(Above: 15th Arrondisement, where my team and I will be working in Paris).Day 2 of the life of my online journal and already thoughts of what to post fill my mind. I am excited as I sit in a Toyota dealership awaiting my car’s oil change! For now, I wanted to explain why I chose the name “outofnothing,life” for my weblog. This past February my missions team and I were together for training at Avant Ministries headquarters. One of the things we had to do was come up with a team slogan or motto that would be our driving expression for the next 5 years - something that captured our passion and that would help remind us to hang in there in those dark times when we want to quit. After a few hours of brainstorming, I came up with “Out of nothing, life.” This came to me after thinking of Romans 4:18 where Paul talks about how Abraham, “against all hope, believed”. (italics mine) Well, in what did he believe? He believed that God would do good on his promise of giving him a son in spite of his old, old age and that, despite being as good as dead in his body and his wife, Sarah, being barren, he would become the “father of all nations.” Paul refers to Abraham: “He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed - the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.” (Romans 4:17). What I want to emphasize here is not the theological implications of this statement and the fact that Abraham&Sarah eventually did receive a son in Isaac (as weighty as they are, but that’s for another discussion), but the hope I have in God. That He can do absolutely anything, bringing life out of nothing. Many people consider Paris as an “impossible” field for missions. But after reading the Scriptures and knowing who God is from it, is that what we the church are really meant to believe? My hope is that I can hold on to the conviction that God can truly do the impossible and raise up believers in even such a spiritually-dry place like Paris.
