In February of 2000, while a member of First Baptist Church, Valley Center, KS, I learned of David who lived in El Dorado. David had been a member of the first ABC mission team to travel to Nicaragua following Hurricane Mitch. Hurricane Mitch had parked itself off the coast of Nicaragua and didn’t move for five days. The devastation it caused in Nicaragua, Honduras and as far west as El Salvador was immense. American Baptist Men – USA, had partnered with ABC-International Missions, to send teams of volunteers to Nicaragua to assist with the reconstruction of communities served by our ABC mission partners in Nicaragua. This all led to my asking David to come to FBC, Valley Center and be the guest speaker for our men’s breakfast.
Our Saturday morning men’s breakfast was 16 months after that disastrous hurricane and the rebuilding of communities served by our ABC mission partners was far from complete. American Baptist had sent a volunteer mission team to Nicaragua to assist with the reconstruction every month since Hurricane Mitch.
As David was preparing to end his narrative, he told us that the mission team that was to go to Nicaragua in April 2000 had backed out. He challenged our church to form a team to fill the vacancy and he made this challenge while looking directly into my eyes.
It took me only seconds to dismiss David’s challenge. Twice in the previous year I had said that I would never be a member of an international mission team. My father-in-law had passed away the previous week and we were still dealing with his passing. Our high school aged son, who had an early interest in foreign missions, was to travel to the former Soviet state of Latvia with an ABC-International Ministries X-Tream Team during the same period of time of the challenge to go to Nicaragua. I didn’t even have a passport and the departure date was only nine weeks away. I had my reasons for not wanting to go but the biggest was that I simply didn’t want to go.
That Saturday evening I was home alone. Helen was with her mother, helping out after the loss of her father. Our daughter was away at college and our son was spending the night with a friend. I went to bed and fell asleep almost immediately.
Somewhere around 2:00 AM I found myself wide awake and had a feeling that I should be in prayer rather than sleeping. So I laid there in quiet prayer and Nicaragua came to mind. The debate began with something like, “Lord, I can’t go to Nicaragua. You know my reasons and they are all valid reasons.” The word Nicaragua kept returning, just the one word, and I continued to argue my position for over an hour.
Feeling a little frustrated, I followed Gideon’s example and laid out a fleece. (Judges 6:33-40) “Lord! If you want me to go to Nicaragua then somebody will have to come up to me and say, “if you want to go to Nicaragua we will help you get there.’” Feeling safe, I considered the issue resolved.
I arrived at our church a couple of minutes late that morning and went directly to the sanctuary. It was our practice for the deacons and pastor to gather on Sunday to join hands and to pray for our church before Sunday School began. They had already started but as I approached two of them separated their hands to allow me to enter their circle. Having stepped in, the person on my right finished his prayer and squeezed my hand to let me know it was my turn. When I completed my prayer the men began breaking the circle. But Bob, who was standing to my left, continued to hold my hand. I turned towards Bob and he spoke. “Les, if you want to go to Nicaragua we will help you get there.”
It was obvious then that the fleece on my threshing floor was damp. I hung my head for a moment and then raised it and looked at each of the four men who were with me before I replied. “Gentlemen, I don’t have time to explain as I have a Sunday School class I am to be teaching now, but it looks like I am going to Nicaragua.”
It was a moment of surrender. I had heard God and had only a moment before resolved to respond to his wish and was silently giving him praise for making his wish so absolutely clear.
Now my question was, how am I going to tell my wife I was going to Nicaragua?
In 2000, having been challenged to assemble a mission team to travel to Nicaragua in a short nine weeks, I immediately declined the challenge. I had the usual excuses, too short a period of time and not within my comfort zone to begin with. In the interest of brevity, I will only say that God had other plans and within 24 hours of being challenged I found myself assembling a mission team.
On our departure date the team consisted of nine members, only two of which already possessed passports. The remaining seven of us had to have our photos taken and apply for our passports within the short nine week window before our departure on Friday, April 28th. On a Friday, a week preceding our departure, five of our team had received their passports in the mail while two team members were still anxiously waiting.
The following Monday I learned that one of them had received her passport that morning. I also heard that the other person, Mike, had not yet received his passport.
I phoned Mike’s home that afternoon and, as I waited for Mike to come to the house phone, I was thinking about what I should say to reassure him. Regretfully I couldn’t think of any reassuring words because I too was concerned. So I took the few seconds I had, as I waited for Mike, and silently prayed something like, “Lord, Mike needs words of reassurance and I don’t have the words. Please speak through me the words that Mike badly needs to hear”.
Mike picked the phone up, and after our greetings were spoken, I told him that I had heard that his passport hadn’t arrived yet. Mike said that it was true and that he was concerned about letting the church people down after they had contributed funds to get him onto the trip. It was then that I opened my mouth and these words literally fell out of it. “Mike! Don’t worry about it. Your passport will be here Wednesday.”
I choked!
In my mind I screamed, “WHAT DID I JUST SAY?” The realization of what I had spoken frightened me. For a moment I couldn’t catch my breath, a pause in our conversation occurred as neither of us seemed able to speak. Finally, a small voice in the back of my head whispered, “Its okay, go with it.”
Having no other idea of what to say I continued with, “Mike, did you hear what I said?” Mike said that he had and we spoke a while longer as I asked him to have faith that his passport would arrive before we left.
On Wednesday morning, April 26, 2000, shortly after 10:30 AM I received an email from Mike’s mother saying that the passport had arrived in the morning’s mail. We boarded our flight to Nicaragua two days later.
I did tell Mike the rest of the story behind what I had spoken a few days into our trip.
Some takeaways from this experience:
God absolutely hears our prayers.
God does answer our prayers.
Your unwillingness to do something may not be what God wants and he has a way of telling you so if you are willing to listen.
It was God’s idea that this mission team be assembled and he was, and is, faithful in moving things in the directions of his visions.
Don’t ask God to speak through you unless you mean it, he may use words that you are unprepared for.
If caught in a situation in which you don’t know how to respond, and you hear a whisper speaking to you, pay attention and “go with it”.
I first met Ira Strauss in July of 1977 at the Green Lake Conference Center, located near Green Lake, WI. Ira would often joke that he was a ‘perfect Christian’ because he was a Christian Jew. Ira lived in the Bronx area of New York City. He had been going to Green Lake and attending the National ABMen’s Conference, while his wife was participated in the National Women’s Conference, also at Green Lake Conference Center, for several years by the time I met him.
When Ira was in high school he had been a member of a New York State, high school champion basketball team. Even in his eighties, Ira never missed a shot, scoring with every attempt. During the periods that the ABMen’s conference offered free time you would find him in the gymnasium; waiting for his next opportunity. Ira just loved to challenge boys who entered the gymnasium to a game of Horse. (Horse is a two player game on a basketball court that involves matching the last shooter’s basket.)
As mentioned, Ira never missed, and you can imagine the awe that a boy or young teenager would have at being defeated by someone older than their own grandparents. For Ira, the game of Horse was simply leading up to an opportunity. Once he had the young man’s attention, Ira would then offer to give pointers on how to properly shoot a basket and very few would turn that opportunity down. So, mixed in with lessons on stance, and proper shooting, Ira would include his witness for Christ. And the young men who Ira met would listen attentively as Ira taught basketball and Christ.
Here is a follow up story involving another person who had known Ira.
Rev. Tim Schwartz, while he was the pastor of a church in Pennsylvania, took Ira’s method of witnessing into the digital age. (This is not the same Rev. Tim Schwartz who lives in Kansas.) Working with some of the people in his church, a few computers were purchased and video games were loaded onto them. Then they played one another until they were very good at playing the games. Once well practiced, they began inviting neighborhood kids into the church to play video games and the church members often won. Following Ira’s methodology, the church members would then give the neighborhood kids pointers on how to win at the game and share Jesus along with the game lesson.
Ask someone which of Jesus’ disciples is their favorite and most will say Peter or John. Peter is often admired because of his boldness and John because of his love for Jesus. Rarely does anyone say that Thomas is their favorite because he was a doubter. Personally, I think Thomas is treated unfairly, haven’t we all had doubts at one time or another?
My favorite disciple is Andrew. Andrew is in the background for much of the New Testament Gospels and we know little about him. But one thing I am positive of and that is that I wish I were more like Andrew.
In John’s Gospel, Andrew first appears in John 1:36-42. https://biblehub.com/niv/john/1.htm This is the story of where two of John the Baptist’s followers decide to follow Jesus. In these verses, Andrew finds his brother, Simon, and tells him that they have found the Messiah. Taking Simon to Jesus, Jesus says, “You will be called Cephas (Peter).”
Andrew again appears in John’s Gospel at the feeding of the five thousand. This story is found in John 6:1-15. https://biblehub.com/niv/john/6.htm As you may recall, having heard this story multiple times, Jesus had been speaking to, and healing, a large crowd of people for much of the day. The scriptures record a brief conversation, between Jesus and Philip, about how they will feed the multitude of people gathered. Andrew brings a boy to Jesus who has “five small barley loaves and two small fish”. Peter then asks how many can be fed from this small amount of food. From the boy’s meal, Jesus fed the multitude of people by dividing the bread and fish with what found to be an over abundance of what was needed once the uneaten portions of bread and fish were collected.
Andrew’s name again appears in John’s Gospel in verses 12:20-21. https://biblehub.com/niv/john/12.htm In this story Jesus had recently entered Jerusalem, riding on a young donkey, and the roads had been lined with people waving palm branches and shouting praise. In the quieter moments following, some Greeks, who had come to Jerusalem to worship at the upcoming Passover festival, approached Philip and asked to speak to Jesus. Philip then told Andrew that the Greeks wished to speak to Jesus and both, Philip and Andrew, introduced the Greeks to Jesus.
Andrew was quietly in the background and we really know very little about him. Still, when John wrote his Gospel, he considered it important to tell us what Andrew was doing in that background. Three times Andrew appears in John’s Gospel and in each appearance Andrew is taking someone(s) to meet Jesus. I admire Andrew simply because he was focused on introducing people to Jesus.
Railcars were converted into small chapels, complete with short pews and often a piano or a foot pump organ. One end of the chapel car would have cramped living quarters for the pastor, and his spouse if he were married. In the United States, Chapel Cars were built and dedicated into service by the Episcopal Church, the American Baptist Churches and also the Roman Catholic Church. The American Baptist dedicated the largest number of Chapel Cars.
The idea for the chapel car was to have the railcar parked in a rail siding of a community and begin a new church plant. As the church body would grow the congregation would be encouraged to move to a building in the community. The Chapel Car would then be free to relocate and begin in a new community and begin a new congregation. (American Baptists missionaries have a long history of working themselves out of a job and giving the ministry to those who live locally.)
The first American Baptist Chapel Car, called Evangel, was dedicated in May of 1891. Between 1891 and 1915, the American Baptist built, and dedicated, seven Chapel Cars. The final Chapel Car to be dedicated, named Grace, is on permanent display at the American Baptist Assembly at Green Lake, Wisconsin. The first photo below is one of my favorite Chapel Car photos, it is of the Chapel Car Good Will. Chapel Car Good Will is in the process of being restored by The National Museum of American Religion. This link will direct you to a page on the American Baptist Historical Society website that mentions the restoration project. https://abhsarchives.org/chapel-car-good-will-restored/ The second photo below shows a portion of the inside of Chapel Car Grace. On the left of the photo, behind the lectern, is the door leading to the very small living quarters.
The printing of the famed Gutenberg Bible was completed by printer and inventor Johannes Gutenberg. It was the first complete book to be printed using movable type.
