Man I am loving my Perspectives on World Christian Movement class! Last week we sat in awe as the lady speaker just told story after story of the lives of early missionaries.Those people are to be looked up to. We can learn a lot from their stories of surrender to God. They were hardcore. These were the kind of people who packed their stuff in a coffin when they left for Africa or some country to tell people the Gospel. At he same time it was cool to hear about their failures in life as well.

         This white woman here was Mary Slessor, a Scottish woman who wanted to do mission work after hearing about what was going on. But she was poor, single, had no formal education and timid. Yet she ended up going to what is now Nigeria all by herself and establishing a place in a village. She ended up raising a bunch of sets of twins because at the time the animistic belief was that one of the twins was the devil's child. But they didn't know which one it was so they killed both the babies. One time she actually went in the night and cut a whole in a hut to rescue the babies! She also ended up being the judge for the area because both the Brits and the tribes respected her. She went through a lot of scary and hard experiences. And she wasn't old; she was like late twenties when she went over. I say all this to contrast her with our willingness.

  All of the people we heard about in our class- Ida Skudder who went to India and taught women medicine, Rosalyn and Johnathon Goforth who went to China and lost five of their children, Amy Carmicheal who went to India and ministered to temple prostitutes, William Carey who first went to India- all suffered immense personal loss. But they had accepted those losses because they were nothing in comparison to the riches of knowing Christ and spreading His Kingdom to all the peoples of the earth.

This is Scottish money that even today has Mary Slessor's picture on it.

      Read read read. Everybody wants me to read something. That's a lot of stuff to cycle thru the brain and form opinions on and react to. "Blah blah blah" is what I think as I read. Of course then I have to go back and read it again cause I obviously didn't fully comprehend it as I mocked it.

      I am however discovering the usefulness of highlighters. I highlight the main ideas in philosophy, the particularly heretical parts in biology, and my favorite parts of my Perspectives on Christian Movement reading. It's fun. It forces me to read it all too.

    Trouble is I like to be up doing things. As I sit and read I think of more physically demanding tasks that I could be doing and I get restless. But in actuality, reading is often more important.

    So here's to another week of us reading and thinking and learning and living for God's glory! Huzzah! Lol..