Mongolia was a special month for me. Ever since our route changed during training camp last October, and Mongolia was added, I had been most excited about visiting this place more than any other country on the list. I'm not really sure why. I think it had something to do with the fact that every time I thought about Mongolia, I pictured huge expanses of mountains, incredible sky, beautiful people, tough living conditions (which I now love, by the way) and wild experiences. Looking back on the month, God certainly met and exceeded those expectations!
In Mongolia, my team lived alongside a group of 4 families that made up about half of a nomadic Christian church in the country side of Mongolia, located roughly 80km northeast of the capital city, Ulaanbaatar. The church is nomadic in the sense that the families move between basically 2 locations throughout the year. In the summer, they live in the plains where grass is abundant for livestock, and in the winter, they move closer to the forest where firewood is more plentiful. At no point during our stay did we all pack up and move somewhere else, but it's still really cool to look back and know we were a part of a nomadic church for a month.
Our month of ministry here was another one of those months were you look back and wonder what you really accomplished. Our 'ministry' was not what we've been used to doing. There were 2-3 days when we actually went out around the valley and visited families in their homes, talked with them, shared testimonies and prayed for them, but besides these few days, most of our ministry was comprised of manual labor and just living alongside these people. The assortment of random experiences I can now cross off my Bucket List include:
• Wrestling with Mongolian men
• Attending Naadam (yearly nation-wide festival of horseback riding, archery and wrestling)
• churning butter
• churning fermented horse milk
• cleaning the poop out of a sheep pen
• cutting down trees with a 2-person saw
• Burning the hair off a freshly killed goat for Mongolian BBQ
• Shear wool off sheep
• Herding sheep with a motorcycle
• Sleeping in a gir (Semi-permanent Mongolian tent/home)
• Eat all parts of a sheep, including eyes, ears, kidney, liver, stomach, intestine, blood, brain, cheek, tongue, and heart
As I've mentioned in previous blogs, it's sometimes easy to look back on a month, especially those where most of your ministry is comprised of manual labor, and wonder what good we did. The devil really loves to trivialize kingdom work that we do and make us wonder if we've even done anything to advance the kingdom. It's an easy snare to get caught in if you aren't careful. What makes it all worth while is when your contact's wife, towards the end of the month, shares that she lost her sister not 2 weeks before we arrived in the country side. That despite her frustration, sadness and struggle, and despite a huge language barrier, we 8 Americans managed to make her laugh, show her love and remind her that Christ loves her above all.
Towards the end of our stay, one of the men told us that by simply being in the valley was enough for God to move through us. In a month of living there, word had spread of 8 goofy Americans living in their fancy tents alongside the Mongolians. Who does that? People would drive by and see us white folk, honk their horns, smile and wave. Long after we're gone, the nomadic church will have people ask them, 'Hey, what was with all those Americans living with you? Why were they here? What were they doing?' and they have the opportunity to spread the name of Jesus just because we were there.
It's so easy to fall into a line of thinking that we have to do this and that for God to move, that we need to will God to move or that it is by our efforts that He is able to move. The fact is that God can move without us. He doesn't need us to do anything. The beautiful and totally mysterious part of it all is that God chooses to involve us, often in the things that seem random, off hand, mundane, and perhaps trivial. Not to give us 'busy work', and by no means is anything ever trivial to God. No, he chooses to weave us all into this tapestry called life, all of us passing each other and being pulled tightly to make a bigger, more beautiful piece…
It's remarkable, really.
