Summer Missions

This summer I have the unique and exciting opportunity to serve as a “Short Term Missionary” (STM) with the Joni & FriendsInternational Disability Center. Joni and Friends is an organization that seeks to answer the call in Luke 14: “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind and you will be blessed…make them come in so my house will be full.” They do this by evangelizing people affected by disabilities and their families; training, discipling, and mentoring people affected by disabilities; multiplying disability-effective churches; and promoting a biblical worldview on disability through education and policy.

From August 12 to 17, I will be serving at the Joni & Friends’ Family Retreat in Greenfield, NH. Family Retreats are nationally and internationally held retreats for families that live with disability. At these retreats, families receive encouragement and care in the comfort of a safe and accessible family camp environment. As an STM I will be paired one-on-one with a disabled child to assist him or her throughout the week, allowing the parents to attend seminars, hear biblical teaching, and enjoy time as a couple. With the child I will simply be a friend, giving the gift of my time and love while participating in the various camp activities with him or her.

I am craving your prayers as I prepare to serve as an STM and as I’m actually at the camp in the heart of my service. I would ask for you to pray that God would enable me with His strength and love to minister the Gospel of Christ effectively to the family and child I will be serving. Once I get to the retreat center, I will become part of a community of STMs and leaders, but I am going alone. Please pray that God would use me not only as an encouragement to the family I have the opportunity to serve, but also that He would use me in the community of strangers that I will be serving with – who will hopefully not be strangers by the end of the week. Most of all, I simply desire prayer for a teachable heart as I learn, first, the book facts about working with people with disabilities and then immediately put it into practice. I anticipate this as a challenging week, but a perfect opportunity to put Paul’s words in Philippians 2 into practice:

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.

Thank you!