these folks, I can't help but be convinced that God is preparing a new body of Christ-followers who will be ready to engage this newly messed up world. He is always there in the present as well as in the horizon!

Bragging Time - I mean "objective evaluation of your child" Time

OK, I won't normally use this blog to brag on my kids - but when a guy's daughter graduates from college and has professors gushing to him about what a great student she is, it's hard to think about much else. This weekend Shawn, Naomi, and I went up to Houghton, New York to attend Rebekah's college graduation. She majored in history. Last week, she completed her final assignment - a 70-page senior seminar paper which she also had to defend before a committee of professors. The topic - the transformation of the Kazakh culture from a nomadic people to Soviet citizens. This is very painful period of oppression and forced cultural change among the Kazakh people of Central Asia.

I'll let interested readers ask Rebekah for the text, but it is such a joy to see her, having grown up in Kazakhstan, use that experience and interest to understand the culture better. I could include all the comments her advising professors said about her paper and presentation, but that might sound like I'm bragging. I could wax on about how blessed I was to see the deep friendships Rebekah has developed with some really great young people, about the love and respect I see people have for her, and just generally about what an incredible young woman she is, but, I'll avoid that. You just gotta be careful about people thinking you are biased about your own children....

Anyhow, we are very proud of her accomplishments and eagerly await how God will continue to work in her and through her in the coming years.

Stories

Fresh back from Colorado Springs where I attended a debriefing seminar at MTI (Mission Training International). It was good to work on some skills for debriefing missionaries. But I went away with much more. I left convinced that debriefing is not something just to get a quick check on "how we're doing", but it is a profound gift we can give people to tell their story - to express the joys and struggles of their experience. Without that possibility, people can get stuck and have a hard time getting perspective on their past. It was very interesting to see all the ways that we tend NOT to listen - that we tend to short circuit the process. Yet the Lord made us so that we need to tell our story and to listen to one another's stories. It is amazing how much of the Bible is exactly that - the Psalms are full of David's expressing the paradoxes of life. We no less need to give expression to the experiences we have. So hopefully I'll be a better listener and will seek ways to give people changes to reflect upon their life experience with me.