Thoughts on Sandpaper
I write this weekend’s TPD from the northeastern coast of Ishinomaki, Japan. I'm finding it difficult to sync up days and times with NJ, so hope this finds you at some point this weekend.
A small team of youth, young adults, and us older folk traveled to one of the main areas most devastated by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Eric and Sue Takamoto (now a key part of the ministry at FCC) are leading our NJ team back to the place they served and called home for more than 20 years.
After the disaster, God called a few willing families with this simple call: go where nobody else is going and love those in need. Go to a people who feel stricken with grief and loss and who carry the guilt of surviving while others they knew and loved didn’t.
As a short term team, we are truly joining the local missionaries in what God has been doing here for many years. Part of the relational, organic, prayer soaked ministry involves reaching out into the community. They’re expecting more than 100 people to visit the church today and experience the love of Jesus. We get to be a very small part of that. Our team completed a few projects and helped clean up the property in preparation for the small community festival.
And I think God brought me all the way around the globe to use a few pieces of 60-grit sandpaper.
One of the students and I were given the task of sanding and repainting an old picnic table so people could safely sit and eat their lunch. We carefully stripped away layers of old paint, filed down splinters, and rounded any sharp edges. We ended the day pretty proud of our restoration masterpiece.
Famous missionary doctor Helen Roseveare ministered to the people of Congo for many years in the early 1950's. She said: “I long to be kept by God in an attitude of willing surrender so that he can go on to perfect that which concerns me; so that he can go on stripping and whittling and sandpapering until he is content with the new arrow he is creating.”
God’s work in our lives when we are surrendered to him is not
- A painless process
- A quick, one-step process
- Or tons of fun
But it is
- A beauty-revealing process
- A purifying process
- And a joy producing process
I pray today as we sense God sanding down our rough edges, stripping away our old paint, and whittling us for his specific purposes that we would share Helen’s heart…one of willing surrender.