Your Minutes Matter :: an invitation to pray for Italy 2015

This morning I helped hubby roll the suitcases out to his car before I gave him one last kiss. Just five minutes ago, he texted me this picture to tell me that the team was about to board the plane for Italy!

Why am I not in the picture? Earlier this year, God surprised me by asking me to stay home rather than go on the mission trip to Milan. (Click here to read the story.) It was strange. I tend to assume--and I think a lot of Christians assume--that obedience usually means going rather than staying, but I couldn't deny the calm I felt once the decision was made.

I brought those now-empty weeks on the calendar to God. Did you want me to do something else with them, Lord?

The answer came quietly, dropping like a leaf into the calm pool of my heart: Pray. 

The ripple widened and another thought came, quick and insistent after the first: Pray WITH other people. 

All though scripture, there vivid examples of our great God answering prayer. He heard Abraham and made a 90 year old woman pregnant. He heard Moses and made a dry highway through an ocean. He heard Peter and made a dead woman live again. He has made water pour out of a rock, made lions ignore their dinner, and struck a whole army of enemy soldiers dead because of prayer.

One story in particular keeps running through my head, reminding me that prayer has significant results. 

That day the odds were stacked ridiculously high against the Israelites. They were just a bunch of sheep-tending nomads who'd been little kids when their parents left Egypt. Manna and the desert were all they'd ever known. They were about to face the Amalekites--seasoned warriors fighting on their home turf.

Moses told Joshua, "Choose some of our men and go out to fight the Amalekites. Tomorrow I will stand on top of the hill with the staff of God in my hands."

When Moses became tired and lowered his hands, the enemy began to beat Joshua and his men. But when he raised his hands in prayer again, the battle went well. As the day went on, he became exhausted, so two other leaders helped hold up his arms. The rag-taggle Jews beat the Amalekites that day not because they were good fighters, but because Moses persistently called on the Lord's help.

If we pray during these two weeks, it will accomplish three purposes:

1. The team in Italy will become more effective.
This one feels too obvious to write, but my half-hearted prayer track record shows that I need the reminder. As we pray, God will work. He will literally intervene in our space-time situations and change circumstances when we ask. He can keep the team joyful when they're jetlagged. He can heal food poisoning (which we pray won't happen!). He can change hearts and make the Good News suddenly clear to Italians.

2. The Church will become connected to God's heart for the nations. 
Prayer doesn't just change the things we pray for; it changes us.  If we spend our precious free time praying that God's purposes would happen, those purposes soon grow in importance to us. If we as the Church pray earnestly for lost people, those lost people soon become more and more precious to us and the love of Christ will dwell in us richly. The division between those who go and those who stay will be simply a matter of physical location. We are ALL commissioned by Jesus' command to "make disciples of all nations."

3. God will be glorified. 
This is the heartbeat pulsing through everything already mentioned. When God answers a specific prayer, He receives thanks, and his power over every circumstance is put on grand display. And to whom is it displayed? To us, certainly, but we are surrounded in a very real sense with a "great cloud of witnesses." When the angels in the unseen realms see our faith expressed through prayer, who can imagine what songs they sing to Him for it? When they see the way that His love causes us, His adopted children, to run to Him, the mysteries of his greatness and wisdom become the anthem of Heaven.

If God is stirring your heart, there are two ways to get involved:

Join the Online Prayer Team!

We need prayer cover for each day that the team is in Italy. You can sign up to pray for a specific day of the week, or the whole two-week trip--ask the Lord what He wants you to do.

As a member of the prayer team, you will get an email reminder on the night before your prayer day with prayer requests from Italy.

To join, click HERE.  

Gather in College Station for 24 hours of prayer!

There is power, encouragement and JOY when believers meet together to pray! The 24-hour prayer gathering will start next Friday, May 22nd at 5pm and will end the next day at the same time. It is a come-and-go event; guests are welcome to stay as long as they like and leave as needed.

Why this 24 hours, you ask?

This particular 24 hour period coincides with one of the most important days of ministry for the team in Milan. After a week of meeting students through the English Clubs on campus, our team always invites their new friends to join them for a full day excursion at a beautiful location several hours away from the city. The long bus ride and the relaxed setting of the Excursion Day has traditionally been one of the best days for deeper conversations about the Gospel with students.

To get the Evite to the event with more details, click HERE. 

When Bold is Not Beautiful (How to Play Nice Online)

There is something about anonymity that makes people bolder.

Have you ever seen the gritty secrets posted on one of those completely anonymous "spill your guts" forums? The darkest things can come to light when no one can trace them back to you.

I'm sure we've all seen those passive-aggressive statuses or tweets.

Even when not anonymous, an interface like the internet can remove the fear of confrontation that many of us have. Suddenly we're not yelling into a person's face, we're just using ALL CAPS for emphasis. We're not being snarky in someone's living room, we're just using *sarcastic font* to show how idiotic his blog post was.

Bold is not necessarily beautiful. 

Even if we're pretty nice folks online, the ease and speed with which we communicate online can make us careless. The blinking cursor means we can't see the hurt flicker across her face, or the way he just folded his arms. It's hard to know when we've gone too far into the tender territory of her heart.

In the three years that I've been blogging, most of the reactions have been positive, but some have cut deep. In those moments, as I scroll down through barbed text or well-meaning platitudes, it's a hard choice to breathe deep and remember grace. Grace for them and grace for me--because I'm not guiltless either.



I'm sure that wiser people could add to this list, but here are a few things that Jesus has brought to mind as I've wrestled with how to do community in this age of simultaneous connection and technological distance.

#1--Assume the best

My mom was right about this--most offenses will be erased before they even start if I begin by believing the other person meant well. Seriously, this works! I've been employed in customer service positions at a bank, a hotel, a restaurant, an ice cream shop and now at a university, and nothing diffuses stress in the other guy more quickly than feeling like you get them. When you give them the benefit of the doubt, you extend grace.

Remember, no one is the villain of their own story. 

Did the person sound impatient? Assume that they are feeling pressure from someone else, or at least that they are frustrated with the situation and not with you.

Did their post come across dogmatic or abrasive? Assume that they have a good reason--a back story--for feeling so passionately about the subject.

Did they sound as if they intended to hurt you? They probably didn't. Even if they did, this should evoke pity in us for the wounds they almost certainly have. Hurting people hurt people.

#2--Sleep on it

You know how the internet is designed for instant communication? Yeah, that. 

Because even the best-intentioned among us can be careless, give yourself a buffer. The more emotion you feel about what you are about to write, the longer the time should be before you post. (I once wrote and re-wrote and prayed over a particular response for weeks.)

Words, once released verbally into the atmosphere or digitally into the blogosphere, are no longer yours. You can't snatch them back, and they can be twisted and misunderstood and widely spread. 

Save yourself some pain: pause, hit "save", and come back later. 

My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry, because human anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. -James 1:19-20

#3--If possible, be personal

Ok, you slept on it several days but still feel like you should say something. Keep in mind that sometimes the internet just doesn't cut it, and we have to go old-school. 

In one of my Communication classes in college, I learned that over eighty-five percent of communication is non-verbal. 

Over eighty-five percent! Some researchers even put the number as high as 93%. That means that even the most perfectly worded email has only a 7-15% chance of communicating the fullness of your true heart. 

Many of our online friends are also real-life friends (think Facebook, Instagram...), and there's no real reason why we can't set our laptops aside and grab coffee or have a Skype date to repair a misunderstanding. 

What if we've never met and probably never will? Even then, be as personal as possible. Send a private message instead of a public comment. And in your tone, aim for conversation, rather than accusation. 

If the goal is authentic relationships and not just blog traffic, let's be relational.

An overdue update!

Our first week here in Milan is drawing to a close, and the stories are starting to pile up, so it's time for an update!

Our team is finally (thankfully) out from under the foggy influence of travel fatigue, and I've watched everyone get more and more comfortable with the daily routine, using public transport, ordering food, and speaking to the Italian students. Even though I've been to Milan twice before, it always takes me a few days to re-remember how things work, and I've had some hiliarious moments as I've tried to stumble through pronunciations or figure out what someone just asked me.

It helps to remember that if we feel unsure, the Italian students are often just as nervous (if not more) than we are. We might be in a foreign country, but at least we get to remain in the comfort of our own language.

On the first day of English Clubs, we played games and made small talk and laughed as we tried to pronounce everyone's name. My name is hard even for Americans to pronounce and remember, but it's a real doozie for them. However, Gabrielle, one of the girls on our team, simply switched out the "e" at the end of her name for an "a", and voila! She has an Italian name! Some of the students even mistook her for an Italian when they glanced at her nametag. :)

The first day was good, but the second was amazing! Instead of going to a classroom, we all trooped to a beautiful park that sits a short mile or so from campus. In the bright sunshine and pollen we played soccer (pronounced "futbol" here, just as in Mexico), and even taught the students to play Ultimate Frisbee. They got really competitive!

I brought my tennis shoes to play, but I ended up talking in the shade with some of the girls who didn't want to run around. As we discussed cultural differences, our families, and our dreams for the future, I found myself thinking that these girls were the ages of my sisters.

The awesome conversations continued at the "aperitivo" (happy hour) at a campus cafe. We crowded over twenty people around the tables, laughing at the wind that kept blowing our napkins and food into our laps.

Today was probably the best day yet, but it's 1 am here in Milan and tomorrow Jordan are boarding a train for Turin early in the morning (a last-minute trip that we planned just today!), so I need to sign off.

But please don't stop praying! All week, in both my personal times with Jesus and times with the team, I've been learning about the necessity, urgency and privilege of prayer.

Your prayers matter. 

They move the heart of God to move in the hearts and circumstances of people, and we know that nothing we do will have lasting fruit unless it's done in His strength.

Please pray: 

• That many students would join our team as they go sight-seeing around the center of Milan tomorrow (10 hrs from the time of this post)
• For our team to be encouraged and joyful
• For the three students I got to share my story with tonight!!! (Ohh, it was so exciting!! But you'll have to wait until the next post. :) ) 

My new Chinese friend

Have you ever lived overseas?

I'm not talking about a vacation packed with non-stop pictures and travel and fun. I'm talking about a time long enough for laundry to be done, long enough for grocery shopping routines to form, long enough for lonliness to set in.

  Someone once told me that the number of calories an immersed language student burns daily from sheer mental effort to understand and be understood is equivalent to what a bricklayer would burn if he worked eight hours in the sun. I believe them.

I had the chance to spend half a year overseas after high school. The mental exhaustion was intense. The new language was an extra layer of difficulty that had to be peeled back from the most ordinary of tasks. I remember searching for words, lining them up in my mind, rehearsing them over and over as I stepped to a desk or cashier and hoped that the other person would be kind.

Now I am the person behind the desk. In my new office, every other visitor speaks with an accent. Their syllables halt in strange places and their faulty intonations make commonplace words sound like music.

For a long time, I have enjoyed tiny slivers of interaction with internationals--a few minutes on the bus, visits with a Chinese friend who now lives 3 hours away, or a Turkish friend who is very busy with her baby. Because our ministry focus is on a student homegroup that has mostly American students (by accident, not design), there just hasn't been the opportunity to interact very much.

Now, not only do I get to see and talk to foreign students every day at my job, I have a new friend from China! Lynn* is a first-semester graduate student from Shanghai, and she is my new conversation partner. Several months ago, she jotted down her name on a sheet of paper at an international student welcome event to ask for an American friend. We got connected, and I'm so excited to get to know her!

I'm sure I'll have plenty more to tell as we get to know each other, but for now, please pray for our friendship, and for Lynn as she adjusts to American life and our (very!) strange language.

*Not her real name

Teller Tales :: Fortune Cookies

Conversation overheard at work:

"My fortune cookie says that Fortune is smiling at me."

"That's kinda creepy. Who is Fortune and why is she smiling at you?"

"Why didn't you get a cookie?"

"I always eat too much when I go there; I never have room."

"That's why you're supposed to get ten of them--to eat one hour later when you're hungry."



There you have it, ladies and gentlemen: the secret musings of bank tellers when there are no customers in the lobby.

24 Hours: Unplugged

Did you miss me? Probably not...I only went "unplugged" for 24 hours, so it only really affected the three people who tried to text me.

My English professor has been lecturing about Postmodernism, and she issued a challenge for extra credit: get rid of the "white noise" of gadgets, texting, and other modern distractions for twenty four hours. Afterward, she wanted us to write a summary of our experience.

Today, I took the challenge. And here is what I wrote:

[warning; this is a slightly longer post than usual. :) ]

I was excited when you issued the challenge to unplug ourselves for twenty-four hours. I reserved the right to call someone on my phone and to work on the computer for school, but I decided that “unplugged” would mean no Facebook, no YouTube, no TV or movies, no texting, no email, no blogging, and no radio. I warned my friends: Don’t text me on Tuesday; I’m going unplugged.

The day started off well, but I had to remind myself that I was not allowed to check my IPhone for the weather forecast. I guess I can just walk outside to see if I’ll need a sweater. It felt a little strange to eat breakfast without checking my email and blog statistics, but as I ate and looked out the window, I remembered again how much I love the tangy sweetness of strawberries. I also left for school on time, which has been rare in the last few weeks.

Between classes, my phone seemed to wink at me from my backpack’s side pocket. My husband and I usually text each other throughout the day, and I had to fight back the urge to send him a message several times. With my hands and attention strangely unoccupied, I began to notice details about my classmates that I’d never seen before. I felt conversational, but most of them were texting and I couldn’t catch their eyes. It made me wonder whether I put off the same vibe of inapproachability when I am fixated on my own phone’s screen.

I went to the library, and there I spent one of the most productive hours of the past month. I chose a table that had no computer so that I would have no chance to “accidentally” check my blog or email. In one hour, I wrote two letters, copied two recipes onto index cards, studied for my next class, and completed an entire Bible study. 

My mind felt calm, sharp, and focused. Usually, I am the queen of multi-tasking. I can cook dinner, do laundry, study for a test and text a friend simultaneously without breaking a sweat. But after Tuesday, I wonder if my mind was designed for single-purposed attention.

I biked home and arrived feeling hungry, thirsty, and restless. I would usually check Facebook at this time of day.  

I feel disconnected from the real world.

A split second after the thought crossed my mind I realized just how ludicrous it was. Here I was, enjoying face-to-face interactions with my husband and the solid realness of my home around me, and I was calling facebook the “real world.” And missing it. When did I make that shift?  At what point did a virtual interface with a blue and white color scheme become more real than the pile of dirty laundry in my closet or the people sitting next to me in class?

Maybe this hurry-scurry lifestyle of production, day-planners and social media has contributed to the postmodernist’s skepticism toward anything claiming to be true or authentic. If they themselves are so enslaved to the busy treadmill, so spread thin that they are unable to give themselves in a genuine way to any one thing, why would they expect something different from society at large?

After a day of being unplugged, I have mixed feelings. 

On the one hand, I enjoyed the calm that settled over my mind in the absence of “white noise”. I felt more productive, more aware, and more relational than usual, and I can see that a constant stream of media and gadget use would almost certainly insulate me from a genuine experience of real life. 

But on the other hand, I felt downright rude to ignore texts from my friends. Unless your phone is lost, or you’re dead, our instant-feedback society has come to expect near instantaneous responses when you text someone. The access we have to any person at any time has become normal—our new reality. To experience the collective reality of our interactive culture, one must forego some depth of interaction with the objective reality, and vice versa.

Since I cannot be a hermit, total absence of white noise is impossible. But in order to avoid the hopelessness and isolation of an in-genuine existence, I am determined to periodically step back, turn off my phone, and taste the strawberries. 

Pentatonix

After the family carnival our church is putting on for kids in Bryan tomorrow night, I'm sure I'll have plenty to share (teaser!!), but for now, here is a little video of my new favorite acapella group: Pentatonix.

This is a mix of "Since You've Been Gone" by Kelly Clarkson and "Forget You" by Cee Lo Green. Last year, they won the grand prize and a recording contract for the singing competition, The Sing Off. Enjoy!

Quieting down

Who has been eating delicious peanut butter cookies, sleeping in, working out, reading encouraging stuff, watching movie marathons with her awesome hubby, and being generally spoiled on her Spring Break? Me. J  Ahh, vacation is always sweetest when it’s needed the most.

It’s interesting: I’ve had less interaction with my laptop in the last three days of vacation than I had during the three prior weeks when I was actually trying to cut back on media. Go figure.

I’m discovering that periodic times when I avoid the normal definition of “productivity” can sometimes actually produce the best results. One result is that it is definitely effective at cutting back on all the “noise” that fills my head most of the time.

I’m realizing that I need stillness.  Even in the flow of necessary responsibilities and the inevitable crush of deadlines and to-do’s, my heart needs moments when I simply

Sit.

Or belly-laugh with friends.

Or lift my hands in silent adoration to Jesus.

Or stand still in the WalMart parking lot to admire the streaming colors of the sunset.

When my heart quiets down, when I stop the volley of anxious, ping-ponging thoughts for a moment, then—surprisingly—I start hearing the smaller noises that usually don't make the “urgent” list. 

I notice the tone of my friend’s voice and the tremor in her mouth as she shares instead of just taking mental note of the bare facts. 

I remember that another friend has a birthday coming.

I allow myself to giggle over a pair of squirrels being…um, frisky in a tree next to the Physics building on campus. 

I hear the voice of Jesus saying “Come talk with me”, and my heart answers “I’m coming” (Psalm 27:8)