Woman On A Mission Ministry

One of the most chal­leng­ing exer­cises that the women under­take in Woman on a Mis­sion is the shar­ing of fam­ily sto­ries. Chal­leng­ing for many rea­sons, not the least of which is that those lis­ten­ing are strangers; and the sto­ry­teller has all of 15 min­utes to share high­lights of both her fam­ily of ori­gin and her cur­rent fam­ily. Every woman approaches the exer­cise pri­vately ask­ing,How much should I share? Can a trust these women? Will con­fi­den­tial­ity be hon­ored? How much of the real me do I expose?

Hav­ing lis­tened to count­less fam­ily sto­ries over the years, the lead­ers and I have been amazed at how many times we have heard the words: “I’ve never told any­one this, but … “ Each time a woman fin­ishes the sen­tence, she makes a coura­geous choice to step out of hid­ing. To take back the power she once gave away to an abuser, a painful or sad event, a dys­func­tional fam­ily. Spo­ken in the con­text of com­pas­sion­ate lis­ten­ers, such words usher in the begin­nings of heal­ing. Change. Trust. Growth. And even faith –faith in one’s fel­low man and faith in God’s abil­ity to help us cope with the dis­com­fort of leav­ing our carefully-crafted com­fort zones, if only for a moment.

I imag­ine God sit­ting in one of the chairs, lis­ten­ing to the sto­ry­teller along with the rest of us, His heart filled with pride as she admits her sad­ness or her poor choices. He knows how des­per­ately she -– all of us—longs to be known. How the enemy must cringe at those words that mark the com­ing out, “I’ve never told any­one this, but …” But God smiles. And the rest of us are hon­ored, priv­i­leged to have received gifts from strangers—treasures of darkness—the tears and courage of a woman step­ping out of the shad­ows into the light.

You were cre­ated for a pur­pose by a pur­pose­ful, orderly God. A Cre­ator with a wild imag­i­na­tion. When He cre­ated you, He had no fear, no bud­get con­straints, no short­age of resources, no lim­its on what He could do, build or imag­ine. He had no obsta­cles to over­come and no boss to please. And when He decided to build a wild but orderly universe–a well-oiled machine, so-to-speak, that was both beau­ti­ful and efficient–He decided to include you. What was He thinking?

This Cre­ator planned that each and every per­son He cre­ated would play a part and help the uni­verse machine work well. To some He gave what humans would con­sider big jobs, to oth­ers, sim­ple assign­ments. But each piece, each per­son, each tiny baby He fash­ioned, had –has— a pur­pose to ful­fill that is a nec­es­sary com­po­nent of His blue­print for planet earth. Each of you was cre­ated tolive and be and do some­thing that will make the world a bet­ter place. You were cre­ated for a purpose—to make a difference—somehow, some way—and in doing so, to glo­rify the Creator.

Won­der what that is, that some­thing He planned for you?

For we are His work­man­ship, cre­ated in Christ Jesus, for good works which He pre­pared before­hand that we should walk in them. Eph­esians 2:10.

When Kathryn May signed up for the Woman on a Mis­sion class, she had mediocre hopes at best of find­ing her per­sonal mis­sion. But she came any­way, week after week, with home­work from every exer­cise com­pleted, eager to par­tic­i­pate in small group dis­cus­sions. Near­ing the end of the course, how­ever, she almost bailed. “We were com­ing up on Les­son 9 where we were to write our mis­sion state­ment and I pan­icked. I told my small group leader, Sandy Bone, ‘I’m just not get­ting it. I guess I need to take the course again.’”

Sandy would hear noth­ing of it. Again and again she gen­tly encour­aged Kathryn not to give up. “We’ll help you; we’ll walk you through each step, Kathryn. You’re almost there!”

“Had it not been for Sandy, I would have given up,” said Kathryn, “And now I’m so glad I didn’t!”

The final two ses­sions of the class were spent lis­ten­ing to min­istry lead­ers from Fel­low­ship Bible Church and com­mu­nity orga­ni­za­tions tell about their ministries—the goals, needs and oppor­tu­ni­ties avail­able to those will­ing to be used by God. Two of the men were Shelby Smith and Ray Williams, pas­tors who take great delight in con­nect­ing mem­bers of Fel­low­ship to needs of peo­ple liv­ing in south mid­town Lit­tle Rock.

“As Ray shared about all our church is doing in that area, I thought, ‘Surely they could use an extra hand some­where,’ so I made an appoint­ment with Ray.”

One of the things Ray and Kathryn dis­cussed was Chris­t­ian Lit­er­acy, a min­istry where men­tors teach chil­dren who are strug­gling in school to improve their read­ing skills using a Bible-based cur­ricu­lum. She learned that the model is built around lit­er­acy camps held dur­ing spring and sum­mer breaks.

For the May fam­ily, lit­er­acy was an issue they knew some­thing about. “Our son, who is now grown, is learn­ing dis­abled and when he was very young, we were told that he would prob­a­bly never learn to read. That was quite a blow, because we know that all learn­ing is built upon the abil­ity to read. My hus­band and I spent years work­ing with our son con­stantly, and that hard work paid off. He did learn to read and proved all the doc­tors wrong. As I began to learn about the method that Chris­t­ian Lit­er­acy uses, I thought about all the chil­dren liv­ing right here in Lit­tle Rock –kids with far fewer advan­tages that our son. That’s when I knew I had to get involved.”

With Kathryn act­ing as direc­tor, cen­tral Arkansas’ first lit­er­acy camp was held dur­ing spring break, 2009. Eight men­tors from four dif­fer­ent churches worked and played hard to help six­teen chil­dren from Franklin Ele­men­tary School improve their read­ing scores. And improve they did!

© Octo­ber 24, 2009 All rights reserved.