Until All Have Heard

To get to church, we walk 4 minutes to the bus stop. We take a bus for 10 minutes, and then walk another 20. When the weather is nice, we play worship music on my phone and the kids skip along. But when the weather is bad, we have a system: I'm the caboose--I make sure no one gets left behind. Karl is the pace car...and occasionally the tow truck. ;) Our congregation is about 30 people. Worship music and the sermon is done in Italian. We have learned most of our spiritual vocabulary through the screens, as Italians don't talk about grace or redemption in everyday conversations. The kids go to a small Sunday school class--3 to 5 kids on an average week. The class is in Italian, which they still do not speak well (since they school in English). It has stretched their patience to participate in church when they don't understand the language. My oldest said, "Now I know to be thankful when I get to worship in English! I never thought to be thankfu...

Over dinner, Cindy shared her story of how God struck her heart. She was riding an NYC subway, glanced around at the passengers, and realized, “I’m the only person with blue eyes on this train. Most of the world has brown eyes.” She continued to explain how God used that moment to grip her passion for NYC. This city represented literally all parts of the world. She wanted to share God’s love with the world, and the world was in her midst! After dinner, while we walked the streets of Manhattan to Rockefeller Center, Cindy shared more of how her life and ministry in the city (now 20+ years) has always and still does, incline her heart to worship the Lord. She said that many of her friends are drawn to worship when they are outdoors—seeing the beauty of the sky or the expanse of the ocean,   but for her, the sea of people draws her to worship. She expounded on this: People are made in the image of God, and to see so many different types of people—beautiful, diverse, unique—...

“Oh Lord, you have examined my heart and know everything about me… You know what I am going to say Even before I say it, Lord… Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, Too great for me to understand! …You knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!” Psalm 139: 1, 4, 6, 13, & 14 Nothing about me surprises God. In fact, all the quirks, desires, and pieces of my personality make me the unique being that God designed! How can I not put an exclamation mark at the end of that sentence!? So when praying about where God will lead me next, my personal values are a good starting indicator. HE has placed those values in me before I was born! HE knows how they will make me think and talk and walk!  Even though God’s Word says I am complex, it would be easy for me to make a decision for myself based on my top desires. The situation increases in joyful complexity when we are a family of 5. My h...

Meet Simone, who has true faith and a personal relationship in Jesus Christ.

The conversations in this video are representative of a typical conversation about God...

This August, we are moving to Italy, where we will be lights for Jesus Christ in a spiritually dark place. In 2012, we spent 6 weeks ministering at the University of Bologna (pronounced Boh-low-nyuh) in northern Italy. In our hundreds of conversations, a resounding ideology surmounted our efforts— students do not believe that God exists. They don’t think there is life after death. They do not believe the Bible is God’s Word because to them, there is no God. Out of the 100,000 students, we met ONE who was a faithful believer—a guy named Simone.   He came to faith through our fellow Cru members who were there on a previous short-term mission. After a year of discipleship, Simone began coming with us to share his faith with other Italians! However, our hearts broke to leave him immersed in an atheistic university culture without Christian community. While many beautiful churches in Italy remain, they are empty except for a few elderly saints and scads of tourists. ...

This site is under construction. All previous posts have been moved to http:// HisStoryMySong.blogspot.com