Monthly Archives: March 2010

Here is a brief video update from Vernon on our first day in India.

Also, if you would pray for our meetings tomorrow we would really appreciate it.  We will be spending time with an individual who rescues children who have been injured and forced to beg for food and money at a local railway station that over 1 million commuters a day pass through.  Lastly, please pray for super-natural strength, as we haven’t slept in awhile, and open doors.

Love you all

Justin

Before we took off for our flight I had been spending time in Exodus 33-34.  Several things have struck me with the two chapters, but I just want to take time to tell you two of them and how I hope they shape our time in India, along with my desire for these to be an intimate part of my life.

In the beginning of Exodus 33, the Lord tells the Israelites that He will give them everything, except Himself.  He says that He will give them land and that their enemies would be defeated, yet He would not give them Himself, because they were a “stiff-necked” people.

If you go on and read in this account, although the Israelites were so stubborn, they were not yet COMPLETELY hard hearted.  The response they gave the Lord was one of grief!  They said this was terrible news.  They would not go.

The passage goes on to talk about how God and Moses spoke together as friends speak to one another. This passage is also a great echo of when Jesus says (in the book of John) that God will no longer call the disciples servants, but friends. This is my prayer!  I pray God would be the same way in my life.  I desire this friendship.  I need this friendship.  Without this type of relationship and communication we will not go on into India, or life, in the proper way.

The second aspect has been how God is called Jealous in Exodus 34.  This is His name, not just an attribute.  Many people may be incredibly averse to this type of description of God, but we must recognize that it is only bad when the compilation is bad.  God is good and does good.  Jealous has called us into the greatest reality we could ever know, namely, relationship with Him.

Many times I have seen how God is “jealous to discipline me when I get out of line,” yet this is not the totality of or proper outlook on jealousy.  He definitely will discipline those He loves, but we must see that His jealousy is intimate.  His jealousy actively calls us to Himself and thus the fact that He just talked about His conversations with Moses as being “like one speaks with a friend” is not diametrically opposed to His jealousy.  He is not jealous because He is needy (which every time we are jealous is because of being needy), but more from the sense of knowing He intimately desires for us to know who He is and what He is doing.  I pray I would know the intimacy of His jealousy more.  I pray we would know Him as Jealous Friend.

Please join us in prayer as we seek this for His Voice and also personally.

Love Truth

Vernon

Well, since I last wrote, a lot has happened in Sudan in regard to the elections.  Here are a few key items:

• It came out that ballots that were supposed to have been printed in South Africa to prevent duplication were in fact printed by the Sudanese government’s printing press, with duplicates (read: election fraud). Oof.

• It was suggested by a team of International Election Monitors that the elections by delayed due to:

1. Deficiencies in media freedom
2. Lack of education on the voting process for those in rural areas (i.e. most of Sudan’s population)
3. A drop in the number of available polling stations
   

   President Bashir speaks on his intent to keep the elections on track, while many throughout the globe wonder about the fairness of holding an election under an internationally indicted political figure.

(Read more here about, according to The Economist (one of my favorite and most trusted news sources), how the Sudanese government is “stacking the odds in its favour” for this election.)

• President Bashir responded to said Election Monitors by suggesting he would cut off the fingers of those who “interfere in [Sudan's] affairs.”  I’d like to think he was speaking metaphorically.
• Luis Moreno Ocampo, the now-famous prosecutor at the ICC, compared Bashir to Hitler, implying that monitoring an election under the rule of a leader indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity will be nearly impossible.

I was trying to keep my hopes up about these elections, praying that they would truly be free and fair.  However, after the past few weeks and the new, unfortunate developments that have occurred, I’m starting to worry.  According to the Sudan Tribune, many within Sudan are even pushing for the elections to be delayed until November, threatening to boycott them in April if not.  If both international consultants AND Sudanese citizens don’t think the country/National Electoral Commission is ready, then I too cast my vote to postpone them.

So, at the end of the day, those of us over on this side of the world who are not International Election Monitors or ICC Prosecutors can only do our best to learn, stay up to date, and pray for peace and justice in Sudan.  In fact, thanks to the folks here at His Voice, I discovered the Sudan Global Day of Prayer that Samaritan’s Purse (an organization my husband worked for that I fully endorse), is spreading the word about.  At the very least, I encourage you to view their daily list of prayer requests in Sudan and say a prayer for the elections, or whatever other events may take their place in the next few weeks.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, Grant Sudan Your Peace.

As I have been reading through Nehemiah one of the main themes that has come in my head over and over is trust.

In Nehemiah 8 it talks about how Ezra read The Law to the people and the Levites helped the people to understand all that was being said.  The reaction of the people was to weep because of how much they had disobeyed God.  It is very interesting to see the reaction of the Levites though.

The Levites said that SINCE the day is holy, DO NOT WEEP, but understand THE JOY OF THE LORD IS YOUR STRENGTH (8:10).  What an incredible outlook!  It is not that weeping is never a proper response, but it seems that many times I hold this misconception in my mind (as much as I speak against it) that as long as I am “sorry enough” God will then see my groveling in the dirt and then count my “repentance” good enough and thus forgive me.  This is so dangerous.

This morning I started to pray about many things and then started to ask God to teach me to trust Him more.  Immediately thoughts ran off in my head.  “Oh, great.  Now He is going to hurt me in some way so I trust Him more.” “Maybe He will even take Amber or the boys from me.”  “I guess He is just going to crush me in some other way by revealing some other issue in my life that I am terrible in.”  Can you see how quickly self centered thoughts dominated my brain AND I decided I should run with them!  All of these things may happen and the goodness of God is not dependent upon the difficulties in my life.  This is not some impersonal or sadistic view of God.  The thing is that He has come to show me that He has conquered ALL evil and therefore each trial, temptation, or tragedy is also a call to worship Him.

How different would my love of trusting Him be, if His joy was my strength?  How much more would I even weep properly, if His joy was my strength?  How much more would I hate sin, if His joy was my strength?  How much less self centered would I be, if His joy was my strength.

Papa, please teach me how to make Your joy be my strength today.

Love Truth
Vernon

Neh. 8:10

A list of the “Top 100 Church Blogs” courtesy of Church Relevance for your perusing pleasure.  Hopefully you are unlike me b/c adding new blogs to my google reader overwhelms me as it inevitably increases the amount of unread content which is a reflection of my intellectual capacity and overall worth as a human being.  Like I said, hopefully you are unlike me and you find the list extremely helpful.

Also, obviously I don’t agree with nor would I bother subscribing to all of the blogs on the list although I do think that those blogs being in the “Top 100″ is helpful in gauging our culture’s view of church, religion etc.

Enjoy

Blogging is not my favorite activity…probably because it is more challenging for me than I think it should be.  I feel like it is a bottleneck, for me, in the process of conveying thoughts and ideas.  I am much more of a bullet point list/outline type of person.  Unfortunately that doesn’t make for worthwhile reading material and usually lacks the information stored in my head that is necessary to make sense of said lists and outlines.

That being said I realized this morning that the thoughts and ideas that are in my  journal are more or less intelligible and could probably serve as short blog posts from time to time.  So without further ado here is a short prayer from January 10, 2010 on Matthew 9:14-17.  This was right after Allison and I had just arrived here in O’Fallon and were still adjusting to our new surroundings.

Father I pray that we might see our present circumstances as a fast from comfort and familiarity.  I pray that in our fasting you might create in us a deeper more profound longing for the return of Christ and for our eternal home.

Did I mention that it was a short prayer?  Anyway I hope that whatever it is that God calls you to fast from you will comply so that he might take lesser desires and form them in to an overwhelming desire for him and the return of Jesus.

Have a great week.

Well hello there.  As Vernon so kindly mentioned in the previous post, I’m Moe and I’ll be blogging here at His Voice a couple of times a month about Sudan-related topics and news.  I blog about this and many other [extremely random] topics on my personal blog, which I’d love for you to check out.

But enough about that, let’s get started.  Today’s topic: Elections! Oh my!  Sudan’s first general elections in 24 years are coming up next month, tentatively April 11-13, which are to be followed by the referendum on Southern Sudan’s secession next January.  I’ll probably be discussing these two events in my posts quite a bit, as they will inevitably have tremendous aspects on Sudanese society.

After several postponements over the past months, conflicts big and small, ongoing trouble in Darfur, and SPLM  threats to boycott the elections, it looks like these elections might actually be on track to take place, as outlined in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement.  If they do, Sudan will elect a president and various parliamentary members, as well as elections for the Southern region, including President.  Sudan’s current President Omar Al-Bashir is up for re-election for the national presidency, as well as other candidates who you can read more about here.

Yasir Arman, the SPLM nominated candidate for the National Presidency

The latest event that leads me to believe these elections might actually happen occurred last week–BBC reported that the deadlock over parliamentary seats in Sudan had ended, with an agreeable result that the South will now have enough members of Parliament to veto any constitutional changes.  This power is necessary in order for them to ensure that the CPA remains in place.  According to the article, due to last year’s census (which in my opinion, and many others, was a major failure) the South did not have the population representation to have enough seats in parliament to hold this veto power.   But after months of deadlock, they came to an agreement.  Let’s hope that’s good news.

(The article also pointed out that more seats were awarded to Abyei and Kordofan, the areas which house my beloved Nuba Mountains–the area I visited in Sudan and where my husband lived.  I pray that this is good news for our friends there.)

Finally, one more interesting tidbit that I came across this week on Sudan’s national newspaper, the Sudan Tribune, was an op-ed titled “Why Southern Sudanese should vote for Al-Bashir“.  This is a bit of a shocking title for anyone familiar with the country’s history–Al-Bashir is currently wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and is potentially up for counts of genocide as well. He is largely known by Southern Sudanese as the mastermind of the violence that killed 2 million of their people and totally destroyed all of their land and belongings.  And yet, this op-ed claims that he is the only candidate that will fully recognize a potential Southern secession.  I find that hard to believe, but even so would not make me want to vote for him (but I’ll save that for a future post titled “Why I don’t think Southern Sudan should secede”).

So, that’s my bit for now.  Please pray for peace and safety in Sudan during this election season–it’s an extremely volatile and tense time and will determine much for Sudan’s future.

We are so pumped to have an incredible friend that will be guest blogging with us!  Her name is Maureen (Moe fo’ short) Lunn.  Moe is a great friend that knows A TON about Sudan.  She will be focused on giving us some great information on the Peace Agreement, different political situations that are going on in Sudan, and other various topics that will help you to be more informed about Sudan.  Here are a few things she wrote about her background.  THIS THURSDAY WILL BE HER FIRST POST!!!  We are pumped!

I started traveling overseas as a teenager, and always found Africa particularly compelling, though I had never been there. In college, I studied abroad in Hong Kong and had the chance to visit South Africa for three weeks, both which greatly sparked my interest in international issues.  After graduating with a degree in religious studies from SBU, I returned to Hong Kong for a year working as a youth ministry intern at an international church there.  Upon returning to Kansas City and settling in, I craved a way to get involved with something of international flavor while I remained stateside–I came upon the ONE Campaign–Bono’s campaign to provide more foreign assistance to Africa.  I began to volunteer regularly, and two years later discovered that I had become extremely passionate about poverty, development and aid in Africa.  So, I turned that passion into a Masters degree at KU in International Studies, with a certificate in East African Studies.

The East part of my African interest came through my husband, Toby, who had lived in Kenya before we met and spent a year in Sudan while I was in graduate school, while we were dating.  His time in Sudan sparked my interest in the area there known as Nuba Mountains, which continues to be my primary area of focus in research and knowledge today.  I had the pleasure of visiting Kenya twice and Sudan once during 2008, while Toby was living there.

Today, I work for a neighborhood revitalization organization in the urban core of Kansas City, Missouri.  Toby and I hope to relocate to Kenya or Sudan sometime in the next few years.

I have run across the Christian Alliance for Orphans and their upcoming conference, Summit VI, a couple of times in the past few months.  If you are familiar with them or their conference or have any thoughts after looking at their site I would love to hear them.

Thanks

Justin