This week is Passover for the Jews. Our good friend Ayelet promised that if we are unable to go there during our stay on Planet Earth, she would meet us over Jerusalem when we are caught up together to meet Jesus in the clouds. Next year, Ayelet, in Jerusalem!
View over the Caribbean, on the way to Susie’s practicum trip to St. Kitts.
Whenever I fly, I love to look for Jesus in the clouds.
When I was eight years old, in 1964, I had a passport when my family spent time in the Philippines. I think it’s no good anymore, especially since I think my looks have changed, and I’ve long since misplaced it. I’ve never been to Mexico, and once when we were at Niagara Falls a very long time ago, we briefly crossed into Canada. But when it was time to have an “overseas tour” while I was in the Air Force, it was Hawaii. Technically, yes, it was over a sea, but it was still the United States, so I didn’t need to have my passport renewed.
But when you have eight kids, and they’re growing up in the Church, the subject of Missions Trips eventually comes up. Naturally, when you have eight kids, you’re pretty sure you can’t afford missions trips. But neither could my family afford Girl Scout trips, band trips, and other fun things I did as a child. So, we had fundraisers.
Now, I can tell you that Eric and all eight of our kids have also been overseas and needed a passport. Here’s where they went:
- Eric: Israel
- Lisa: Puerto Rico and Guatemala
- Emily: Israel
- Chris: Mexico and Nicaragua (twice)
- Susie: St. Kitts and Kyrgyzstan
- Robyn: Israel (three times)
- Valerie: Israel, Ireland
- David: St. Kitts and Iraq
- Vivian: Myanmar
Some trips were with our own church, some were with other churches, and some trips were solo. But if they were there on a missions trip, they were there to support a missionary.
Some were sightseeing trips or for pleasure or special events.
Some trips happened after they were married and out of the house.
Some were with a team of college friends.
One was a military deployment.
I have the way to the Indianapolis airport memorized (but appreciate the GPS). And we are familiar with fundraisers.
The first of our kids to go out of the country was Chris, and he was the one I worried about the most. Somehow I had gotten on a mailing list for a missionary in Nicaragua and enjoyed reading his emailed newsletters. But one day, my eyes were drawn to a request for painters. I didn’t know what he meant, and Chris could paint, so I approached the letter in the negative, like a good Norwegian would:
“You wouldn’t mean an artist painter, would you?”
Well, yes, that’s exactly what they wanted! They’d bought an old building that used to be for auto repairs, and it had a tall black galvanized steel gate that made the place look like a prison. They wanted to use this for a Christian school, so they wanted a mural on that gate so it would look like the kids were entering Heaven.
I said, “My son Chris can paint, but he’s only sixteen, and we couldn’t afford to send him.”
The missionary said in return, “All he needs is a round trip ticket. We’ll take care of the rest.”
The decision making was the hard part. Chris didn’t always pay attention, so I was afraid he would get lost, like I did at the Honolulu airport, and miss his flight. Was he too young for such a trip, with no one to look after him? And where would we get the money for the ticket?
Well, the money for the ticket was covered quickly. When Grandpa Ware liked an idea like this, he was sure to send a check. And Chris was thrilled with the idea! All that was left was whether it was God’s will. The circumstances seemed doable. So we prayed, and the next morning, in our daily Bible reading, there was this:
“Furthermore King David said to all the assembly: ‘My son Solomon, whom alone God has chosen, is young and inexperienced; and the work is great, because the temple is not for man but for the LORD God.’” ~1 Chronicles 29:1
I cried. It wasn’t a temple that Chris would be making, but God was assuring us through His Word, that He had hand-picked our son for a great work. So, we agreed this would be a good thing, but I made sure to drill him and drill him on what he would be seeing at the Miami airport and how to find his next flight out of there.
I cried again on the way home after dropping him off, thinking he would be all alone and I couldn’t help him (which wasn’t good for driving!), but he did fine, and the missionary met him in Managua.
We called it a special semester, two months long, during the otherwise frigid Indiana winter months, and Chris got an immersion course in Spanish, along with art and Christian service.
True to the word of the missionary, he was taken care of. He ate a lot of rice and beans in the mission church’s feeding center, and he slept on the roof of their orphanage. He painted not one, but two murals. He went with one of the teams from another church when they passed out water bottles to the residents of the dump, and shared the Gospel. He took cold showers at the end of the hot, dusty, smelly day.
And he couldn’t have loved it more. The second time he went to Nicaragua, he took several others from our church along with him.
Susie, David, and Vivian are all graduates of Calvary Chapel Bible College in Indianapolis (CCBCi). To culminate their school year, after learning about Christian service, the students at CCBCi always plan a spring missions trip, called a “practicum.” These are usually 2 or 3 weeks long and participation is not actually mandatory, but greatly encouraged.
When the students have counted the costs, they kick into high gear for fundraising. They’ll write a letter to all their family and friends explaining how much they want to go, what they’ll be doing there to aid a missionary family / church, how much it costs, and how what they really want us to do is pray for them. There’s also a student-run practicum dinner, where they serve their guests their student-prepared feast, and talk about where they’re going and explain what the need is. Of course, contributions are accepted, but these dinners are actually prayer meetings. Once you’ve heard about the needs, the next thing to do is to lay hands on the students and pray for them.
When Vivian went to Myanmar, we really didn’t even know at first that that was Burma, and Burma was really only in our heads because of The King and I. Burma was disparaged in the movie because it was so pitifully small compared to Siam! But today, with the military coup in Myanmar, we not only know where Burma is, we know the Calvary Chapel missionaries who live there and run the Calvary Chapel church, and we keep tabs on them and pray for them.
The world becomes a smaller place when you’ve seen it for yourself. Vivian had a Zoom graduation last year because of Covid, and Andrew, her husband, took a job at a Calvary Chapel near Fort Wayne. But when Vivi gave her graduation speech from CCBCi, it was mostly about how much she and Andrew wanted to go back to Myanmar because they loved the people there.
You might meet someone who has escaped from China and is going by an assumed name. You might have to trek up a narrow mountain road to minister there. You might have to sing the same English language children’s action songs over and over again in each village you’re brought to, without telling the Buddhist parents that “One Two Three, Jesus Loves Me” is not primarily about learning to count. You might sweat more than you’ve ever sweated before in your life. But you’ve invested part of your life in those people, those children, and that becomes your treasure. Eating their foods with them from a banana leaf, you bond, and leave part of your heart behind when you leave.
Robyn’s trip was different. Around the time when Valerie was born, in 1993, we had a friend named Ayelet (pronounced like “I yell it,” and her husband Daniel, who were from Yad HaShmona, a kibbutz with a moshav, or guest house, in the Judean hills. Daniel was getting his degree at Purdue’s vet school and Ayelet was along for the ride. They went to our church because, as Messianic Jews, they didn’t really appreciate crosses in churches. They liked our church because it sported a dove instead.
Robyn was only two or three at the time, but the Ronen’s were unforgettable, and Ayelet loved Robyn’s blond hair and chubby cheeks. They reminded her of Daniel’s cheeks. Although Daniel was an Israeli, his family was from Finland and he had the same blond hair and cheeks.
Ayelet taught us how to do Passover. We celebrated with our church family, but we also had a private Seder with the Ronen’s one year when it wasn’t being done at the church. It was a novelty at the church, but it was a firm, non-negotiable event with Daniel and Ayelet.
When Christmas time came around, Ayelet made a cookie church alongside the one our family made, but hers was a synagogue.
Then, Daniel had his degree and they were soon gone, as Purdue students typically are. But before they left, they told us about a volunteer program at the moshav. If you could just get there, you could volunteer to work at the moshav, and in your free time, you could go sightseeing. And, members of the moshav community could bring you places where the typical tourists didn’t get to go. Also, Ayelet told me she had a cousin picked out to marry Robyn when she grew up.
Well, who wouldn’t want to be related to a BenDavid? (That means “Son of David” and it is Ayelet’s maiden name.) And it just so happened that Robyn, after having a unit study on Israel in high school, expressed an interest in going there. I think she was fascinated by the thought of meeting Ayelet’s cousin, or another good-looking Messianic Jew. So Robyn saved up her earnings from Leonard’s until she had enough for a round trip plane ticket, applied for a passport and a work visa, and studied Hebrew.
So while I had been apprehensive about Chris in a strange airport, I considered Robyn level-headed enough to be by herself in a foreign country. She had single-handedly done all the planning to get there in the first place! But when she actually arrived at Ben Gurion airport, she felt rather lost and anxious. Fortunately for American travelers, there are almost always people who speak English in an airport, so she eventually found her way to the moshav.
On that first trip, Robyn learned what to do when your employer cracks the whip. A volunteer is not the same as an employee, but she was there to work, work hard, and work fast. Most of the time, she worked cleaning rooms for guests at the moshav, and other times, she would do other manual labor jobs such as pruning the olive trees at their Biblical Garden. (These were very messy indeed!) She and the non-Jewish volunteers got to work on the Sabbath and take Sunday off.
Sadly, Ayelet’s cousin was in the IDF by that time, so Ayelet’s matchmaking idea never happened.
Robyn was at Yad HaShmona during Christmas, and though there was a time delay on Skype of a few seconds, we were anxious to hear from her, so we contacted her from Lisa’s house on Christmas Day, and sang The Hallelujah Chorus to her. She loved it and sang along with what she heard. Unfortunately it wasn’t coming through in a synchronized way, but we all overlooked that as well as we could. We had sent her, at a pretty hefty expense, a Christmas stocking, with items to stuff into it. She had tried to make the famous cookie church, but putting it together with frosting wasn’t a successful idea.
She learned that the Arabs who worked for the Messianic Jews in the kitchen, who intoned “I love you” upon first seeing her, and who ogled her when she passed them, could be cured of this affliction by putting her long blond hair in a scarf.
The second time Robyn went to Israel, she was unable to get the work visa at Yad HaShmona, but she got one instead at a guest house run by a large Messianic church, Beit Immanuel in Tel Aviv, where she became a worship team member. And when she returned home, she was always the one who led the singing at our Passover Seders.
Robyn was in Israel during an escalation in tensions between Israel and one of her neighbors, and it was probably the second trip, so we respectfully requested that she come back early. (Believe me, you watch the international news a lot closer when your children are overseas!)
The third time, she just had to go back for a fellow volunteer’s wedding, and she took Valerie with her for a whirlwind tour.
Valerie, at a beach near TelAviv
What has remained for us is Passover. Sure, one at a time, we might get to see Ayelet again if we have a trip to Israel on our calendar.
Eric, at Yad HaShmona, during a trip to Israel,
with Ayelet, Daniel, and one of their kids
But we have never forgotten that she taught us how to do Passover, and we still do, every year.
One year, we had a real live Judaizer at our Carroll County church who had been spreading the false doctrine that we as Christians became Jews when we were saved and now we had to keep the Law. So on purpose, we didn’t have Passover. Instead, Lisa talked us into going to her church and having it there.
But since then, we have not missed, not even for Covid. We hosted a Facebook Live event in 2020, the same way most churches at that time were just getting started with livestreaming, out of necessity. This year, we’ll be doing our virtual Passover again this Thursday night, April 1, which is still technically Passover week, but just not when you usually have the Seder, at the beginning of Passover.
There will be lamb, the way Jesus would have experienced it, but understanding that Jesus Himself was God’s lamb, the perfect once-for-all sacrifice. (Sorry, we can’t share it with you when it’s virtual, but you can watch us!) There will be singing, dancing, and joy over God’s deliverance for His people in Moses’ day, and remembering that that is a picture of how Jesus rescued us from our sinful state and will again deliver His people at the End of All Days.
Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem! There is nothing that says “Pray for Jerusalem” like having friends there.
Dear Father, we do pray for the peace of Jerusalem, as well as peace for the rest of your people who are still scattered. We also pray for the peace of all the countries where our family has ministered, especially Iraq and Myanmar. We pray for the true peace that comes from knowing the Prince of Peace, Yeshua HaMashiah, Jesus. For it is in His Name we pray, Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment