Once More Delayed, But In A Better State
Here I sit again, another post, another airport. I am now delayed in Chicago. So far we have been delayed about 2 hours or so, but it keeps getting pushed back. Unfortunately we have already passed our real problem point; we will arrive at our next destination after our connecting flight has already left.
Yeah, you got it, that means we will be delayed again. We will now arrive in Los Angeles at 1:40 AM (assuming all else goes as it is supposed to), and the next available flight to Taiwan doesn’t leave until 1:20 AM the following day! So we will be stuck in LA for about 23 hours!
So now I need to get all the flights changed, and get hotel reservations in Bangkok changed and get word to the people house sitting and picking us up in Phnom Penh. But those are all things I can do.
Surprisingly, I’m not as upset about it as I would have thought (given my recent reaction to delays and lost luggage). It’s more of a fatalistic resignation now. But at least I am on my way home with my family. All in all I’m in a fairly good mood (although it could just be the buzz from my third large Starbucks coffee in the last few hours).
It’s Déjá Vu All Over Again
Once again I’m sitting in the airport waiting for a flight.
Last time the worst happened; they lost my luggage! So I was arguing with baggage handlers at a little airport in North Dakota past midnight. Big fun! But I did eventually meet up with my luggage the next day.
So now we are waiting for the first leg of our return flight to Cambodia. But there could be more delays; there is bad weather around Chicago where we are making our first connection.
Now it’s not just me in this, Lisa and the boys are here too. Hopefully it will be a simple flight with no surprises (I think I’ve paid my air-travel dues lately with the last two trips I took!).
We will see if I end up posting from any other airports along the way.
Sometimes You Don’t Want to Learn Anything
OK, there is a point where you just want to tell someone off, even though you know a problem is not their fault and they can’t do anything about it. That point has come and gone.
If you read the last post, which I made earlier today, you will see that I wrote it from an airport where I was waiting for a delayed flight. Big surprise, I am now waiting in another airport. I finally got my flight out of Newark to Minneapolis, but I missed my connection to Minot, North Dakota, and the next flight isn’t till 10:09 PM. That means I once again have 7 hours to kill in an airport terminal. I’m not real happy about this.
On the flight I had been asking the stewardess about the connecting flight. My hope was that the weather that had delayed my flight might have delayed the connecting flight as well. So I asked if she could have them check for me. She said that many passengers had been asking about connecting flights, so she would see. A bit later the pilot comes on saying that there will be airline agents waiting at the gate to help everyone with their connections. Great. But when the plane finally lands (after having been delayed for takeoff, rerouted in the air adding about 30 minutes to the flight, and having to wait after landing on the tarmac because there is no available gate) there is no agent waiting to help anyone. Instead, the area is crowded with many passengers and few airline employees. After not being able to even find a flight to Minot listed on the departure board, I was finally reduced to flagging down the stewardess from flight I had been on (who was now walking down the concourse) and getting here to help me get some guy behind a counter to help me. The guy behind the counter, who repeatedly said in an annoyed voice that he was not yet officially on duty, was able to tell me that I had missed my flight and gave me a boarding pass for the next flight to Minot at 10:09 PM.
In the past I have worked in customer service, and I know that if you have a customer who has gotten the short end of the stick, you do what you can to make their life easier. But this guy at the counter wasn’t willing to do a thing. I suggested that since I was now stuck for so long in the airport, perhaps they could give me a pass into the airlines first-class lounge. I figured this was something that basically would cost the airline nothing, make a bad situation a bit more bearable, and gain the airline a repeat customer. No dice. Boy did I want to give him an earful. I thanked him (somewhat cynically) and walked off with the stewardess, who I vented to (calmly) about the situation. Of course she couldn’t do anything about it, and I knew that and wasn’t expecting her to do anything. But boy did I feel like going and telling off a number of the airline’s employees.
Unfortunately, I have a feeling that God is trying to teach me something, and I’m really not in the mood (which is probably the point). Like many other people, patience isn’t my strong point. And I have a tendency to get mad at everyone else when I am inconvenienced. But I’m sure that with all the delays from the weather and all, everyone else was having a pretty miserable time as well. But I wasn’t worried about them, just me. And worse, I allowed the situation to affect my attitude and ruin the next few hours.
So now I’m calmed down a bit, but still stuck in an airport. I suppose that’s the way things go.
Delays Prove No One is in Island
Here I sit, once again, be-deviled by thunderstorms and delays.
I am writing this posting from the Newark International airport. I’m trying to get back to meet up with my wife Lisa and our two boys (who are waiting for me in North Dakota), but it looks like it might take a bit longer than I expected.
A little over a week ago I flew out to New Jersey to attend a conference in New York City, and spent seven hours in the Detroit airport when my connecting flight was canceled because of thunderstorms. Now, I am waiting for another delayed flight. Assuming my flight actually leaves at it’s new departure time I will have ten minutes to make my connection in Minneapolis. If I don’t make it I will have to spend about 8 hours in the airport waiting for the next flight.
Now, I’m sitting next to a window, and it’s beautiful outside; blue skies, just a couple clouds, not too windy… But apparently, somewhere between here and Minnesota, thunderstorms are spread across the land. It is amazing how something so far away can still affect my travel plans.
That’s just what life is like. And that’s especially what missions is like. I was just talking to a friend about our financial support system. Currently, churches and individuals send in monthly amounts that they have pledged to maintain over the next few years. We have about 120 individuals and churches who do this. Within Assemblies of God World Missions, the average monthly pledge is about $55. So to meet our budget we have to have a lot of those pledges and visit a lot of churches. My friend said he thought it would be better if missionaries had a closer relationship with just a couple of churches who would then support that missionary at a couple hundred dollars a month. That way the missionary wouldn’t have to visit so many churches and there would be more of a feeling of partnership between missionaries and their supporters. Well, in many ways that would be nice, but the problem is the same as the thunderstorms that are plaguing my trip today. If you have five churches that support you heavily, and while you are on the field there is some type of split or problem or something at one of those five churches and they stop supporting you, you could have real problems. In the past missionaries have had to leave the field because of these kind of problems with their support.
Neither system is perfect, but I believe that we can do a combination of the two and get the best of both worlds. We want to maintain closer ties to our supporters, and we hope to have some churches partner more closely with us for high pledge amounts so that we don’t have to spend so much time itinerating, but we also want to keep the broad-based support we have now so that we maintain a variety of options.
Now if I can just get the airlines to work something out with Amtrak or something…
New Days in New York
I love New York City! I grew up near Chicago, but after Bible College Lisa and I moved to New Jersey to work at a church just across the river from the city. Now I love New Jersey, too, but New York is just “it”. And this week I am in New York! Well, actually I am staying in New Jersey, but every morning I am taking the train over to the city to attend the DV Expo East. So, I am actually in Manhattan for the majority of each day.
One of the best things about New York City is the variety of people who are there. I love being in a place that can feel like so many other places from around the world! But that’s beside the point. The point is more about another of the things I enjoy about NYC; the access to cutting edge technology and trends. The DV Expo is one of those “covet” events. A “covet” event is one of those shows where you see all these new gadgets and gizmos and stuff that makes you go “Oooohhh… I need one of those!” Why exactly you need it, and what you are going to do with it isn’t important, what’s important is it’s really cool!
Now, I have been spending money while I am here on cool new stuff. However, I DO have a use and plan in mind (at least for most of it). The one piece of software that I plan on buying tomorrow that I don’t have an EXACT plan for is called “Animation Master”. It is a roto-scoping 3D modeling and animation software. What does all that mean? It means really cool computer toy for Troy! No, seriously, it creates 3D animated stuff. This is the kind of software that guys who work at Pixar play around with in their free time. And it is on special at the Expo for a song (relatively speaking)! So although I don’t yet have a plan for it, I know this is cutting edge stuff that we could use easily down the road. So, like most of this cool stuff, there is a HUGE learning curve, so I am getting it to start working with it.
Saturday I will finally be meeting up with Lisa and the kids in North Dakota, and on Monday it is back to Cambodia. Until then, you can find me drinking Starbucks and eating a shish kabob from a street vender on a park bench in New York, thank you very much! Is there some spiritual lesson here? No, it’s just good to be in New York.
Could You Super-Size My Bathroom With That?
Whenever I’m in the States these days I tend to find surprising things bothering me. It’s always something different. There are lots of things you expect to be bothered by, and because you expect them they don’t bother you as much. In this category you will find things like church / Christian attitudes, news / society bias, etc.
But there have been plenty of annoying things this time that I didn’t expect. Previously I mentioned the time the sun set in North Dakota in the summer (10:30 PM! In Cambodia the sun goes down between 6:00 and 6:30 PM all year long). But today I have a new one.
It hit me yesterday when I was in the shower (I know some of you are already thinking “that’s too much information!” Sorry). First, I freeze here, especially at night. Day time isn’t bad as long as it’s a nice day, but at night it gets colder than it ever gets in Cambodia, so I’m huddled down under the covers, and in the morning I can’t wait to get into a nice hot shower (something I almost never have in Cambodia (I’m referring here to the “hot” part; I do take regular showers). So Yesterday I’m in the shower, and I guess up until then I had just been so happy to be warm that I hadn’t noticed the other problem; the shower was really small. Or at least it deemed to be. I have been in plenty of smaller ones, but they were all in the States. Either it’s a bathtub with a curtain that drifts in to stick up against your side when you have shampoo in your eyes, or it’s a stand up shower stall that is small enough that if you bend over too quickly you will hit your head on the wall in front of you and your rear end on the wall behind you. In the past this never seemed to bother me, but this time I suddenly find myself annoyed by it. Why? Because in Cambodia the shower is basically the entire bathroom! They tile the whole thing, stick a drain in the floor and a shower head on the wall, and there you have your shower. Lots of room and no mysteriously drifting plastic shower curtains!
Isn’t America the land of Super-Sizing? I’m sitting in a HUGE church, drinking a VENTI coffee from Starbucks, and typing this posting on a notebook computer with a 17 inch screen! So why can’t we get a decent size shower? And don’t even get me started on the subject of fixed American shower heads verses Cambodian shower heads attached to hoses you can move around and direct, or low American ceilings versus high and spacious Cambodian ceilings!
Some of you are probably thinking “Maybe Troy has had a bit too much of the Starbucks coffee he has talking about.” OK, maybe… But I’m just trying to point out that the things that are sneaking up to annoy missionaries who are home in the States aren’t always the things you might expect. Sometimes they are; missionaries do struggle with attitudes and issues that are serious and important, but usually they expect that. It’s the little things that you don’t expect.
So perhaps if McDonalds went into the home construction business we could solve this pesky little shower problem; “With that bathroom do you want a regular size shower, or do you want to Super-Size?” I’ll take Super-Size, thank you.
The Story Part 2 (the problem of "zero sum" missions)
Picking up the thought that I touched on last time, there are other problems with the story that the people in the churches hear from missionaries. It has to do with the “thrill factor”.
Very often, churches seem to think and act on the premise that missions giving is a “zero sum game”. In other words, they have “X” number of dollars for missions, and once it is gone, that’s it. So when missionaries contact churches, the first thing that goes through the church leaders mind is, “do we have any available missions funds?” If they let the missionary come to the church, after the missionary speaks it becomes a question of deciding between supporting missionary A or missionary B. So then it becomes, who has the more exciting stories; who has the higher “thrill factor”. This spills over into the missionary’s communication from the field, as well. At times it can be difficult for a missionary to write a newsletter when they don’t feel like they have anything exciting to report.
Yesterday, I had the privilege of being in a church where a long time missionary friend of mine was speaking. This friend is an MK (missionary kid) who grew up in Kenya, and now is a missionary in the Sudan. He had ten minutes or so, and did a great job of presenting the need in the Sudan. By the time he finished, I felt like I should go to the Sudan (that always seems to happen when you get a missionary who is good at communicating their heart). Then I started thinking through what all he said, and how the people responded.
Now please understand, I am not intending to criticize what he said, or how he said it, or anything; I am just trying to paint a picture for you of what fundraising is like for missionaries.
There tends to be the idea that one ministry is more valid than another because of it’s location, or the “results” that a missionary has. People sometimes say, “missionary so and so has planted all these churches, and that other missionary hasn’t planted even one.” My friend even brought up some of these problems. He was talking about how some of the least reached areas of the world don’t tend to have many missionaries because it takes time and relationships to have someone become a Christian, so there’s not a lot of exciting stories for newsletters and things. But then it’s even harder for the missionaries themselves. They tend to look at what the other missionaries do and feel like they are failures because they aren’t seeing people saved every day. People in churches often reinforce this because they question who they should support, and sometimes will even drop missionaries who don’t seem to “produce” at a level they equate with a successful ministry, and pick up support for someone else (remember the zero sum game?).
The answer, as I said in my last posting, is in relationships. Only when people in the churches develop a relationship with a missionary, and understand what they do and why they do it, will they be moving beyond the “thrill factor”. In saying that I will also add that often it is the missionary’s fault. I’m not sying that they didn’t do what they should have on the field, but rather they failed in maintaining a good relationship with their supporters in order to educate and disciple them in how missions works in their area. I know of other situations where a church has dropped their support of a missionary because the missionary fails to communicate regularly with the church. Personally, as much as I hate to see any missionary loose support during their term, I think churches in this situation are often justified in their actions. But I am drifting a bit from my point about the “thrill factor” of one ministry verses another.
The Bible says that some plant, some water and some harvest, but all share the reward. All of them play vital roles. And it’s amusing that usually the “great” things we do aren’t the things that really make a difference anyway. Very often, the things that have real lasting impact for the kingdom of God are the little things that happen when we are least expecting it. And we don’t even find out about it until years later. But maybe that’s a story for next time…
I realize this posting may raise a few other questions, but let me finish by saying I don't believe that missions is a "zero sum game". I believe that God's plan, in God's timing will not lack God's resources. As we stretch ourselves to bless others, God will in turn bless us as well. Once we eliminate the "zero sum" missions philosophy, many of the other "thrill factor" problems go away as well.
Now, I don't think we should give regular support to every missionary that walks through a church's doors, but I do think we should pray and ask God what He wants us to do in every situation; I think it is wrong to just dismiss the possability of support just because we think we have hit our limit. We should pray about each opportunity and seek God's will and direction. Once that relationship has been made, it must be maintained by both sides to remain healthy and strong.
The Story That’s The Story (Kidnappings, Hurricanes and Missions)
Being in America for the last few weeks has given me more access to news than I know what to do with.
Over the last few years, things in Cambodia have changed radically, and we actually have a couple cable news channels, like CNN, at our home, and I regularly check a couple of news web-sites. But here, there’s not only numerous TV news channels, there’s newspapers of every kind in every gas station and restaurant, high speed wireless access to the internet in every coffee shop, as well as talk radio of every stripe.
But the most striking thing is that with all those news outlets, they all seem to be covering the same thing. Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t all saying the same thing exactly, but they all do seem to cover the same stories.
A week ago, it was the girl missing in Aruba. Then there was the London bombings. Now it’s the hurricane. There always seems to be a “piling on” in the media. This tends to bother me a bit at times. How many times can you hear the same thing over and over again? They tend to not only repeat themselves from network to network, but even on the same channel they cycle through the news every 30 minutes or so and keep repeating the same information again.
This is exactly the same problem I was talking to a pastor about last week. People in churches, especially those who have been recently saved and haven’t grown up in churches, aren’t used to making long term regular financial commitments to missions. A big part of that is because they are used to this instant news. They are used to seeing the latest instant news updates everywhere they turn. Traditional missions in the Assemblies of God is a bit different. Missionaries visit a church once every four years or so, there might be a newsletter stuck on the bulletin board a couple times a year, but it’s all old news. And it’s very “filtered”. They spin and condense three or four months into a one page newsletter, or four years into a 45 minute sermon, so the view the average person gets isn’t exactly “eye-witness”.
So the current trend in churches and in missions is to get that hands-on, eye-witness feel by concentrating the missions efforts of the church more and more in short term teams sent out by the church for a few weeks, or in one time projects that the church raises money for and then moves on to the next thing. These things aren’t bad, but if churches shift their support away from monthly support of long term, full time, field based missionaries to increase the short term projects and teams, it could become a bad thing.
I believe both of these efforts have their place. The challenge is, how do we in the church keep from making the story, “the story”? How do we keep from allowing the immediate feedback of short-term work to undermine the importance of the long term work? The answer is relationships.
Churches and pastors and church boards usually pick up a missionary for support because they came to the church and established a relationship with the church. That relationship is based initially on that first service and usually on the mutual association with the Assemblies of God. But like all relationships, if this one is not worked on regularly, it is going to have problems. The sad thing is that like much of life, the negative news gets the attention, and the problem relationships between missionaries and churches are the ones that get the attention.
It is my hope that this blog is one step to maintaining good relationships with churches who support us here in the States.
Back to Where it Started
Today I finally am back in a place with good internet access. In fact, I am sitting in the same place I was a few months ago when I first started this blog.
I am currently in Springfield, MO working on the same video project that brought me here back in April. This is a project to produce, among other things, a two minute promotional video to be shown at the upcoming World Missions Congress that will be held in December in Tennessee (I thin k that’s where it is anyway). The meeting is to bring together college age young people who are interested in missions and to challenge them to give a year of their lives to work overseas, with the hope that during that time God will call some of them into full time missions work. The video I am working on is to highlight the Asia-Pacific region, and the needs represented there.
So let me ask you what you think. Here is the video script. But before you read it, let me remind you of a couple things. First, this is targeted at young people, so it moves along pretty fast and doesn’t pull any punches. Second, there is a video component that I can’t share with you right now. There will be a lot of images that precede this part of the video. The scripted part is only about half of the overall video. Also, it won’t be me talking, but rather a college age young man who is working in Thailand. So have a look at what we say, and let me know what you think; post your comments and suggestions and we’ll see what we come up with. Here’s the script;
Forget the hype, forget all the flash. Asia Pacific has 33 countries and close to a billion people. But less than 5 % of them know Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. That leaves more than 950 million unreached, and about half of those have had little or no exposure to the gospel.
At the same time there are less than 300 Assembly of God missionaries in the region and less than 100 missionary associates. That’s about 2 and a half million unreached people for every missionary. So what’s the answer?
Jesus said pray that God would send more workers into the harvest field. We need workers. People like you who are willing to invest up to a year of your life in the kingdom of Jesus Christ.
Bottom line, I’m not talking about warm bodies to fill a slot, and if your looking for a chance to travel and see Asia, don’t waste your time with this. Working overseas with missionaries to reach these groups isn’t all fun and games; it takes real commitment to prayer, hard work and servanthood. But if you really want to follow Jesus, if you want to be a disciple of Jesus Christ and change the eternal destiny of people who have lived too long with no hope and no future, this is exactly what your looking for.
God is calling laborers into the harvest field of Asia Pacific. Can you hear His voice? Will you answer the call?
