Yesterday I was up at such an incredibly early hour that I thought I’d have no problem waking up today. This morning was totally different, though. For some reason, despite having gone to bed at a reasonable hour, I had to drag myself out of bed at 7:00 to take a shower and have breakfast before class started at 8:00. I was yawning until after lunch, which made me feel terrible because everything we did today was so thoroughly interesting.
We started off hearing about the refugee ministry in Kenya from an IT missionary couple on furlough. Dotun and Ami are Nigerian and Philippina respectively, and met on the mission field working with mostly women and children who have fled into Kenya from Somalia, Sudan, Uganda and other nearby countries. They work with people from backgrounds I can’t even begin to imagine, from the Lost Boys of Sudan to women who have been victims of trafficking. It was heartbreaking to hear their stories, but also uplifting to realize what a passion they have for God and for these people and what their team is doing for the Church in Kenya.
As if my world hadn’t been rocked by 8:30, we did devotions with Rich Becker (Director of Training) and then got to hear Scott Olson’s testimony (Director of International Teams USA), both of which managed to blow me away in their own unique way.
Lunch today included almost all of the Elgin Ministry Center staff, so they all introduced themselves and told about what they do, and all of the MITs introduced ourselves again. No matter how much confidence I seem to exude or how many jokes I tell, I loathe standing in front of a group of people and talking. I’ve gotten much better at it, but my nervousness has just never gone away. Even telling people my name and where I’m from and how I’ve experienced the love of God on my IT journey so far got my heart-rate up and it stayed that way until well after lunch and break were over.
I say that to lead into the fact that we gave our testimonies today. After facilities and mobilization orientations, we split into groups of three or four MITs plus a staff member as a facilitator and then one or two more staff members just for fun for each group.
Now as a little background, I’m Methodist. “Testimony” was like a bad word to me until very recently. In fact, I didn’t even know I had one until recently. Before splitting into groups, Mark Foshager picked three random people out of the eleven of us and asked us on a scale of one to ten how ready we felt to give our testimony. Kelsey, Ted, and I all said we were at about 5. I felt lucky in the group I ended up in, which turned out to be Kelsey and Ted. Rich was our facilitator, and Dave was our active spectator, and we theoretically had 8 minutes to give our story, but spent much more time than that on each person, asking questions when they were finished. I think we were all surprised at some of the things we learned about each other, especially how we keep finding out that everyone here would seem (at least to the world) to have ended up in Missions “accidentally,” Even aside from that, people can rock you just telling you about their seemingly average life and walk of faith. As Scott Olson put it at lunch “They know more about me than my mother does now.”
After we officially finished for the day, John Andrew and I headed outside to “play basketball” with the kids. It started raining, but we eventually made it back outside and shot hoops with the Ackermann guys, and eventually Eric invited us back to their apartment for dinner. It was pretty cool hanging out with them, eating taco salad and telling jokes and talking about Ecuador (the Eric, Carla and their 4 kids are headed to Costa Rica for language school and then to Quito to work at Casa Gabriel).
If the next four days of training are anything like today, we’re going to be well fed, both with home cooking and the Spirit.
WOW!!!