Reasons & Enduring

With having said good-bye to friends this last week, I'm thinking of my own departure coming up in 5 months. This is my last term here until God directs otherwise. So I’m starting to do some clean-up around my desk, sorting some papers, and found some of my early prayer letters and a letter to the director regarding my future. Would you like to know why I have spent all these years here? Written 21 years ago, it's still my heart. Let me share part of it with you (written July 24, 1986):

The end of my short term is coming up in five months. I have had to do some serious consideration as to what I should do after this. Having been here already two years, having gone through the initial adjustments and struggles, having stated building relationships with the nationals, having a basis of the language, and having learned the work and my role as a nurse at G. H. I can’t see throwing all this away only to go somewhere else and start all over again. Through various things I have read in Scripture and books by Christian leaders, through what I have seen in the last two years of myself, and with lots of prayer, I have decided I would like to return for another term. It is difficult for me to say career. We take our life really one day at a time. I know my life is committed to the Lord, for His service, for life. As Eric Alexander said of Paul, he had two motives that formed his life and thinking: 1. for the praise of His glory, 2. for the sake of the Gentiles and a third one could be added –for life. II Timothy 2:10 also encourages me to continue here in this ministry. “For this reason I endure all things for the sake of those who are chosen that they also may obtain salvation which is in Christ Jesus and with it eternal glory.”

An Old Hymn

Old hymns are really beautiful. So poetic. Recently this has been one that I have decided to at least memorize the first verse. When I think of the love of Christ, without reason (unconditional), never-ending, that pulls me to Him, I am just amazed. He calls us to love one another in this way too. Do we do that? No. Well, we do try. But maybe too often we're pushing people away more than pulling them to us. I have been reading Everyone is Normal Till You Get to Know Them, by John Ortberg. This is a great book about learning to live in community. God has invited us into the Fellowship of the Trinity. Jesus has prayed that we may be one, just as the Father and He are one. He paid an enormous price for us to be admitted into this Unity --death on the cross. And how do we respond to this? How are our lives changed by being loved with everlasting love? How are other lives being changed? I'm learning much from this and having to check my motives and my actions.

Loved with everlasting love,
Led by grace that love to know;
Spirit, breathing from above,
Thou hast taught me it is so!
Oh, this full and perfect peace!
Oh, this transport all divine:
In a love which cannot cease,
I am His, and He is mine.

Heav’n above is softer blue,
Earth around is sweeter green!
Something lives in every hue
Christless eyes have never seen:
Birds with gladder songs o’erflow,
Flow’rs with deeper beauties shine,
Since I know, as now I know,
I am His and He is mine.

Things that once were wild alarms
Cannot now disturb my rest;
Closed in everlasting arms,
Pillowed on the loving breast.
Oh, to lie forever here,
Doubt, and care, and self resign,
While He whispers in my ear,
I am His, and He is mine.

His forever, only His;
Who the Lord and me shall part?
Ah, with what a rest of bliss
Christ can fill the loving heart!
Heav’n and earth may fade and flee,
Firstborn light in gloom decline
But while God and I shall be,
I am His, and He is mine.

George Wade Robinson, 1838-1877