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*
In August last year, I was boogie boarding at Mrytle Beach when I felt the Lord speak to me and tell me “it was time to catch a wave.” At the time, I thought the Lord was referring to SIM’s desire to send me on a 3-6 month short term trip out of the USA. I excitedly shared with my supporters the news and waited for the Lord to move.
But in September, the Lord moved very unexpectedly. At first, it seemed to be a turn in the wrong direction. The trip SIM wanted me to take dissolved into thin air, and about the same time, I said good-bye to a long-time friend and I became depressed. Admittedly, all I wanted to do was call it quits and do something—anything—else. I had a conversation with my Dad right about then. He asked me if I was happy with my life. I stammered out an answer, but deep inside I knew I was not happy at all. Tired, frustrated and broken, I gave up. I was ready for God to build me back up into whatever He wanted.
“Whatever He wanted” turned out to be equally unexpected. God brought a man into my life. I met Robert in May last year, when the Lord brought him to SIM USA to complete his internship requirement to graduate from Cedarville University. We had hit it off, but remained friends only at work. At the end of the summer, he went back to Ohio at the end of his internship. That was it. But in September, God brought Robert back to SIM for a month. We started hanging out more and built a friendship outside of work. So much so that Claude actually took us aside one evening and told us that we needed to be careful in the way we interacted because people would start talking about us at the Office.
It was a slightly embarrassing conversation, to say the least! At that point, I was not admitting to myself how much I liked Robert. But that conversation ended up opening the door to something both Robert and I had thought of and both dismissed as impossible: a relationship between the two of us. Shortly after that conversation with Claude, Robert and I went out to play skeeball together. After our game, he told me he liked me. And I had to tell him that i liked him too. We then started talking every night for at least four hours. And from the talking, we started dating.
And now, in just a few more short weeks, I will become Robert’s wife. Golly, I’m going to be a married woman…the thought keeps hitting me in odd ways. But as I know Robert more and more, I see that the Lord brought the right man into my life. He’s passionate about the Lord, he wants to use his media skills in ministry, and he suits me as a husband and life long companion.
When God told me to catch a wave, I was expecting a completely different ride. I thought I would have a new task, a new place, or a new ministry that I’d be doing. Instead, God brought me something completely unexpected. He brought me my husband.
(To read the original “Catch a Wave” post, click here: http://www.rachelfinder.com/post/964769521)
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.
I got back from my support-raising trip to NY and New England on September 7th. It was both a good, and a hard trip.
It was good in that I was able to show my northern supporters the people I serve, and the many countries around the world impacted by the ministry here. I loved seeing the light-bulb burn a little brighter in their minds. I also shared with everybody SIM’s plan to send me overseas at some point in the spring.
One thing I wanted to do while I was “at home” was to say goodbye—not to New York, but to southern New England. Though my parents left New Hampshire when I was 12, I never properly said goodbye to the region. I suffer from horrible homesickness at times and I’ve thought that’s why. So I took the time to drive from my grandmother’s house in MA, across NH and VT and into NY, saying goodbye to a region I love dearly.
But while I was home I had another (but not so unexpected) goodbye to say: this one to a dear friend of mine. He hadn’t died or anything. But after ten years, it was time for our friendship to end. Completely. We said goodbye the night of my party, and I’m glad I had a group of other people to say goodbye to at the same time. It helped take the bittersweet feeling in my stomach and tone it down a bit. But saying goodbye to somebody who’s been a part of my life for the past ten years has been difficult.
I came home Tuesday, not feeling ready to come back to Charlotte. The good and the bad of my trip was weighing heavily, as was a question my father asked me before I left, “Rach, are you happy?” When I got home, I found things turned upside down. SIM’s initial placement idea for next spring fell through so now that wasn’t happening, my job seemed like it would stay the same old-same old, and I honestly had to answer my dad’s question with, “No, I feel like I’m missing something.”
I felt like my whole world had been hit with a bomb, and I was muddling through the fall-out. Yet even though it’s barely been a month since I came home, the Lord has taken me through a lot. Saying goodbye to a number of things in my life has opened a door for hope and healing to come into my life. Sometimes in places that I didn’t know that needed it! Through it all, Jesus has shown me that I’ve got a huge support-base here, and friends in unexpected places.
Somebody commented on my first episode of TRV on Vimeo this morning. It made me go back and watch the episode and see what they had actually found so interesting. The episode features me, in one of my 18th century dresses, talking about my “revolutionary” way of living life as a missionary. But it wasn’t the oddity of seeing me in one of my dresses that caught my attention when I watched the video. It was the fact that this moment was what started my move to full-time ministry in Charlotte.
Previously, I’d been working in short bursts at the SIM USA office, serving only during SIMCOs (SIM’s Candidate Orientation) to train and prepare our newest missionaries. Then, I’d head back home to my parents house in Upstate NY to do more fund-raising and waiting.
I was heading down to Charlotte for another of these SIMCOs, fully intending to return to NY when it finished like I had done previously. But this is the SIMCO where God had other ideas. This is one where God started speaking to me and telling me, “It’s time. I want you here permanently. In April.”
That was a freaky and challenging thing to hear! I wasn’t at full support, I had no car, I didn’t know where I would live…yet after the Spring SIMCO of 2009, I stepped out in faith and made plans for full-time service. I went back to NY for two weeks, did what I could to raise more funding (and got up to 50%!), packed my stuff and moved back to Charlotte full-time in April.
I’ve been here ever since. Until I found a permanent house and a car, God provided various places for me to stay, and a whole flock of different automobiles for me to borrow. In August 2009, I finally moved to the Avacado House, where my roommates and I still reside. In November I bought my own car. And even though only have of my financial needs have been given to my ministry each month, I haven’t gone hungry, or been without enough to pay the bills. It’s been an incredible journey that has stretched my faith in profound ways, ways I never would imagined or thought of.
And to think, the moment that started it all was back in February, 2009. That brief moment when I thought it was to be “business as usual” turned out to be the moment that changed everything and set the current course of my life into forward motion.
