What are you doing here?

What are you doing here?

We returned back to the states the end of March, after completing nearly 8 months of language training.  We needed to get back to do some additional fundraising for upcoming ministry, and have had a decent start over an almost 2 month period.  The summer months will hopefully prove to be fruitful, and our hope is to return to Honduras mid-August and secure a home to begin prep work for receiving our first ministry participants in January of 2017.

The question I’ve gotten the most is the title of this entry – “What are you doing here?”  Some have been surprised to see us home from Honduras, while others did not even realize we were not living in the Phoenix area anymore, and the news that we had moved to Honduras was further shocking to them.  Of course with each occurrence of the question, we have the opportunity to share the story of our move, our plans, and our need.  I’ll be honest though, the question always sets me thinking on a deeper path.

We had not planned on returning to the states this soon.  In some ways, when I’m asked that question above I think in my head, “Yeah…what are we doing here?”  In all honesty, fundraising for ministry does not feel much like ministry to me.  It feels like asking for money.  I’ve read multiple books and articles on the subject, and talked with lots of people who have been doing it longer than I have.  I’ve gained good insights, and agreed with them on some points and wanted to run away screaming on others.  While we know this short season is exactly what we needed to do to be good stewards of what is to come our way, for me it has been one of the most difficult seasons of my life as well.  For the past 16 years of my life, I have been in full-time ministry in one position or another.  Daily schedules, routine meetings, planned times of leading studies and preparing sermons and shepherding people through visits and counseling sessions.  When we moved to Honduras in the summer of 2015 I knew that was going to change a bit, but that was largely because we were going to be immersed in language training.  4 hours a day of learning Spanish, plus the homework, practice, etc. was not going to leave much time for anything else particularly with 2 little ones in the home.  But now it’s different.  Oh, it’s not like I’m sitting around on a daily basis playing Candy Crush for 10 hours straight.  There are phone calls being made, letters being sent, events being prepared for as well as thinking and planning through ministry to come.  When I ask myself that question, “Yeah…what are we doing here?” I know practically what we are doing, yet there is still a strange feeling of disconnect between being here and the focus of our ministry being somewhere in the vicinity of 1600 miles away.

I suppose even though it is a difficult time of living for us, it is a good lesson to learn as well.  When someone asks “What are you doing here?” to any of us, it is beneficial to take that question and chew on it for a while.  When the question is proposed to us, it is usually more along the lines of a geographical nature.  Why are you here in this grocery store in Lawrenceburg?  Aren’t you supposed to be in another country?  The way we should approach it though is not geographical, but spiritual.  What are we doing here?  Are we loving those around us?  Are we looking for opportunities to share, to support?  Are we anticipating tiny moments of giving up our lives for others, and for using our freedom given to us by Christ to serve others in love (Galatians 5:13)?  Or have we been caught in a rut?  Are we dreading the next sunrise because we anticipate the next day being the same mediocre day we just finished before we crawled into our beds?  The question “What are you doing here?” should provoke us to examine more than the geographical implication.  We should allow the question to bring us to an examination of our activities, and to be able to acknowledge what we are doing here matters.  Each and every day, no matter where we are geographically.

God Bless, Steve Rose

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