Last Lessons #73 – WORLD-WIDE

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”  Galatians 3:28 

One big lesson I have learned is that world-wide means “wide world!” so there were three more lessons I had to learn before God would involve me in a world-wide work.   

1. He took me to another continent.  When the Army paid for Bob to study at Johns Hopkins he had to pay back the time in active military service.  The Army decided to send us to Okinawa for two years where Bob would work as the Director of the Health, Education, and Welfare department during the reversion of Okinawa to Japan.  The Orient was a fascinating place to live and while we were there, we were able to travel to Taiwan and Thailand.  I learned very little Japanese (a very difficult language!), but fortunately most people spoke English.  The Okinawans were polite (!), kind, generous, and small.  In this blog, I would like to suggest for your reading Francis Shaeffer’s book No Little People.  How gracious of God to give us the privilege of living for two years with these small Okinawan people.   
2. The second lesson I had to learn was how to start and run a business.  Because I was an officer’s wife, I was expected to join the Officers’ Wives Club.  I had zero interest in that because I was a missionary and I wanted to teach people to know God and help them raise their standard of living. Officers’ wives didn’t fit in my thinking until I was convinced by the Army general’s wife that I could be the club’s charity manager and decide where the money that the wives collected went.  I liked that job!  What I also came to realize was that officers’ wives were stuck on a small island and were bored stiff.  That’s where Stretch and Sew came in.  I taught over 400 women to sew on knits in my living-dining room.  I brought in the fabric from the USA, sold it with patterns to my students and made a profit.  As a bonus I taught my three daughters to sew, and we even put on a fashion show at the Officers Wives Club!  How’s that for marketing! But not exactly mission work!  I did put a bookcase of Christian books in my house for sewing students to check out but that was not much “good works”.  What I didn’t know, but God did, was that I needed to learn how to run a real business, keep books, organize labor, buy and sell products.  He knew I needed to learn these things because someday Rafiki would have a widow’s program where all this would be necessary. 
3. The third lesson I was taught by God’s grace was the importance of individuals.  It’s one thing to want to reach the world, but it’s another to reach individuals.  What happened in Okinawa was that we were asked by the military chaplain if we would be willing to house for six weeks a girl who was in the hospital from an overdose and would be sent to juvenal hall if she had no place else to go.  Her name was Barbie, and she was fourteen years old.  Her mother was Okinawan and ran a bar and her American military father had long-since left Okinawa, but Barbie was an American citizen.  We had three daughters of our own around Barbie’s age and as we prayed about it, we all agreed that we could do this – with certain restrictions on her, of course.  Barbie was not necessarily happy about the deal, but we were better than juvenal hall!  She didn’t like the restrictions and she thought we were weird to have family devotions every night after supper.  To make a long story a little shorter Barbie’s mother asked us if we would take power of attorney for her and take her back with us when we returned to the United States.  We did (which is another story!), and Barbie came to faith, finished school, married a Christian man, and now has children and grandchildren.  She now works at Rafiki!  

How necessary it is to learn that God changes the world one person at a time.  Having the tools to manage a world-wide ministry is important, but so is every person created in God’s image.