Rachel's Viewfinder

“So where will you be living?” 

That’s usually the first question after the initial, “Wow! God is so GOOD” comment on my recent engagement.  It always catches me off guard, but I suppose it shouldn’t.  I’m getting married, and I’ll be following my husband’s lead.  So the assumption seems to be that I’ll be leaving Charlotte, and my work with SIM. 

The beautiful reality is that God has called Robo to Charlotte and to work with SIM once his school loans are paid off.  The Lord has not only brought someone who suits me as a life companion, but who compliments me as a workmate.  Right down to the same ministry with the same organization.  Praise the Lord!

Our plan as of right now is:

1).  We continue living in Charlotte, NC, or somewhere in the near vicinity.

2).  Rachel continues to work with SIM USA in the Media Department as a supported missionary.

3).  Robo get’s a job and works to pay off his school loans as quickly as possible.

4).  Robo joins SIM USA as a supported missionary and together we continue to serve in the Media Department.

A lot of this is in need of PRAYER!  The Lord has blessed us with the option of living in the house I currently live in.  My roommates are moving out just before the wedding.  While this provides us with a place to live, we’re currently experiencing problems with the house that our landlord has preferred not to fix.  One of these is the septic tank.  Pray that the Lord would either provide us with a new home, or that our landlord would make the necessary repairs.

Another prayer request is for my continued support.  Right now, SIM USA has made me a permanent part of the Home Staff.  This means my support requirement is higher (about $2700 a month), but I now have health care and retirement!  I also have a higher “salary”.  Robo and I plan to live on my “salary”, so we can put the entirety of whatever his paycheck will be towards paying off his school loans.

Which brings up another prayer request!  Pray that the Lord would bless Robo with a job in the video production/web industry.  Reasons for this include the need for Robo to maintain his production skills in a media environment, as well as earning a paycheck big enough to pay his loans. 

For those of you giving financial to my ministry, my support account information will still be the same, save for the fact that I will be Rachel BOGAN.  :D  *excited*

I’m not anywheres near being a parent.  But my siblings and I have all moved out of my parents’ house and to our own homes.  My mom and dad talk about how quiet thing are around the house without us there.  I wonder if their feeling is similar to what the Office feels like when SIMCO is over?

It’s been the first full SIMCO-less week, and as always happens when the candidates are leave, it’s quiet around here.  People don’t buzz about the building as speedily, there’s no hub-bub going on in the dining room upstairs, and my day isn’t filled with the rush of filming schedules.  Instead, it’s the slow but steady work at my editing computer, little knowing or seeing what is going on elsewhere.

Still, I can’t help but take a moment on look back on the past four weeks.  Day One was a blur, as my first interaction with our new missionaries was shooting their portraits.  I had fun, but it was confusing because I was still learning everybody’s names!  The group photo I took that afternoon even had a whole family missing because I didn’t know who they were and I couldn’t tell if all were present and accounted for!  Ah mi!

Teaching storytelling on Wednesday and Thursday helped solve the “I don’t know you” problem.  I had plenty of proud moments later that week and into the next when I heard my students share their stories using the skills they learned.  They were truly a wonderful class of students!  I wonder if the other SIMCO presenters get to experience the same sense of pride and satisfaction?  I get to see immediate results from my session.  Do they get to, too?

Mealtimes were great!  I love to sit with everybody and share stories and life together.  We all became one great big family.  Particularly funny was the night Margie had us all play a guessing game about each other.  You never know what has happened in some people’s lives! It was also nice having another gluten-freak missionary in the house.  Sharing gf food experiences with Dana made us both thankful that we weren’t the only “oddball” in the group.  And it was really nice of her to bring me a piece of gf apple cake from her trip to Posana’s in Asheville during her free day!

As always, I enjoyed the rush and fun of filming.  Everybody did a good job.  And all were so patient!  Especially the Olivers when the camera battery decided to die right in the middle of their shoot.  At SIM USA, we always talk about how missionaries need to be flexible.  The Olivers scored 100 on that unexpected test.

As SIMCO ended, we all said goodbyes.  It is always a bittersweet and poignant time.  Some of these people I won’t get to see again.  Not on this Earth anyway.  Facebook and email make it easy to keep up with them as they go about the world on mission for Jesus.  But to be able to share meals, stories, and fellowship…that won’t happen again like it happens at SIMCO.  The latest SIMCO class has left, and things have settled down this week.  I realized that we at the Office are back to an empty nest.  The birds have flown onto greater things because of being here with us.  But just as parents train up children in the way they should go, so we have prepped our new missionaries for the next venture in their lives.  Praise the Lord for a blessed SIMCO!

It’s all about perspective.

God has taken me through a lot these past two months.  My visit up north at the end of August marked a major turning point in my life and ministry.  It’s funny how the moments that seem small and insignificant end up being the life-changing moments.  One such moment happened when I renamed my Cube “The Kobayashi Maru.”

My Cube, otherwise known as my office cubicle, had come to define a lot of what I thought about my life and my ministry in Charlotte, NC.  When I joined SIM, I thought I would soon be traveling around the globe as a sort of “kingdom reporter.” But as I came to live, work and serve in an increasingly more and more permanent function at the USA him office, the more and more I felt stuck in life.  While I was up north, I shared with excitement that I would soon be going overseas.  Finally!! I looked ahead to the future and saw what I always though God was calling me to be: an overseas missionary.  Needless to say, when I got back to Charlotte and found out that those plans fell through, I was crushed.  I was back to my tiny, four-walled Cube, making short videos about missionaries while never getting to go to the places they talked about.

I was frustrated and upset.  I felt as though there was a glass ceiling above my head, and I had hit it.  Soundly.  That glass ceiling was preventing me from being where I thought God had called me and doing what I thought I was supposed to be doing.  But that’s where God reminded me of a lesson I learned from watching Star Trek:

In the movies, there’s a running theme about a test all Starfleet cadets must take while at Starfleet Academy.  It’s called “The Kobayashi Maru.” The test is a no-win scenario where the participants must experience what it feels like to lose a battle and accept the helplessness and fear as a result.  But one resourceful cadet, James T. Kirk, decided he didn’t like the no-win scenario, so he hacked into the computers, made the test winnable, and changed the outcome of the test.  Some said he cheated, others gave him a commendation for original thinking.  The point though, was that he refused to accept the present situation and let it define him.  I stared at the gray walls of my Cube, and decided that i was not going to let my present situation define me.  I made a sign, taped it over my phone, and stared at it.

Instead of focusing on the glass ceiling above my head, I started thinking of ways around it.  At first, those thoughts were along the lines of “what else can I do with SIM?” I was thinking that perhaps I was supposed to move out of Media and try something different.

That’s when I started reading my journals from three years ago.  I retraced my thinking process as I began pursuing full-time mission service. At that time, I had no idea how God could use me.  All I had heard of was the possibility of doing childrens’ ministry, or something like that.  Media hadn’t even come on the radar. But tucked between the pages, in April 2007, was a sheet of paper.  On it I had written an idea I had for mission work.  Though it written it from the perspective of using my creative writing skills instead of video-production, it describes verbatim the missionary storytelling and media work I do now.  The idea of blowing the lid of the missionary world and showing the Church whats going on around the world was exciting and stimulating!  At the end of my thoughts I wrote, “God, can i REALLY do this for the rest of my life? I’d feel like a combination of Indiana Jones, Paul, Ben Franklin, H.D. Thoreau, Peter Jennings, Bingham Young, and Phileas Fogg if I could do this for the rest of my life.”

I sat, thinking about my current ministry and my life, and I realized I’m doing exactly what I had asked God for.  And I realized that if I was going to be speaking to the Western Church in America, I had to stay and work in America.  Other missionaries go to the culture in which they serve.  I was too.  It just happened to be the same culture I grew up in.  And with that in mind, I finally came to the peaceful conclusion that I AM doing, living and serving in EXACTLY the place God wants me to be.

Changing my perspective, and employing a lesson from Star Trek helped me see a slightly different view of my life and ministry.  Admittedly, nothing has really changed.  I’m still doing the same sort of projects for missionaries going to countries I’ve never visited.  I still live in Charlotte, NC.  But my Kobayashi Maru is no longer a no-win scenario.