Why now?

"Do you not say, ‘Four months more and then the harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. Even now the reaper draws his wages, even now he harvests the crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together."

Kim and I understood five years ago that God was calling us to Lebanon. As an act of obedience, we applied to the International Mission Board to be appointed as missionaries. For reasons that I will cover in another blog, that didn't work out. We took that as a sign that the time wasn't right yet, and settled back into our normal routine. We knew the calling was there, but we didn't know how to follow it.

We even came up with our own plan. We'd keep working on the farm until the mortgages were paid off. We could then lease it to someone and self-finance our mission. What a great plan! We wouldn't have to depend on anyone, or jump over any hurdles to convince anyone. It would only take 15 years to pay off the farm. We decided we might as well wait until all the kids were out of the house. That would make it more like twenty. But then, we could go.

The problem is that the harvest won't be ready in twenty years. It's ready now. Our plan was a plan to delay.


“In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared about men. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.

“For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care about men, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually wear me out with her coming!’”

Why wasn't I like her? There she is, a role model given to me by Jesus. She went after what was right, and didn't quit until she got it. She was persistent.

We need to persistently pursue God's will for our lives. I've pursued it casually, waited on it, talked about it -but now I'm ready to really be obedient. I'm going to go after Lebanon until everyone around me is so sick of hearing about it that they pack my family on a plane and send us over there just to get rid of us.