Category Archives: Spiritual Journey

Trusting God Day by Day

By a worker in Spain

We have been going through the Old Testament in our children’s clubs. Through many of these lessons God has taught me lessons in my own life as well. A lesson we taught recently was the Bible story of Elijah and the widow. Elijah didn’t provide the widow with 100 more bowls of flour and 100 more jars of oil, he provided one bowl and one jar that never ran out―for three years. God miraculously provided for each daily need. As the widow needed to learn to depend on God, day by day, for her daily sustenance, God has been teaching me to trust in His provision, day by day. Continue reading →

It’s Gonna be Wild. It’s Gonna be Great.

By a Worker in Asia

“Come away with me. It’s not too late. I have a plan for you. It’s gonna be wild. It’s gonna be great. It’s gonna be full of Me.”

These words, by the band “Jesus Culture,” sum up our time here since we’ve returned to Asia. We have seen God do some amazing things, both in our lives, and in the lives of  the people around us. We’ve seen healings. We’ve seen more people open to talking about God. We’ve sensed an excitement and joy among our friends that we’ve never experienced before.

So often we expect things to be how they’ve always been. We expect that God will work as He has before, that He will talk to us as He has before. But, since we’ve been back, we are learning to expect the unexpected. We are learning, in our hearts and not just our heads, that this God of the universe is so much bigger than we could ever imagine. As the song says, “It’s gonna be wild, it’s gonna be great, it’s gonna be full of Me!”

Trust and Obey

By Rob and Laura Evans, Mexico

Some of you will remember when our family went to Philadelphia, PA, for WEC’s three-month Candidate Orientation course in 2008. What a faith journey! Rob took a leave of absence from his job, our daughter, Hannah, was in the middle of her food allergy nightmare and recurring asthma attacks, we still weren’t sure what God wanted us to DO in missions, or convinced of where He wanted us to GO, and we didn’t know if WEC would actually accept us until AFTER the course was over. All we really knew for sure was that God was asking us to trust Him, and we wanted to obey.

Now we have the privilege of watching God move in the hearts of other families walking through the same process to become missionaries. We were privileged to mentor a Venezuelan couple working through their Candidate Orientation class―only this time in Mexico!

Prunning Time

From a friend in the Middle East

The olives are all harvested and now it is pruning time. Jesus talks about pruning: “Every branch that does bear fruit He prunes so that it will be more fruitful” (John 15:2). I have always thought of that pruning in a very Western way—trim the branches a little, but not enough for most people to notice, and I’m not excited about getting pruned like that. So I’m a little in shock here. Once the pruners have worked down a row of our beautiful, luscious olive trees, there are more branches and leaves on the ground than left on the tree! Jesus was talking about vines, not olives, but I’ve heard vines are pruned even more dramatically. And that’s scary when I think that God prunes us sometimes. A host of verses come to my mind about God’s ways and wisdom and plans for us. So I am deciding again to trust God, because He does know what He’s doing with the pruning shears.

A Lesson from Oceans 11

By a worker in Africa

Have you seen the movie Oceans 11? Remember how Danny Ocean and his team tricked Terry Benedict by creating a duplicate of the Bellagio casino vault and rewired the security cameras to only see the copy? The security crew saw a calm and still vault and had no idea that behind the false scene there was a lot of action going on—Ocean’s team was actually stealing all the casino’s money.

Lately I’ve learned that understanding that movie scene is crucial in missions work. Continue reading →

Cat-Like Me

From a friend in the Middle East

God has been good to me my first few weeks here in the Middle East in many ways. One particular blessing is the cats. There are three of them: Saffra, Ricky and Rocket. I have so much loved inviting them to be friends with me, sit with me and relax in my room. Rocket, the kitten, has responded most enthusiastically and is currently “my” cat while his owner is on leave for several months. He has a purr like a jet engine, and I love it when he purrs in response to me. Continue reading →

Revenger or Forgiver; Which are You?

From a friend of WEC

Old Bedouin tribal law allowed revenge up to the fourth generation. If someone killed your great grandfather you, as great grandson, could in return kill someone from the tribe who killed him.

But anger in our emotional arsenal won’t wait for four generations. It wants satisfaction now. Joab killed Abner for killing Joab’s brother. Absalom, David’s son, killed his half-brother, Ammon, for raping his sister, Tamar. Continue reading →

Christmas and Shipwrecked

From a worker in Asia

For various reasons this year has seemed more unChristmas-like to me than any other year. The only Christmas music I could access on my computer was Handel’s Messiah (13 tracks), so I listened to it MANY times. One day last week I was riding the bus, and everything in my personal life, this country and the world seemed overwhelmingly hopeless. Continue reading →