Well, I actually wrote this once, hit post and got an error message and lost it, so hopefully I like round 2 as much as the original, probably not but we’ll give it a go…
So, ministry this month was much more difficult for me than I ever imagined. I have been doing manual labor in a hospital and for a long time it didn’t make sense to me and how I view ministry and God’s kingdom. See, building a church makes sense to me as Kingdom work, repairing a poor person’s home in Pittsburgh, digging an irrigation trench, those things make sense as kingdom work, but not my ministry this month, for the longest time, didn’t make sense. For the first week of ministry i was moving old hospital equipment, much of it is no longer used, from various storage closets to a bigger, new storage room. It was constant loading and unloading ofcarts, monotonous, boring, and seemingly no purpose to it. I was also struggling badly with the language barrier. I wanted to get to know the Guatemalans I was working with but my Spanish is really weak and minimal and they speak even less English. This really got me down as I desired to hear their stories, ask about their families, and get to know them while we loaded and pushed carts, but I had nothing. It was so frustrating. However, God’s been transforming me and my thinking as i switched ministries within the hospital. The second week I did a little painting, which provided a little purpose for my previous ministry because we ended up repainting a room I had cleared out the week before while moving stuff to the new storage room, but it wasn’t enough. I next went to the shop where some people on my team were scraping rust off hospital equipment, making tires move again, cleaning 1000s of hairs and threads out of the wheels on equipment, cleaning adhesive and scrapes off them, and repainting them. It was during this ministry that God started speaking to me. I heard Him saying, i am making things new, i am making things new, and finally my ministry had purpose. All the scraping of rust, removing hairs, oiling wheels, it all had a purpose, i was making things new too. Just as God is making all thingsnew, people and the earth, I am making things new for the hospital this month. I take hospital equipment thatisnasty, doesn’t work well, doesn’t move much, is rusty, and I fix it, oil it, pull out hairs, scrape rust, repaint it and make it new. I don’t buy new hospital equipment, I take what is already there, in its brokenness and nastiness, and make it new. God does the same with us and all of creation. God takes us in our brokenness and nastiness and doesn’t destroy and recreate, but instead, He renews and redeems that which is already created but is now broken and failing. I have had the immense joy and privilege of doing the same thing for the hospital this month. That is my ministry, i am in the renewal and redeeming business. That is how the Kingdom comes now and how it will ultimately come when Jesus returns, with the new heaven and new earth, they aren’t eceayed, they are renewed and redeemed. I pray that in the next month’s i will not try to destroy that which God has created but i pray that i care enough for everything and everyone around me that i wish to see them renewed and redeemed rather than destroyed and recreated. God is taking our imperfections, whether small or large, and He takes us into His “shop” and cleans us up and renews us and redeems us. I’m not just thankful that God transformed my thinking this month, but He is transforming me and how I am viewing ministry, not just today or this month, but hopefully for the rest of my life. One way God is renewing me is in my passion for Him and His Word. I have felt challenged by God to read the Bible in 60 days, at the very most, by Thanksgiving, which would be around 66 days. I know this is a huge undertaking, but I’m 1/3 of the way through Numbers in just under a week and have loved almost every second. God’s been revealing Himself to me in really neat ways and has been making me new in my passion for Him and His Word.
So, a quick story to close. This week while working in the shop, sanding off rust and making equipment new we decided to bring in a speaker and listen to music and podcast sermons by pastor Matt Chandler. The first day we started this i prayed that God might somehow use this for His glory, that somehow the language barrier would be broken at least a little and hearts and lives of those working around us in the shop might be stirred by the sermons we were listening to. So a couple days later a man comes up to my teammate Josef during a sermon and asks if we are listening to the radio. Josef politely responds that we are listening to an iPhone and asks the man if he understands anything being said. The man says he understands most of it. How incredible. How amazing. Seeds are being planted in this man’s life. I don’t know if he’s a Christian or not or if the sermons are transforming his life, but that’s up to God now. I can onlypray, and I ask you to pray with me, that his life might be transformed by the seeds we are planting and that he might also transform the lives of those around him because of us and what we are doing.
