MESSAGE BEARER MEMO
By Ryan Shaw
These bi-weekly memos are to provide encouragement, exhortation, and spiritual nourishment in the lives of those who have signed the Message Bearer Creed as you prepare to serve the Lord globally, and are influencing your peers with this vision.
A Great Loss
I want to apologize for getting off the schedule that I had set in September for getting these Message Bearer Memos to you. This was supposed to get to you on October 26th. The past two weeks have been life changing for me as I lost my mom suddenly to a massive stroke on October 25. I have been with my family in Pasadena, CA over these past days and we have grieved and mourned together the loss of this extraordinary woman. Mom was only 62 and is now rejoicing with Jesus as she sits before the throne room of heaven beholding the brilliance and glory of the God she served and loved her whole life.
How does one handle a situation like this? All too often, it seems that we try to rush through the pain, responding to some strange western outlook that tells us that we need to get over it and move on. Or we try to make logical sense out of what has happened, seeking to figure it all out to somehow satisfy some craving for answers that we possess. I have sensed the pull to do both these things and yet something within me shouts that to allow the pain its due course will bring growth and a deeper life to my soul.
I want to deviate from the topic I had slated to share with you in this memo to allow some qualities of my mom’s life to encourage and challenge us. Mom was a beloved woman who lived life well and finished her life well. Though her life was suddenly cut short, she lived with a vibrancy in her love for God until her dying day. She studied the scriptures regularly and used them in her life and to challenge other people. Her faith was much more then something only personal, she shared her love for God in many arenas.
She was faithful to the call of God on her life. She and my dad spent 12 years as missionaries in the jungles of Papua New Guinea as Bible Translators. She was quite hesitant to go to New Guinea when their organization first invited them to this destination. She knew she would be going to live in an isolated jungle and she struggled with this reality. Yet, God unleashed His grace upon her and she chose not to wallow in her own pity, but to follow where she knew He was calling the both of them. Over the years she overcame many of her struggles in the jungle and God’s strength, grace, and comfort flooded her life and helped her through.
She knew the value of relationships. Since she passed away, I have been overwhelmed by the number of people that have come out of the woodwork from all over the world to share what mom meant to them. She was a woman who sought to track with people throughout her life. Obviously, she was aware that she could not remain tight friends with everyone over the years, but she always maintained contact with many. She understood the importance of living in community with other people. She and dad have been involved in the same small group Bible study for 25 years. These friends have been through all manner of life’s situations together and they are the better for it as they demonstrate the key ingredient of “body life” in a believers experience.
Thank you for allowing me to use one of these memos to get off topic and allow the life of a woman of God to teach us and to invite us to choose to live in a realm where we give our all to God. As you go through these years of your life, let them be the years where you can look back and say without reservation, “I gave my all to grow in the grace and love of God and to learn to pursue Him passionately!” One theme I believe God is ingraining within me through all this is how frail and fragile we really are as human beings. We think we are in control, but we are sorely mistaken. We are but a vapor, David recalls in Psalm 39. God desires us to live with a constant sense of recognizing our utter dependence upon Him, even for our next breath. Friend, don’t take life or even any more days for granted. Consider that our lives are for the purpose of bringing glory to God alone and that this should be our aim and our end in every endeavor. Receive the depths of His love for you consistently throughout every day and relish in the truth of the scriptures concerning His view of you and then choose to live every moment fully consecrated to faithfulness to Jesus.
