Hudson Taylor

“Depend upon it, God’s work, done in God’s way, will never lack God’s supplies.”

Good work

There are a lot of perks to being a cross-cultural missionary, and one of those is more work.  Huh?  More work is good?  Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy down time, entertainment time, “me” time as much as the next guy.  But I’ve found more joy here with less time for leisure.  This quote from George Bernard Shaw sums it up well, I think:

 ”The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.  The cure is occupation.”

 I wonder if some of us aren’t happy because we have to much “me” time and not enough “others” time, “service” time, “sacrifice” time, “giving” time. 

Friday’s Chapel

I taught at Friday’s all-school chapel and used this quote from Mark Twain.

 ”He was a good man in the worst sense of the word.”

If our actions are not motivated by Deut. 6:4 (Love the Lord your God with…), there is always the danger that we will simply be “good” people.  And it’s very easy to get sick of a good person.  It’s hard to get sick of someone who does everything out of deep sense of love.

Do I win?

I’ve heard that antidisestablishmentarianism is the longest, non-scientific word in the English language, but I’m wondering what the longest title of a blog is?  Might I be in the running?

 I’m a missionary in Kenya, and I have two other blogs–Strangers In Kenya and All That You Can’t Leave Behind– in addition to this one.  Strangers was my first, and then it got turned into a book by Father’s Press.  I’m starting this blog to share daily (at best) or weekly (at worst) quotes from my devotions.  I also want to let more people know about my book, not in order to make money (trust me, I’ve given away more books than I’ve sold at this point), but to share with the Western church what day-to-day missions work is like in a Third World context.  I think that the church could shake up the world if a new revival in missions took place, and I think that simultaneously missions could shake up the church.  I realize that this is what many here on World Press are doing, so it’s a community I wanted to be part of.