February got off to a slow start, but soon enough started rolling along with significant speed and business!
I was the speaker at SBC’s high school prom on Friday February 12. Yes, I know, it seems strange to have a speaker at prom, but don’t worry I kept it short and sweet – my holy-roller-preacher-man alter ego did not make even a brief cameo.
February 13, I was the speaker at the College Education Department’s thanksgiving celebration. This was one of my favorite assignments, because so many of my friends here at SBC are education majors; including both of the Flores sisters. Those two crazy girls keep me on my toes and most certainly keep me laughing. Mik Mik (the elder sister) was the one to introduce me that morning. As I walked up on stage she started to hand me the microphone, but paused with a mischievous grin on her face and began speaking into the mic once again. “O, but before Andrea will give her message, she will render us a song,” mik said. My jaw dropped. “MIK!” I yelled at her “What are you doing?! What am I going to sing?” I gasped. She laughed and said, “Whatever you want,” and ran down off stage, leaving me with close to 300 students and faculty staring at me, waiting to hear this musical number I had supposedly prepared. I was bright red and in my panic I couldn’t think of one English song that I knew all the words too, but I had sang a Tagalog (national language of the Philippines) song many, many times without musical accompaniment or need to reference a lyrics sheet. I felt like I had stood there for five minutes, but later upon reviewing the video it was only 30 seconds. I began to sing and they cheered like I had just scored the winning touchdown at a Friday night home football game. It was ridiculous! I could hardly retain my composure and finish the song because I was so overwhelmed by their surprising expressions. That was by far the most intimidating moment of the trip so far.
After I finished, I quickly transitioned into my thanksgiving message for that morning. My key passage was James 1:2-4, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” Not exactly the typical passage you find when flipping through the “thanksgiving” section of your concordance. However, my parallel was the rain. This metaphor was quite relevant to the people here, because we are in the middle of a significant drought. I told them that while the rain can be inconvenient and sometimes quite hazardous, we’d all agree that we need rain. Just like a farmer needs rain to grow his crop, in the same way we as Christians need rain, or trials, to grow as a disciple in Christ. The key to this verse is “Consider it pure joy my brothers whenever you face trials of many kinds…” It does not say “in spite of.” It does not say be joyful even though you have trials, but whenever you have trials. Be joyful because you have trials! Crazy?! Right? Not so. Its so hard for us to have faith, to trust God with our lives when everything is running along nice and smooth, but when you are in the middle of a storm and in the pit of your darkest trial, who do you turn to? “God,” I hope. Trials deepen our faith and if we ever hope to finish this race well, we need trials. Each one prepares us for the next wave and we can begin to see a pattern of God’s faithfulness. And of course after every storm, there is always a rainbow – after every trial God’s promise to never leave us nor forsake us, prevails!
That following day, we visited Zion Baptist Church and I was to give the Sunday morning message. When I became a preacher, I will never know, but I figure this is what the Lord meant when he said we must always be ready and willing to testify about God. It was of course February 14 and they were expecting a message on L-O-V-E. Bor-ing! Haha I’m just kidding! I gave them a message on love all right. I preached out of John chapter 15, emphasizing the ideas of “greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” and “Love your neighbor as I have loved you.” How do you love someone like Jesus? Last time I checked, I’m not blameless and pure and cannot sacrifice myself on a cross and bear the sins of the whole world; I don’t know about you. So what do we do? If the greatest example of love is Christ’s death on the cross and we cannot replicate that act ourselves, the next best thing, the next most loving act would be to point them to cross. The most loving thing you can do for someone is tell them about Jesus. If you don’t tell them about Jesus, you don’t really love them. The second part of my message was how do we express our love to God. John chapter 15 says, “If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love...” When we think “commands,” we automatically think of the “Ten Commandments” and probably some scene from the “Prince of Egypt” or if you’re an old geezer, you’ll have flashbacks to the 1950’s Charlton Heston cinematic masterpiece. But do you think, just maybe, Jesus was talking about the great commission, the command he gives us to “…GO and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit???” (Hey, I’m a missionary, and as far as I’m concerned it all comes back to the great commission. I dare you to find a topic I can’t tie in to the need to take the gospel to the ends of the earth – I double-dog dare you!) Matt 28:19 says, “Therefore GO…” It doesn’t sound like a suggestion to me. Despite all of the parables and apocalyptic language of the New Testament, Jesus didn’t leave this one up to interpretation. It doesn’t get any clearer than “GO.” But if you’re still not convinced flip over to the last chapter of John. Jesus asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?” Peter answers emphatically “yes” all three times, but his verbal acknowledgement is not what Jesus desires. Jesus says, if you truly love me, “FEED MY SHEEP!” We are holding in our hands and in our hearts the Bread of Life and we are getting fat! I beg you today to feed someone else for a change…
The weekend of February 12-14 was only the beginning of the craziness. That following Monday kicked-off our Spiritual Encounter Week here at SBC. SEW is something like their revival week, where the students, divided by elementary, high school and college, attend worship services in the gym, complete with borrowed worship band, student special numbers and of course the guest speaker. Dah dada dA! Andrea Brazell is not only a preacher, but a revival preacher – I am so not southern enough for this nonsense! Luckily, I was only requested to speak during the elementary’s SEW. However, this was a brand new challenge for me. In all my speaking engagements home and abroad, I had never had to do a series. Uh oh! Sure enough, by God’s grace and God’s might, I managed to formulate my first ever five-lesson children’s sermon on faith. On Monday we talked about baby Moses in the basket floating down the Nile. Each day I brought props from home and called on student volunteers to help me act out the stories. With the limited supplies I had, creativity was a must! Therefore, baby Moses was played by my latest pineapple purchase and Pharaoh’s daughter wore a crown made of cellophane, but they loved every minute of the crazy Americana’s teaching techniques! From there we went on to join Queen Esther in her plight to save her kinsman, fell into the sea and stewed in the belly of the great fish with Jonah, faced wind and waves and walked on the water with the Apostle Peter, and last but not least battled the fearsome giant alongside the soon to be King David, wielding only a staff and three small stones in our sling. Each story was meant to teach the children a different aspect of faith. Day one, with baby Moses affectionately known as “Piña,” our theme was “Trusting God with Our Safety.” Day two, Queen Esther taught us to “Trust God with the Plan.” Through Jonah’s insubordination and grim consequence we learned to “Trust God through Obedience.” “Trusting God with the Impossible,” was the topic concerning Peter’s miraculous account. Finally, Goliath’s surprising defeat demonstrated “Trusting God with the Victory.” Whew! Another one bites the dust!
However, rest for the weary will have to be postponed. I was whisked back north for our Filipino Nehemiah Franchise training. This took place out at my supervisor’s old home in MJ Santos, Agusan Del Norte. We were out in the sticks, or bokit, as we call it here. Up at 5, breakfast and devotions 6:30-8 and then we hit the ground runnin’! We trained our franchise leaders in team building exercises and how to be an effective facilitator. We spent two and a half days on “Cousin” (or Ms) evangelism and house bible study methods. This was the most frustrating part of the week for me. The cousin ev experts were teaching in Tagalog. So lets recap, in 2005 I learned Cebuano, 2006 I learned Warray warray and now I’m learning Ilongo. All of which are various strains/dialects in Vasaya. I can somewhat follow a conversation or oration in Vasaya, I CANNOT understand a lick of Tagalog. However, I am expected to participate in the practical interactive portions of this workshop. I cannot tell you how frustrating it is, when after each scenario they ask me, “Did you understand?” Ha, that’s cute, “NO!” I did not understand five minutes ago and, I’m sorry, I don’t understand now. I’m flattered, you think I’m so adept at language that I can absorb and configure a brand new method of communication in only a matter of minutes, but I’m afraid it might take me just a wee bit longer than that. Yet again, God reigns Jehova Jirah! I make it through – I witness and disciple to my pretend cousin with the rest of the participants, thanks of course to some awesome translators and the power of BODY LANGUAGE! (This totally makes me think of that scene with Ursula in “The Little Mermaid,” right before Ariel trades her voice for legs! ::side note:: J) Kuya Rey, Casey, and I spent some time encouraging and offering suggestions on mobilization efforts and Kuya Jess (My supervisor and founder of NT) spent the last few sessions speaking on the vision and current direction NT is moving in – statistics, different types of teams, countries we’ve penetrated and future potential for national teams in some of our partnered countries. Kuya Jess also spoke about why we call the six Filipino training/sending locations, “franchises” and what that looks like. We talked about the goals of Nehemiah and what needs to stay the same in every franchise and what could potentially look different from franchise to franchise. He gave the example of Mc Donald’s. Every Mc Donald’s in the world has the same Golden “M” standing out side, same color scheme, same uniforms, but the menu varies from country to country. In India they don’t serve hamburgers (Go figure!), in South Korea you can order a squid burger and in the Philippines rice is more popular than french fries. He used this analogy to say, Nehemiah Teams is using young people to fulfill the great commission in this generation. They are committed to go to the unreached and hard to reach areas. We hold our volunteers accountable to the personal development materials, seeing to it that they learn how to be a world Christian and that they deal with a missionary calling. However, the evangelism and discipleship methods taught in the original NT material, will most likely change and should change depending on what part of the world and what people group you’re ministering to. All of the training was exponentially insightful and the fellowship with my fellow Filipino soldiers was rewarding as well.
We also took one short break and had a group activity of swimming in the Agusan River, just down stream from some water buffalo. Ahh refreshing!…or you can pretend it was.
Saturday we all went our separate ways, equipped and renewed to take down the powers of this dark world and the spiritual forces of the heavenly realms! Hindi Basta Basta! We have rendezvous with destiny! Sunday, I spoke at another church urging the young people to join up and the Church to support their willingness to serve. Monday it was back to school. I had sorely missed the scholastic oasis during my brief pilgrimage; it was good to be home.
I have one month left at the college before the Filipino teams are deployed to the field and I have a shift in my responsibilities; seeing to it that the proper training and follow up is achieved in all six districts. Pray that I will use every ounce of my time left on campus to minister to the lost, disciple the infant, and spur forth the strong!...before they get fat…
