01July The Unusually Usual in Missions

BAJMISSIONBLOG 01JULY The Unusually Usual… Hey, y’all. Chris in Chula Vista. We just returned from a week in San Vicente. It was filled with the unusually usual… which is the life and work of any modern missionary. Lori had a fantastic time connecting with her cottage-industry women, helping them with the hundred details (I can’t get my machine pedal to work right… the needle on the machine doesn’t want to sew this particular fabric well… ). She was up late in her ‘ministry room’, working thru details for the next day. Lori also has begun the process to bring two new women into the sewing cottage-industry. This always has a number of barriers and hurdles that must be overcome to enter the high-quality sewn product market… one woman lives in a garage-door shack without any electricity, for instance. Lori did tell me, “I really feel called to work this out for these women. When I asked the one woman ‘what will she do with the extra income from a sewing business?’, her answer was ‘buy shoes for my two children’. Their shoes were rags hanging on rubber soles with holes.” The Unusually Usual means having to pray thru, follow the Lord and work out the hard details. I had the Unusually Usual in the form of ‘sometimes, ya just gotta say YES when strongly asked’. I was meeting with the pastors of the Nazarene church, and we were conversing about the pastors current changes in his diabetes care (he's been moved to insulin, so last few trips I've spent hours doing 1-on-1 diabetes education with him. PTL, he's getting pretty good at it...). The pastora then looks at me, “how soon can you start a diabetes support group in the church here? We have a number of members fighting diabetes… it feels like we’re a church of diabetics! I have somebody over here daily with some problem related to diabetes. When can you start?” Well, I had been planning a program launch in January, I'm still lacking adequate funding, but… ‘how about early September?’was my answer. “That will be good. Be ready for a lot of people…” SO, the Unusually Usual means I’ll be wading into community diabetes education 4 months earlier than I was moving with. Please pray. It seems the economic down-turn in the Village has really ramped up the robberies. Almost everyone has a story of a recent ‘robo’… so far, our little house hasn’t been hit… pray! Your bro, Chris