In the first part of this two part post, I shared a bit of my testimony regarding God’s provision for our family over the last year. What I’m more than a little embarrassed to admit is that I had all of those doubts EVEN after I’d seen God provide and care for us miraculously so many times before, carrying us through difficult and scary medical crises, impossibly hard financial predicaments and even tense and uncertain political atmospheres.

Yes, our family is large.  And yes, more often than not, we have just enough – no extra, no margin… and that is uncomfortable. Yet we see God come through time after time –

• providing, sometimes sufficiently and other times abundantly, or removing need,
• giving discernment,
• showing us needed modifications to our plans and lifestyles, or
• simply adjusting our expectations.

Our judgment and wisdom has often been questioned:  Are we right to ask churches to provide for our large family on the mission field? What about college and our children’s future? Flying our family one way to or from the field is a huge cost – is that the wisest use of missions’ monies… and what would happen if we needed (for whatever reason) an emergency evacuation?

More than once, we’ve questioned our own judgment and wisdom: Is it wise to bring small children to a place where sometimes, deadly disease is rampant and unpreventable? Should we leave our parents when they are aging and facing physical challenges? How do we provide stability and a good send-off for our children as they move out of the shelter of our home and on to independent living and post-secondary education?

Obviously, we feel that we are exactly where God wants us. He has given each one of our children.  It is His job to provide, and He promises to supply all of our needs according to His riches in glory. Our job, therefore, is:

• trusting,
• learning contentment in whatsoever state He sees fit to place us,
• accounting faithfully to Him, our churches and our mission for our expenditures, and
• seeking to be Spirit-led, wise stewards, using the time, talents and resources He has given for His honor and His glory first and foremost.

When I’m tempted to stew, to wonder, to fear… to start re-spinning my fragile and insufficient web… I hope I’m learning to pray and quickly think of God’s provision through the sweet lady from our church who delivered baked goods and non-perishables to our home every Wednesday last year. I want to remember all the prayers and words of encouragement from almost every continent when our daughter lay sick on a clinic bed with resistant malaria and dysentery. I’m humbled by my friend and neighbor, who regularly shares with my children, out of her physical and spiritual poverty, tangible gifts of beignets and fari masa she has made to sell alongside the road.

Having a large family on the mission field is exciting because it gives us, as parents, so much opportunity to learn and live these truths… and to disciple our children in them. It is so much better to find our refuge and provision in the Lord rather than trusting in any man, whether that be “self” or a group of churches and supporters back in our home country… all the while realizing that God’s abundance often flows through the generosity of others. God, in His grace, has given us this opportunity to live in faith and trust day by day, every day. If we were any fewer, in any other place or in any other career, we might not have to, and I’m doubtful that on my own I would so choose.

I’m so thankful we are who we are, right where we are, doing what we do.

In what uncomfortable situations has the Lord placed you, and why are you thankful for it? How do you “lean not on your own understanding, but in all your ways acknowledge Him?”

(Post by: Richelle)

Well, the sad day has come where I have run out of Tuesday Topics in my inbox. Thus today’s Tuesday Topic: What questions would you like to see discussed in the coming weeks? Is there any way that you’d benefit from hearing the wisdom and advice that other missionary moms have to share? Feel free to leave you question in the comments, or if you prefer to preserve the element of surprise, feel free to email it to: formissionarymoms@gmail.com . As always, please include your blog address if you’d like to be linked to!

Oh, and please resist the temptation to respond to people’s questions until they are posted as a topic! Thank you!

I find the Old Testament fascinating… the stories, the cultures, the people, the way God worked… Sometimes, as I reread through stories that I’ve heard all of my life, it is amazing the things that the Holy Spirit causes to leap right off the pages and into my heart where I mull them over, often for several weeks… sometimes for a really, really long time. The story of Dinah has been one of those stories that I’ve returned to time and time again over the past 18 months.

I knew the story of Dinah; we’d studied it in church/Sunday School more than once and she was most definitely one of the Bible’s “bad” girls. Matthew Henry writes: “Dinah was, for aught that appears, Jacob’s only daughter, and we may suppose her therefore the mother’s fondling and the darling of the family, and yet she proves neither a joy nor a credit to them; for those children seldom prove either the best or the happiest that are most indulged. She is reckoned now but fifteen or sixteen years of age when she here occasioned so much mischief. Observe, her vain curiosity, which exposed her. She went out, perhaps unknown to her father, but by the connivance of her mother, to see the daughters of the land (v. 1)…. She went to see, yet that was not all, she went to be seen too; she went to see the daughters of the land, but, it may be, with some thoughts of the sons of the land too. I doubt she went to get an acquaintance with those Canaanites, and to learn their way. Note, The pride and vanity of young people betray them into many snares.” I would have to say that Mr. Henry’s opinions are probably the ones I’ve heard most frequently expressed. Needless to say, Dinah was never one of my heroines… and I never gave her story any more thought until…

…I started teaching a Bible study to 15 and 16 year old girls, until remembering that the fifteenth birthday of my oldest is just around the corner… and my oldest girl follows just on his heels. But back to the Bible study – the girls wanted to study different women in the Bible and they chose Dinah for several reasons – close to their age, her story is tragic and there is just something magnetic about those less than nice girls.

The first thing that struck me as I began looking at her story again, was that while the name Dinah means “justice,” it is questionable whether she received any at the hands of her world or her family… and the in mind of today’s followers of Jesus.

The bulk of her story is contained in Genesis 34:

“And Dinah the daughter of Leah, which she bare unto Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land. And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the country, saw her, he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her. And his soul clave unto Dinah the daughter of Jacob, and he loved the damsel, and spake kindly unto the damsel. And Shechem spake unto his father Hamor, saying, Get me this damsel to wife. And Jacob heard that he had defiled Dinah his daughter: now his sons were with his cattle in the field: and Jacob held his peace until they were come. And Hamor the father of Shechem went out unto Jacob to commune with him. And the sons of Jacob came out of the field when they heard it: and the men were grieved, and they were very wroth, because he had wrought folly in Israel in lying with Jacob’s daughter: which thing ought not to be done.”

Reading and rereading this passage, it is not clear from the biblical text that Dinah actually did anything wrong. Her desire to see the daughters of the land is never condemned. We just don’t know for sure in reading the biblical account. While she may have been maliciously and deceptively sinful – she may have snuck out of her father’s house, she may have lied, she may have dressed seductively and actually gone looking for boys while telling her mom she wanted to meet some girls her own age… the list of evil possibilities is probably endless. But she also might have been a young girl, the only daughter in her father’s house, who’d just moved to a new place, who was lonely and desiring the company of other gals her age and so she desired to show herself friendly so that she could make some new friends, and then she became a victim of her new neighbors, her family and her world and culture.

I guess I tend to lead towards the latter interpretation over the first, maybe because I’ve watched our children, my own young girls as we’ve moved them halfway around the world, entering a new and unfamiliar culture, a school where everyone speaks different languages and the school language they don’t yet understand… and the first thing they want to do is find and make some friends. They are great sister-friends within themselves, but God designed us, especially females, to enjoy relationships and both my big and little girls love to get to know other girls wherever we go – be it a new church in another state or a new school in a foreign language in a different country.

The key thought the Holy Spirit impressed on my heart is the need for discernment – as parents and as individuals – when we enter those new situations (and life is filled with almost daily new situations). As finite human beings, we can’t begin to see the train of consequences a simple action like “going out to visit the daughters of the land” might start rolling. I think this fact is emphasized in this particular passage by the fact that “and” begins almost every sentence… each action was a reaction provoked by the previous event. There was very little forethought or intentional planning, and when there was, it was for evil designs.

Thus, perhaps one of the most important things I can model for and teach my children is the need to think through possibilities and potentialities before choosing on a particular path, whenever that is doable. We need to know the reasons why we do what we do, and to teach our children to examine their motivations – to know that we are not just reacting to or following the lead of the world and culture around us.

One other thing I’ve taken from this Bible story, even today… as we are once again in the midst of our transition to this land where God has called our family to sojourn, is my need to extend grace to my big and little girls… well, more accurately, to all in our household… for those inevitable times when wise discernment just doesn’t happen regarding what is done, said or how we respond to ourselves and to others. We will… in fact we have already… made some massive mistakes in this transition and are dealing with consequences we couldn’t have foreseen. But God’s grace overflows and when we walk in His grace, offering it to ourselves and to others, He redeems situations where we’ve messed up, growing us, changing us and bringing glory to His name.

Is there some Bible story or passage that the Holy Spirit is showing you through new eyes? One that has particularly poignant application to a present situation?

(Post by: Richelle)