**This is a personal website and reflects my thoughts and convictions. It does not represent any official position held by Youth With A Mission.**
Live Stream recorded from 01/04/2022 at YWAM Harpenden Studios.
Category: Current Events
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Apology
I am sorry that some of my videos don’t seem to be available on my website. I am hoping that Thiago can sort that out. In the meantime, please visit my Facebook page where the videos are available.
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Does YWAM have a “core business”?
I had a very pleasant surprise this week. Having been away for a couple of weeks, I walked into the back of our Chapel for our Monday morning community meeting, and it was packed out. As I made my way along the side, I could see that the vast majority were young people around the age of twenty. This is the first time since the pandemic struck that we have been nearing a full house. Two of our DTSs were with us: one will go on outreach soon; the other was just back.
Community helps us grow
As good as that was, our purpose is not just to have a full house. We are committed to helping people become ever-growing disciples of Jesus. There is no doubt that living and learning in a community setting gives a great boost to growing in character and in the spirit. Dietrich Bonhoeffer realised that eighty years ago and trained his ordinands in community. Monasteries and other Christian orders discovered the same truth again and again through century after century in Christian history.
In our family
One of our granddaughters who is twenty-one has been living with us off and on for the last couple of years. Pre-Covid she went to a DTS in Kona, Hawaii. She arrived with no Christian faith, but the Holy Spirit turned her upside down in the first few weeks! Now she has had a deep, intimate relationship with Jesus. We were amazed at the change in her when she returned home after six months away. But it took more than a six-month DTS.
Her plans to carry on with more training were delayed by the pandemic, and during the delay some signs of the old instabilities, which had been part of her teen years, arose again. She had wanted to do a Bible core course in Norway but began to waver. Marti and I prayed and encouraged her, and with the first upturn in travel she attended the Norwegian course where she became grounded in the Scriptures. That has been a deep spiritual experience for her, and a growing knowledge of the Scriptures has transformed her into a zealous, wise, focussed disciple of Jesus, and a committed carrier of the Gospel. She now knows she is called to China.
Joy in our family—it’s our core business
With the joy that she brought back into our home (we also have a sixteen-year-old grandson living with us), and the experience of the full house in the Chapel, I reflected on the idea of our “core business”. Business consultants will always exhort business leaders to keep their eye on the core business because it’s easy to get distracted and put our energies into other activities. But if the core business dies, it all dies.
Our vision is the completion of the Great Commission. But our core business is expressed in 2 Timothy 2:2, which is multiplication. We aim to make disciples, who make disciples, who make disciples….
The power of multiplication
It’s now 53 years since the first YWAM residential training course in Lausanne Switzerland which Marti and I had the privilege of attending in 1969. There are now millions of people who have participated, or who have been impacted by those who have done so. Some have gone on to become full-time missionaries in the classical sense, and most others are ambassadors for the Kingdom of God in the whole range of human endeavours. What a privilege to be focussed on our core business!
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Pain Management
Marti and I have been privileged to have many friends—some in YWAM and some not. We recently hosted a group of about 15 friends with three or four more online. We loved the feelings of warmth and trust as they began arriving and began to get caught up on many months of life when we could not see one another because of the social restrictions.
Warmth and joy at being together were the most obvious emotions, but there was an undercurrent of pain too. The preceding two years have been hard on all of us and very hard on some. Friends and family members have died, businesses have gone bust, and the loneliness of separation from those we love has sometimes been crushing.
After chats and hugs, we made time for each person to talk about whatever they wanted us all to know. Gratitude for God’s grace was a common theme, but tears flowed at times. One gracious, mature, and emotionally resilient lady eloquently expressed how hard these months have been. She said, “Eventually I sat down and said, ‘God, I am just full of holes!’“ It seemed to me that she was saying God had poured out His grace on her, but she just couldn’t retain and live in it. From that confession, she said, healing began.
THE FIRST STEP TO HEALING
Very often the first step towards healing is to admit that we are in pain and that, having done our best, nothing seems to be better.
“When I am weak, then He is strong.” That’s how Paul wrote it. Also, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
Another friend confessed that she had just endured “the worst three weeks” of her life. She had gone on a long trip to visit one of her adult children and to enjoy a spiritual retreat. But when she got there, her daughter was rarely available and, when she was, she was distracted by other obligations. And the spiritual retreat was nothing like she expected. It seemed dry, barren, and legalistic.
She was about to leave and was feeling despondent, when a mature woman at the retreat centre approached her. It was clear that she understood what our friend was going through. In a brief conversation, she emphasised three responses that changed her outlook and have already been very helpful to me too.
These three fundamental choices can make all the difference when facing pain and disappointment:
- Remember to trust God when disappointment and pain strike—whether that is emotional pain or physical pain. He is the one who has promised that He will “make all things work together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:28) Pain and disappointment can occur suddenly and demand our full attention. If we don’t make a faith-filled choice to trust God at that point, the exclusive focus on the unwanted developments can disconnect us from any awareness of God’s grace. The scriptures are clear that God’s grace comes to us when we have faith.
- Begin to give thanks for how God is going to redeem this situation. We do not need to understand how God will work to bring about good; but we do need to trust that He will. Thanksgiving is the language of faith. Sometimes the trials that come to us have the potential for destroying our faith, but if we find a way to give thanks and then we continue in that language of gratitude and thanksgiving, we will see God at work. In my recent New Testament reading, the following scripture struck me powerfully: Hebrews 10:34 “When people looted your property, you actually welcomed it joyfully, because you knew that you had a better possession, a lasting one.” What a statement! That is mature faith.
- Live each successive day in faith. That initial response of believing that God is as good as His word must be reinforced daily. He IS able to make everything work together for good! I sometimes wake up in the morning with a vague sense of dread—I think that is unbelief that somehow creeps into my spirit and mind overnight. When that happens, it is essential that I spend time in the scriptures, in thanksgiving and in supplication—asking God for what I need. I cannot get into the day with anything other than a confident hope and faith in who God is and that He loves me and is working in the world around me to bring blessing to me.
These disappointments and pain can turn out to be great blessings. The scriptures are full of examples; many of the Psalms were written from a place of pain, disappointment, and fear, but the Psalmist, usually David, poured out his heart until he broke through to faith. Psalm 57 is one of many examples. The Apostle, James, put it so well in James 1:2-4 “My Dear Family, when you find yourselves tumbling into various trials and tribulations, learn to look at it with complete joy because you know that, when your faith is put to the test, what comes out is patience. What’s more, you must let patience have its complete effect, so that you may be complete and whole, not falling short in anything.
Trust, Faith and Thanksgiving are the best of all medications for pain of the soul!
Within hours, our friend had a perfect opportunity to put her lesson into practice. She arrived at London Heathrow airport at about the same time as her husband was flying out of another terminal. They had arranged for him to leave their car at her arrival terminal and put the keys in their usual hiding place.
When she connected with him online, there was a photo of where the car was, and everything seemed to be in order, so she phoned him to say thank you and goodbye—then she asked him if he had left the keys where they had agreed. The phone went silent. Then he confessed that he had forgotten. He felt terrible and decide he would not go on the ministry trip he was planning, but she urged him to go, and in her inner self, she trusted God to bring good out of this small disaster.
When they ended the call, he went to the airline help desk (inside immigration and near the departure gate) and explained his dilemma to the staff. Another staff member was standing nearby and said, “I’m just about to go to that terminal. Give me the keys and your wife’s number and I will take them to her.” As she emerged from the baggage hall, that kind airline staff person was there to welcome her home and hand her the keys to her car. AND she didn’t even lose her temper to her husband! Lesson learned. I hope she retains it, and I hope I do too, and perhaps you would like to ask God to help you remember also!
Lynn Green 