Hand in Hand Global Mission Support Blog Digest

Eric and Wendolyn Trozzo are new ELCA missionaries who will be serving in Malaysia. They have two young sons, Dante and Caedmon. To support the Trozzos, or another of the ELCA’s over 200 missionaries, go to www.elca.org/missionarysponsorship.

Caedmon makes a wish with a dandelion.

Way back, before we started thinking about becoming missionaries, the “Rhyme Bible Storybook” was preparing us. If you’ve got kids in your life, you should learn about the Rhyme Bible – most kids have theirs memorized.  And for us, Caedmon’s favorite story was about Jonah. “God said to Jonah, ‘I have a little task. Get up and go to Ninevah, and do what I ask.  The people there are wicked, so tell them to obey, but Jonah got on board a ship, and sailed the other way.”  And our kids shout, “Ut-oh, Jonah, you should’ve gone to Ninevah!”

So when things started falling into place for us to become missionaries, we had the Jonah story ringing in our ears. It wasn’t so much about being afraid of God sending us a storm or a big fish – we know God works through more than fear. It was a sense of being sent and of what happened to Jonah after the fish. He went to Ninevah, expecting no one to pay him any heed – but the people there responded about 100 times more passionately than he was ready for. It was like the people there were hungry for a message, and when God sent Jonah to them, it wasn’t so much about Jonah’s work as it was the people being prepared by God, for God.

And so as we head to Malaysia, we feel a little like Jonah. Honored (if quite nervous) by being chosen; curious (to see what God is already doing); and hopefully, humble, because though the Rhyme Bible talked about people being wicked, the story then and now is about people needing connection to God. And having talked and prayed together, our family believes that God has already put things in motion in the church in Malaysia. We are excited to get there and meet the active people of God and learn about all of God’s children there. And like Jonah (if you read to chapters 3 and 4) we expect to learn a whole lot about ourselves and how much we rely on God’s living word. Our hope is to be a little like Jonah – maybe skipping the fish guts part and hopefully finding joy in serving God and the church.

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The Rev. Peter Harrits, an ELCA missionary in Malysia, is also the regional Young Adults in Global Mission (YAGM) coordinator. He reflects here on the YAGM group he has worked with for the past year as the young adults end their service. The YAGM program relies on coordinators like Peter who facilitate the young adults’ ministry and provide mentoring and spiritual guidance. To support a YAGM coordinator, go to www.elca.org/missionarysponsorship.

The YAGM participants in Malaysia gather.

Stories of happiness and friendship. Stories of regret and remorse. Stories of success and failure, of significant gains and losses. Stories trying to make sense of a year immersed in the other. Recalling, remembering and reliving their experiences, these storytellers crafting them into tales for the uninitiated — those who have not been and do not know. This is holy, difficult work.

In the Gospel of Luke, messengers from John the Baptist leave the familiar environment of their community and spend time with this Jesus character. They arrive weighed down with loaded questions from John and those who sent them. What are they to make of this man who had cured people of diseases, plagues and evil spirits? They ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Jesus’ response is simple, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard … .”

During their time in Sabah, I don’t know that the young adults I accompany witnessed the blind or deaf being restored, lepers being cleansed, or the dead being raised (you’d think somebody would’ve told me if that happened!), but I do know that they have seen and heard many things: things Internal and External, thing about the World and Society, about Culture and People, about Faith and God. As they start to return home, they are telling tales of getting lost in new cultures, of facing failure, of relationships that transformed them, of being welcomed in as they are, of sharing the love they have received in Christ, of receiving grace, and of wondering what they ever did to deserve that.

The stories aren’t all complete. Many are still ragged and raw with a jaggedly open ending. Some beg for resolution while other seem content to linger on with ellipsis dots and question marks.

The stories aren’t all pretty either. Many offer an unvarnished depiction of a year’s worth of life. Celebrations of community are paired with the pangs of isolation and songs of joy are met with the quiet wailing of lamentation.

The stories are real and, like the young adults who tell them and those of us who listen, they are very much a work in progress.

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Cindy McPeake is spending a year in Malaysia as part of the ELCA’s Young Adults in Global Mission (YAGM) program. The program relies on coordinators who facilitate the young adults’ ministry and provide mentoring and spiritual guidance. To support a YAGM coordinator, go to www.elca.org/missionarysponsorship.

Lunch at the New Life Center.

While we were in Thailand recently for our last group retreat, we got to visit the New Life Center, a center for young women who have been exploited or forced into labor. We took a tour of the facilities, ate lunch with some of the residents and spoke with the director. We talked about the causes of forced labor, what the government is doing to eliminate it and how the center is part of restoring the young girls’ hope.

We asked the director, in a seemingly hopeless situation, where does she see hope? Her response was, “sitting with the girls, listening to them cry, crying with them and being angry with them. And then seeing the transformation they go through when their power … their hope … is restored.”

Later that night, we talked about power and what it means. We defined power as “the ability to act.” The New Life Center director had the great power to act on behalf of those young women. She had the power to sit with them and cry. She had the power to show them that they could take back their own power, their own ability to act.

Our discussion moved to what motivates us to act. We all have the great responsibility to take action, to use our power on the behalf of other people to inspire, empower and sustain them. It can be a daunting task, to use our power wisely and positively, with the greater good in mind. But there is also power in using our power.

The power of power comes from building relationships with people, forming bonds of trust and restoring hope to the hopeless.

I know for me, I struggle with letting people have that power over me. Not because I think they will use it negatively but rather because it’s hard for me to admit I need help.

A good example of this is prayer. I truly love praying for other people. To be in conversation with God on the behalf of other people is a great joy for me. But I struggle letting people pray for me. I struggle letting people in on my own struggles. I am ashamed that I struggle and that I can’t handle it on my own. To acknowledge that weakness and be humbled by someone else’s prayer is always something I shy away from.

At the close of our retreat, we had a foot-washing devotion, which was a huge struggle for me. To sit, in front of my fellow YAGMs, as someone prayed for me is way outside of my comfort zone. To be completely vulnerable in the midst of all those people challenged my ability to stay calm.

But I did it. And it was a blessing to be blessed. To be taken care of. To be prayed for and cleansed.

That’s the power of power – the ability to act, but also the ability to stop acting and let someone else act for you. It’s the ability to step back from yourself and allow others to step forward.

How are you powerful? How do you allow others to have power over you?

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Here are excerpts from a message recently delivered by Jessie Obrecht, an incoming participant in the ELCA’s Young Adults in Global Mission (YAGM) program. She will be spending a year in Malaysia under the guidance of the Rev. Peter Harrits, a regional YAGM coordinator. The YAGM program relies on the coordinators who facilitate the young adults’ ministry and provide mentoring and spiritual guidance. To support a YAGM coordinator, go to www.elca.org/missionarysponsorship.

Jessie Obrecht

 … At the beginning of my senior year (at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn.,) I applied for a program called Young Adults in Global Mission, which is a program for youth to go abroad for 12 months and serve as a missionary in one of nine countries … .

After submitting my application, my response to people asking “Why do you want to do this?” was: “I want to get out of my comfort zone.  I want to experience something completely different … .”

… (But) about a week and a half after (being accepted) I realized that as exciting as all my new adventures and achievements were, that I was deeply rooted in the community of Moorhead and Concordia College ,,, . Here I was having to step outside of my comfort zone, outside of the family and community I had known for four years, and I was fighting it like a stubborn mule!

I won’t tell you that after this revelation of being challenged and stretched that leaving Concordia was all rainbows and bunnies. I won’t tell you it was fun or happy. … I shed more tears within those weeks than ever before.

But I also learned a ton from this experience. …

In a movie I watched a few weeks ago, “We Bought a Zoo,” one of the characters, Benjamin Mee, says, “You know, sometimes all you need is 20 seconds of insane courage. Just literally 20 seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it.” Now, in my words, what Benjamin Mee is saying is that every once in a while we just have to take one big ole leap of faith in life. We’ve gotta throw it all up, leave it to God, and just jump! …

For me, my leap of faith is Malaysia, and I would be lying if I told you I wasn’t absolutely terrified to hop on that plane in three months. But sometimes in life, we have to take that leap of faith, to embrace the unknown, and to risk, because in the end, we’ve got the greatest safety net of them all in God. So why not take this crazy, beautiful life, and live it to glorify God’s name in any and every way we can?

Amen

To read Jessie’s complete message, go to her blog.

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Liz Frey is spending a year in Malaysia teaching English as a second language as a member of the ELCA’s Young Adults in Global Mission (YAGM) program. The program relies on coordinators who facilitate the young adults’ ministry and provide mentoring and spiritual guidance. To support a YAGM coordinator,  go to www.elca.org/missionarysponsorship.

Serving as a YAGM in Malaysia has helped Liz Frey control her fears.

I never thought of myself as brave. I have a very timid disposition, if you ask me. I do not like to face my fears; instead, I allow them to fester while I hide. I would wait for someone else to make a move. I would blame my inaction on others.

Fear or the opposite of bravery can be crippling and life changing. It hinders us in doing things that we want to do, that we should do, that we need to do. I can think of countless examples of times in my life that I allowed my fear to take control. My fear of being alone or unloved. My fear of losing a friend. My fear of being wrong. My fear of leaving home. The list goes on and on. I can pick out so many moments where my fear beat out the call of bravery.

Yet, a big change in me has been the development of bravery. I didn’t go to Oz to collect courage from the Wizard. Instead I came to Malaysia, and here is where I received bravery. I faced one of the biggest fears in my life – going out on my own. I couldn’t run home if things were difficult. I wanted to face this fear head on; I had allowed it to block other dreams and this wouldn’t happen again.

I was really scared from the onset and in some serious denial about leaving. I had morphed the whole summer before coming to Malaysia into playtime. I pretended I wasn’t leaving. I could feel the fear creeping into me, as the time at home got shorter. But I was committed, and I was determined to face my fears in the unknown.

And I would be lying if I said that I don’t feel fear coming every day. Every day brings something new to tackle, big or small. But every time I feel this fear, I remind myself of a great quote from a great book, “Coraline” by Neil Gaiman: “Because when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.”

This is what I have learned about myself in the last eight months. I can be brave. In fact, I am brave. Fear is just part of life, but I can’t let it hold me back. As I round out the last few days of the semester at STS, I can’t help, but smile. I am so proud of myself and how far I have come. The next step is packing up this newfound bravery and bringing it home with me.

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Jisella Ibarra is living for a year in Malaysia through the ELCA Young Adults in Global Mission (YAGM) program. The program relies on coordinators who facilitate the young adults’ ministry and provide mentoring and spiritual guidance. To support a YAGM coordinator, go to www.elca.org/missionarysponsorship.

Poverty in urban Manilla.

Recently, I took a trip to the Philippines thanks to some additional support from home. (Thanks Dad!) I work with Filipino and Indonesian immigrants, so I wanted to see where most of my kids were coming from and why so many people immigrate to Malaysia from the Philippines.

It wasn’t very hard to miss the high degree of poverty. We hear about poverty and we are saddened by it. But I have to say it is really something else when you are in the middle of it all and can breathe in its intoxicating reality.

There were kids begging the tourists for money just to be sent away empty handed. At times you could spot a group of kids counting their coins just hoping that it would be enough to feed all of them for the night. And at the next corner there would be a poor child lying on the ground too weak to get up. I doubt they had families to take care of them or a home to go back to.

There were many Filipino women with desperate looks in their eyes accompanied by white men. I can’t imagine how terrible their situation was to give into prostitution and live with it as if it was a normal part of life. It shocked me to see how open this community was to this matter.

Never in my life had I felt as vulnerable as I did then, just to imagine what all of these women go through just to survive. My heart screams “That isn’t life.” I just ponder in agony, where is the love that Jesus came down here to teach us? That selfless love all Jesus’ followers should have?

As I have come up to this point in my YAGM year and have experienced so many things I never could have imagined, I feel that the main purpose for my time here in Malaysia is about seeing things that we miss in our ordinary lives because we are too busy to stop and take a closer look. It’s about giving into vulnerability and letting our hearts to be broken by the injustices of this world. It is when we are most vulnerable that we are able to see with more clarity what God wants us to see and give ourselves into his plan.

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The Young Adults in Global Mission (YAGM) program is reliant on coordinators who facilitate the young adults’ ministry and provide mentoring and spiritual guidance.  The Rev. Peter Harrits is the coordinator for Malaysia. To support a YAGM coordinator,  go to www.elca.org/missionarysponsorship.

YAGM participants navigate a labyrinth.

“In the beginning was the Tao (道), and the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God …”

These words, the opening words to the Gospel of John as translated into Chinese, sound both comfortingly similar and utterly different to my ears. The familiar “Word” has here been rendered into the unfamiliar word ”Tao” — and with it the passage unfolds in a slightly different manner.

Of course when we use ”Word” in English translations of the Bible, we don’t actually mean the words we see on a page or speak in everyday speech; rather it is an attempt to reflect the original Greek word “logos” — a term pointing to the reason or logic behind all that is.

Likewise, when the Bible was translated into Chinese the character that was chosen was not the one for the spoken or written word but Tao — a rich word meaning path or way, pointing to regularity, order, and harmony. In all three languages, in this text, the word in question ultimately refers to Christ.

I learned all of this on a retreat I took with the Young Adults in Global Mission (aka YAGMs) I serve to Hong Kong. Staying at Pilgrim’s Hall at Tao Fong Shan Christian Center, we spent our days learning about Chinese spirituality and other religions in the region, trying to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western thinking, and contemplating the claim and the call God has already made and extended to each of us.

If I understand it correctly, and believe me when I say I’m a novice, part of the Tao is recognizing that everything has its own way or form of being. Year in and year out flowers and trees will bud and bloom in one way, cancers and diseases progress in another. There is an inherent beauty of regularity and balanced order to it all.

In my role as country coordinator for the ELCA’s YAGM program in Malaysia, I’m learning that there is truth to this concept embodied in each of the eight absolutely unique young adults who have been called to serve here. They each have their own sense of humor and areas of strength, as well as remnants of brokenness and moments of vulnerability.

While the theological language I’m most familiar with speaks in terms of each young adult being lovingly created in the Image of God, equipped with a certain set of gifts, talents, skills, and abilities and called to be bearers of Christ, the Word, in all that they do, the word Tao reminds me that each has a certain mode of being as well.

Through their year of service, of walking as resident aliens in a strange land, it is my hope and prayer that they may begin to discern the path — Christ, the Way — that is both before and within each of them.

For the opportunity to accompany them in that journey, and your prayerful support, I give thanks.

— Peter

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Elizabeth (Liz) Frey is part of the ELCA Young Adults in Global Mission (YAGM) program, spending a year in Malaysia teaching English as a second language. The program is reliant on coordinators who facilitate the young adults’ ministry and provide mentoring and spiritual guidance. To support a YAGM coordinator,  go to www.elca.org/missionarysponsorship.

Young Adults in Global Mission participants are commissioned in September 2011.

I recently listened to a sermon regarding these verses from 1 Corinthians 9: “I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings” (verse 22-23). The pastor explained the text as Paul crossing social boundaries that his society had built up. He was taking risks in order to tell anyone and everyone about Jesus. Paul was jumping the lines that separated people in his day.

This mental image got me thinking: As a YAGM, how am I crossing lines in pursuit of sharing God’s message?

First, just being a YAGM forces one to cross a line.  That line could be cultural as in stepping from the consumer culture of the U.S. to living a simple life in a new country. As a YAGM, I left the American culture I was immersed in for 23 years to become part of a culture I knew very little about.

But, there are many more lines that I have had to cross since coming to Malaysia almost six months ago. I have become a teacher. I don’t have a degree in education, but here I am teaching English several days a week to future pastors. I have become a meat-eater. This is mundane, but in a culture that does not facilitate to vegetarians, I crossed a line in order to immerse myself here.

Most importantly, my faith has crossed a line in the months that I have lived in Malaysia. Honestly, I was a “Sunday Christian” prior to coming to this country. I only thought about God on Sunday, while I was at church. I never read my Bible and rarely prayed. I had faith, but it wasn’t part of my daily life. Living and working at a seminary has changed me in dramatic ways.

Being in Malaysia has changed me in amazing ways. I live my life with God in mind. I have crossed a line and become something all for the sake of trying to live out the gospel.

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The revs. Mathius and Bing, who serve among the Murut people in Sabah, Malaysia

Some pastors in North America serve multipoint parishes, spending sometimes hours on the road between congregations, even on Sunday mornings to get to the next place in time for worship. This is not always easy, especially if you factor in all the time spent behind the wheel and in all kinds of weather.

In some parts of the world, some parishes encompass dozens of congregations: pastors may have to travel by motorbike or on foot, and each congregation in the circuit may only get a visit every few months because of great distances.

In parts of Sabah, East Malaysia, pastors of the Basel Christian Church of Malaysia serving among the Murut indigenous population often have to travel distances in their parishes. For some, this involves using a boat on the rivers.

The Rev. Mathius serves a parish centered around Pagalunggan, not far from the border with Indonesia. One of his congregations is an hour away — by boat. Sunday after Sunday, and even on weekdays, he plies the river in his boat, surrounded by virgin rain forest.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. The river has rapids, rocks, and other obstacles. Usually one needs a “pilot” at the front of the longboat to check on water depths, considering the changing water volume during the course of the year. One has to not only protect the boat, but also protect the precious outboard motor.

The Rev. Mathius has to know the river well to travel safely. There may not be time to enjoy the scenery. But this is where his ministry lies, his commitment and passion.

Y. Franklin Ishida
Director for Asia and the Pacific, ELCA Global Mission

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