Home Thoughts From Abroad

Early Sunday morning I flew to Kota Kinabalu on the island of Borneo to speak at a retreat for a group of students with an interest in holistic community development. We loaded into two vans and travelled up some pretty scary roads that twisted their way up to this very strange, but quite lovely house with an incredible view of the hills and valleys around it. Electricity and water were definitely a challenge and I slept on the floor in that brown room at the third level. However,  the students had prepared a great BBQ of fish and chicken for dinner and the fellowship was sweet.

I thoroughly enjoyed sharing with these young people the things that I have learned about holistic community development over the past five years, especially since five of these young people had recently attended a training program facilitated by our TWR Cambodia team. These are very bright, committed young people with a real passion to see transformation in the lives of the indigenous people groups in Sabah and the orang asli people of the peninsula.  It was not only a literal mountain top experience but a spiritual one as well.

We arrived back in KK late Monday afternoon in time for me to speak a second time at the final class for a group of seminary students taking a course in CHE which was being co-taught and translated by a couple of the guys who had been at my earlier session.  As I began to deliver the lesson from our retreat session, my translator got so excited about what he had just learned that I was able to step back and watch him share it with the others.  How fun to see your students become the teacher right before your very eyes.

On Tuesday I had meetings with three leaders from the seminary, a missions center and a major church group who are all beginning to realize that there is a need to look at education and community and missions from a much broader perspective. In this setting the centuries old debate between the Great Commission and the Great Commandment is very real and down to earth. Do you simply preach the gospel, or do you reach out in love to the whole community in need and allow the Holy Spirit to touch whose lives He will?

I am grateful for this opportunity to reach out in a new ministry in Borneo and am willing to let the Lord stretch me through new experiences of teaching and sharing to others what He has taught me in Cambodia. It is greatly rewarding to go to a completely new field and find that the Lord is there in the lives of His servants encouraging me and giving me an opportunity to support the good work that they are doing. Please pray for open hearts as we develop new initiatives for communities in need.