2020 will not be wasted

What a year 2020 has been. It's been described by some as a 'terrible' year or even the 'worst year' globally. Although historians would no doubt point out that there are some very strong other contenders for the 'worst year', it's certainly true to say that 2020 has been a year like no other in our lifetimes. Even now the effects of coronavirus continue to reverberate around our lives and compound the 'normal' struggles of life. As we get to the end of this year, it's tempting to draw a line under it and try to move on. 

I'm not tempted to pretend that 2020 never happened but  I do feel the draw of deciding to write-off 2020, like a bad investment or broken asset. I could just admit that 2020 was pretty terrible, try not to dwell on it too much and get on with 2021. There is still six weeks to go of 2020 but it's tempting just to try and get on with 2021 right now. I can't change the calendar and make 2021 come any faster, but I can at least get on with planning 2021.

Yet one idea keeps circling around my head.

2020 will not be wasted.

My friend and mentor when I was at university was the first person who repeated this idea to me, over and over again, until the words had sunk into my brain, although it certainly wasn't original to her and she didn't claim that it was. God does not waste experiences, she said, as I processed some difficult things that had happened. And over the last ten years, it's a thought that has stuck with me.

God does not waste experiences. 

"In all things, God works for the good of those who love him" (Romans 8:28). Or, to rephrase, God has worked, and is working, for the good of his children in every part of their lives. There is no part of our lives that is redundant in the long, slow process of God conforming us to the image of his Son. There is no situation that God cannot and does not use. 

If we could see our lives from a bird's eye view, there would be no section that we could trim a little bit off for a more streamlined sanctification. If we could see how God is weaving and pulling together the strands of our days and weeks and months, there would not be one useless thread to pick out.

This goes against our normal thinking. We look at events in our lives and we cannot comprehend how God could pull anything out of value out of them. I've looked at the mismatch between my hopes for 2020 and the reality; from a human perspective, I'm at a loss to figure out how much of this year could be anything but a waste. 

But 2020 will not be wasted because God does not waste experiences. If you have been united to Christ, then there is not one moment of 2020 that you can describe as worthless. The mundane, the disappointing, the hard, the boring, the encouraging, the heartbreaking - God won't squander a second of it. We may not know what good God will bring from 2020 but we can trust our heavenly Father to use it for his glory and to make us more like Christ. 

Of all the adjectives that we could use to describe 2020, it has not been a waste of a year.

How to shock a deacon (and other things you might not be aware of)

We were just starting to raise support ahead of moving abroad and had, with the help and advice of our sending organisation, put together a provisional budget. We felt it was realistic and certainly well within the bounds of what we'd been told to expect by our organisation. The elders and deacons of our sending church had come over that evening to talk through our financial needs. I made everyone a cup of tea and pulled out a box of homemade cookies. My husband handed out copies of the draft budget. As everyone started to digest the contents of the sheet, one of the deacons skipped straight to the bottom of the page. As his eyes alighted on the total figure at the bottom, he almost fell off his chair in shock and surprise. 

It wasn't the most auspicious start to gathering financial support, even if it does make for an amusing story now. Yet by God's grace, we have been and continue to be well supported financially in our work here. But in Western cultures (or, at least, British culture), where we often try as best we can to skirt around the subject of money, financial support for cross-cultural workers never seems like an easy topic to talk about. 

A couple of weeks back we had another worker family come and spend a few days with us. They're good friends in a similar life position to us and we talked openly and honestly about a whole number of things, including issues surrounding financial support for workers.

The details of these conversations aren't pertinent and I don't want to expound on them here but I want to flag them as questions that we pondered and discussed. No issue has a clear right or wrong answer but comes down to how to apply wisdom depending on the person and situation. 

• Different support models: salary; raising support according to a budget; partial self-support
• Saving and investing for retirement, particularly coming from a culture where there is the expectation that individuals fund their own retirement in one way or another.
• Whether and how much to save for our children's futures, so as to be able to contribute in some way towards young adult expenses such as driving lessons, weddings and university education.
• The pressure to make sure that holidays don't look too luxurious, including avoiding or limiting photos on social media.
• Consciousness of how spending decisions 'look' to supporters back home, for example getting paid cleaning help in the home.
• Feeling the need to justify certain decisions, for instance how what might have looked like an extravagant holiday was actually a thrifty option.
• Balancing the cost of different education options (private schools, national schools, home education) for children with other factors.
• The interaction and balance between 'secular' work (where that is required in order to get a work visa to stay in the country), 'ministry' work, the salary for that secular work and additional financial support from ministry partners. 
• Whether and how much to explain to supporters about the particular pressures that come about from living and serving in a cross-cultural context and how that impacts spending decisions.

And there are many more related questions that we didn't cover. These considerations are not all unique to cross-cultural workers but they do take on a particular significance when you rely on financial support from churches and individuals to live and work. Some of them weren't questions that we'd necessarily thought much about (or at all) before we came out on the field. 

Why am I sharing this?

Most of us instinctively shy away from financial topics. They can be uncomfortably gray areas to discuss. But they are very real issues for workers, and for others in Christian ministry. I'd like to suggest that we get a little more comfortable talking about these things but I'm not too sure if that's realistic for most of us. I'd be content to raise awareness of these issues, to say that these are things that cross-cultural workers are thinking about. We feel the responsibility to steward well the resources - not just money, but time, energy, language ability, Bible understanding and knowledge, spiritual gifts - that we've been given by God. We don't take support for granted but are truly grateful for it. We deeply desire to do the right thing when it comes to living on support - the right thing for us, for our families, for the local church that we serve and for God's glory. And we wrestle with what that right decision is. An innocent comment from a supporter about a holiday we've taken can cut deeply. We might be serving abroad but we're still sinners, a bundle of Christ-exalting intentions moderated by pride and the fear of man, and that impacts our choices too.

We are fortunate to have generous friends who urge us to remember our human frailty and to invest in looking after ourselves so we can keep serving. We're grateful for our partner churches' and individuals' support, for our sending organisation and for older, wiser cross-cultural worker friends, who have helped and advised us on some of these areas. We also know others who've struggled with one or more of these areas.

I don't make that cookie recipe much any more, but whenever I do I think of that evening with the elders and deacons. We had a good conversation that evening and I think everyone went away a little better informed of some of the financial considerations and factors involved in being a worker overseas. 

Let's talk and think and learn more about financial considerations for cross-cultural workers. 

Rainy days

It was rainy yesterday. The drizzle all day kind of rain, clouds so low they obscure the top half of the mountain that we can see from our window. The summer months are dry here and though we get a little rain during summer, the rain and snow is mostly concentrated between November and April. I can't remember another all day, rainy day like yesterday in the previous five months. When we've driven out of the city in the last few months, the land has been dry and scorched from the summer heat, with a slash of green across the landscape every now and then, as trees mark out the path of a river.

I used to think of rain as a negative thing. I knew in my head that plants need rain to grow but from my wet British perspective, I thought that a little more sun and a bit less rain wouldn't be a bad thing. It's a thought echoed in popular culture: don't rain on my parade, why does it always rain on me, here comes the rain again...

Now I live in a much drier country, I have a whole new perspective on rain. Nowadays farmers can very easily irrigate crops that aren't next to a river but the watered green fields next to yellow barren ground provide a stark reminder of just how necessary and life-giving rain is. 

Living here has helped me read many Bible verses with a fresh perspective, including the ones about rain. There's too much to say on the theological significance of rain in the Bible for one blog post but rain is a recurring theme in the Bible. So this is a skim along the surface, a few quick thoughts that have been circulating around my head about the Lord who is the master of the water cycle, the one who covers the sky with clouds and commands the rain to fall (Psalm 147:8).

When the Almighty God declares that his thoughts are not our thoughts, that his plans and purposes are more drenched in compassion than we could ever imagine, that his love is as great as the heavens are high above the earth, he uses rain and snow as a picture to illustrate his point. Just as rain and snow fall from the clouds and cannot return to the sky without running through the ground and watering the soil, enabling plants to grow, so God's merciful drawing of his people to him cannot be thwarted (Isaiah 55:6-11).

The Lord is our shepherd who makes me lie down in green pastures and leads me beside quiet waters (Psalm 23:1-2). I've seen sheep here making do with the scraggly, brown grass. They look scraggly and thin themselves, not much like the fluffy sheep we're used to in the UK. But the Lord doesn't tell us to make do with the unappealing brown grass. He shows his care for us as he refreshes us with the choicest pastures and safest waters.

God "causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous." (Matt 5:45) Jesus isn't saying here that sun = good, rain = bad so just as God sends good things to all people, bad things happen to all people too. Far from it! He's underlining our Father in heaven's merciful character by repeating his point in two different ways. Both the sun and the rain are evidence of God's common grace. 

And waiting for rain gives us a picture of our lives right now. James gives us the example of a farmer patiently waiting for the seasonal rains, depending on the rain to water the waiting seeds and cause the crops to grow, as an encouragement to wait patiently for the Lord's return.

What exactly is it that we're meant to see in that patient farmer, looking day after day up at the sky for clouds to gather? James is not saying that a farmer hopes the rains will come but there's always the chance of a drought this year. He's using the year by year, decade by decade, century by century regularity of the seasons to make his point. 

We can miss this too easily from a British context because rain is a reliable part of life all year round. Summer just hopefully means a little less rain! But both here and in Israel, there is a seasonal pattern to rain. The rain generally comes in the cooler months while in summer we can go for weeks without rain.

James explains the analogy when he writes that believers are to "be patient and stand firm, because the Lord's coming is near." (James 5:8) When the farmer has planted his seed and prepared the field, he can do no more. He needs that rain. Without rain, his crops will not grow and he will have no harvest, no food and no money. He cannot make it rain. But he trusts that the rain is coming, as it does every year. In the same way, we wait for the Lord's coming. We confidently live our lives with a firm and solid hope that Christ is coming again.

It's rained again here today, though not as much as yesterday and my children are asking to go out in the rain. As we stomp in puddles, I'll be reminding them that rain is a sign of God's mercy. That God is our caring shepherd. That God is our kind Father and every good thing that every person has comes from him. And that as sure as the seasons turn, Christ is coming again.