Serving God’s multi-ethnic household
24 Jun 2020
You are thousands of miles from your home country amongst people you really don’t know that well when you are introduced to a young woman whose first language just happens to be English! Not only are you talking with a stranger but within ten minutes of the conversation, you find yourself praying with that person on a sidewalk outside a synagogue. What great adventures we undertake with the Lord when we trust in His wisdom for the next chapter of our lives!
Many years ago I thought that to be of any value on a mission field one needed to have medical qualifications, so I dismissed the idea of ever going because I had chosen teaching as a career. Little did I realise that seven years after retiring from full-time teaching I would be asked to teach in a missionary school in South East Asia. To be part of a missionary community for two years full-time and seven years on a part-time basis was enriching and it opened my eyes not only to the physical and emotional needs of the people we were serving but to their hunger for the gospel. God opened a door that I had securely shut for over forty years.
In the last two years He has taken me on another adventure but this time to Europe, to be part of a village church’s outreach into the community through English teaching to adults. Who would have thought that a study of language could be so effectively done by using gospel accounts of Jesus’ miracles as reading materials and articles from Christian apologists for the advanced English learners? The words of Jesus are as true today as they were when He spoke them to the disciples … ‘ Look…lift up your eyes and see that the fields are white for harvest’ (John 4:35). In His wisdom and timing, God plants us for a time away from the comforts of the familiar, and when he asks us to go outside our comfort zone he showers us with treasures.
I have found great joy in being part of God’s global family, supporting those who are church planting, joining with them in prayer, helping with the children’s program, and sharing God’s truth with those who are seeking. They have enriched my walk with the Lord and given me a deeper understanding of what it is to be God’s multi-ethnic household. Europe is in great need of the gospel, just as we are here in Australia and retirement means that we are free to go for a season wherever the Lord leads. If there is any hint that God is calling you in your retirement years to serve away from home, take up the challenge, for He is ‘able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think’ (Ephesians 3:20).
-Dina, a Pioneers worker serving in Europe.
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