Once a Missionary, Always a Missionary – Part 2

 

Ministry

I'm in the pink hat with my granddaughter 

praying for a lady whose mother is battling dementia.

As noted in Part 1, I had a bit of a struggle at first, finding ministry work here in the US. Since I had lived in this town in the early 90’s, I had a church that I had loved. The first Sunday after the move I visited the church in its new location. I was pleased to find that it is still the friendly, Bible-preaching church I had known. The founding pastor is now retired, but he still attends the church. When I saw him that morning, I told him how much he had helped me on my journey, quoting many helpful things he had told me. His eyes filled with tears as he leaned on his cane.

I joined the Prayer Team at church and a couple of months later, a friend from the team suggested that I go pray for a local mercy ministry: Rich in Grace Ministries. They were doing a big giveaway of household goods for low-income families. Of course when I got to the site of the giveaway, I had no idea what I was doing. Turns out that the families stay in their car and volunteers at each station load their car with things like hand sanitizer, shampoo, washer pods, paper towels, and so forth. After the last station, the cars are directed to the last station: the prayer station. That first time there were about a dozen of us at the prayer station. I have worked with RIG ever since as part of their prayer team. Sometimes I am the only person on the prayer team. But alone or together with others, this ministry makes me feel like a missionary again.

Furthermore, I began to find that my prayers for people I had only just met were supernaturally super-charged by the Holy Spirit dropping knowledge into my spirit as I prayed. This was knowledge that I didn’t know and indeed could not possibly have known[1].

Back in the early 90’s, the founding pastor of the church had each new member take a Spiritual Gifts test[2]. My test showed my strongest gifts as exhortation (encouragement) and teaching. Since neither of us could figure out how to use exhortation in a traditional church setting (without looking like a churchy cheerleader), instead I started teaching Sunday School, specifically my three-year-old’s Sunday School class. Yearly I moved up with him, so I was always one of his Sunday School teachers.

Whenever missionaries visited our church, I was always the first person to hunt them down after service, peppering them with questions. Although I didn’t deliberately do this to encourage them, that is the effect it had on them. Of course, I only realized it all in hindsight. At the time, I was just genuinely curious. That is the divine mystery of Spiritual Gifts: they pop up seemingly out of nowhere when you least expect them. On the other hand, if I set out with the intention of encouraging someone, it can fail—sometimes in spectacular fashion. My theory is that the effort fails whenever I’m trying to work the gift, relying on myself, rather than relying completely on the Holy Spirit. I believe that when I encouraged those visiting missionaries it was my spirit responding to the Holy Spirit’s leading and that response was rewarded with the supernatural empowerment.

Back to the Spiritual Gifts test, something even more interesting than those things that I scored highly on are the things that I scored very low on: intercession, with a score of 1, hospitality, also 1, and mercy, with a score of 0. That’s right ZERO mercy. Keep these lows in mind as I walk you through the Italy years in the next post.


[1] But more about those prayers later.

[2] A sample of a Spiritual Gifts Test can be found here (though there are others): https://giftstest.com/

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