A Day of Rest: Exhausted but Exhilerated

I have been speaking a lot.

The Harvest Baptist Women's Retreat
Willow Metro 212
Three East Delta Congregational Churches in the UP
Christ's Church of Oak Brook Ascend Group
First Free's Ministry Community

I have also been leading a BUILD group for the last ten weeks and teaching a Wheaton in Chicago class. While speaking involves preparation time and thought and the actual delivery can be somewhat exhausting, I have been sensing the Spirit using me in many of the sessions and that is very exhilarating. I think I learn more and get more out of it than the listeners. Today, I was able to really relax. I slept in, went to the River City Community Church, read the Tribune (I have to buy it at CVS now because my delivery papers kept getting stolen), walked Charlie around the Garfield Park lagoon and watched the movie, The Replacements, on TBN.

Speaking of movies, I finally watched Beyond the Gates of Splendor last night, about the five missionaries who were speared to death by the Waodani tribe in the Amazon basin in Ecuador in 1956. It is a documentary and I liked it better than the dramatized version of the story, The End of the Spear. I was touched by the courage of Elizabeth Elliot and Rachel Saint. They went in after the murders to live with the tribe and led them into an understanding of the love of God that eventually transcended their murderous cultural habits and brought faith and peace to the tribe. There is a shot of Valerie, the Elliot's daughter, being carried lovingly on the back of one of the tribesmen who had murdered her father.

The story is narrated by Steve Saint, who spent summers with his aunt Rachel in the jungle and also came to love the men who had murdered his father. At one point he said he was accepted by the kids in the tribe, because like him, nearly all of them had lost a parent or someone they loved to death by the spear. It is an amazing story of the power of God to bring forgiveness and healing transformation to an entire culture.

It was also fun to see Frank Drown in the movie. Frank led the team that went in to recover and bury the bodies. Frank and his wife, Marie, were missionaries that my home church in Iowa supported and I think he even may have stayed in our home. I always really admired him. I remember him telling us that he had used the fuselage of a crashed plane to build a water tower to bring running water to an entire village. He is a visionary entrepreneur who used his gifts for the good of the community. He and Marie now live in Canada. They do workshops on "de-westernizing" the gospel.