I’ve never had a week as full of church
activities as this week. After the long weekend at the church camp, there was a
talk on team ministry/leadership on Wednesday, a lesson on pastoral visitation
and care on Thursday, helping out with a university student alpha course group
on Friday, and a day camp by Gospel Operation International (GOI, a missions
organisation… coincidentally the pronunciation of the Chinese name of this organisation sounds the same as “rowing the boat”) on Saturday.
I had to ask my workplace for permission to
take time off three months prior to this because Saturday is the busiest day in
the clinic. The location of the day camp is only five minutes’ drive from my
home. I didn’t realise the national park next to my home is so great: During
the camp, a Kookaburra knocked at our door, and a turkey accidentally entered
into the room!
Rev. Martin Lau shared with us about how
the love story in Song of Songs can also be used to describe the love story
between Christ and us. During the missions workshop, he played a missions video
which I saw quite a few time last year. My eyes became very watery right at the
beginning of the video (so this could only be something from God, because I am
rather stoic). He even told us that there will be a one-month long missions
trip to Dubai, Uganda and Israel at the end of next year!
This camp helped me understand how missions
organisations support missionaries. It is a great gathering where we got to
meet brothers and sisters with a heart for missions from various different
churches. The games were also very interesting. There was a balloon game where
we are each given a balloon to write our life mission, and I wrote the Great
Commission. We were asked to throw the balloon and keep it up in the air for
one minute, which was easy. Then they started throwing other balloons in and
asked us to keep both our missions balloon and the additional balloons all up
in the air. Most of us were more focused on our own balloons than the new
balloons. The new balloons had words like family, academics, exercise, etc. I
found that in real life, I do the opposite: I am probably more focused on
balancing those other things than on the Great Commission! Then we were asked
to think about what are some of the ways we can keep more balloons up, and
people suggested being more supportive of each other and helping with other
people’s balloons when we see their missions balloons falling.
The next
game was even more exciting. People had to hold on to some metal bars and let a
person walk over the bars to reach a map, for that person to be able to stick
his/her missions balloons onto the map. This requires very strong teamwork and trust of each other. So, although God gave each person an individual calling, everyone needs support from others to reach the destination of their individual calling. When I got to the map and prepared to stick my
balloon to the middle east, I didn’t see there was another tape which became
stuck to my balloon. I decided to take a risk and try to remove that tape, and
the balloon exploded! This made me realise that front line missions work is
very dangerous! Every decision could involve “life or death”!
The final
game was the “road signs” game. We are to pick two road signs, one representing
our relationship with God, the other representing our own status in ministry.
Instinctively I picked “keep right” and “yield”: Try to do the right thing in
God’s eyes and keep the right relationship with God, yield (submit) to God. I
took a third sign, “no turning back”, because I believe that once we start following
God, there’s no turning back.
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