Inspiration From The Road

I'm on the road for East Texas Baptist University and this morning finds me in a La Quinta in Houston, preparing for a day of contacting people for the school. And this morning I finally act on my best intentions of the past many months--I am posting a blog! One might ask what has inspired me to do such a thing, and that would be a more than fair question. Why would anyone record their thoughts in public and expose them to cyberspace? Is it vanity? Is it therapy? Is it a feeble attempt to see one's life as larger than one's self? Honestly, there may be an element of each of these in my decision to bravely face the keyboard this morning, with java at my righthand and Bible at my left, symbols of a godly start to the day. But the great inclination to blog this day comes from an email I received this morning from a friend in Kenya concerning a former student at the Kenya Baptist Theological College. The email details a commissioning service at Parklands Baptist Church in Nairobi in which a young lady is being sent out by her church as a missionary to East Timor. The pastor is a man I had the privilege of teaching at KBTC. In his message to the new missionary, he asked his church to claim Deuteronomy 28:1. Simon Mwangi, the Associate Pastor at Parklands Baptist Church said, “Time has come for the African church to send missionaries all over the world.” In 1998, I taught a course at KBTC concerning "The Unfinished Task", in which I challenged my Kenyan students to become cross-cultural missionaries themselves rather than continuing to be on the receiving end of western missionaries. At the end of the course, the students gave me a beautiful hand carved plaque in the shape of Kenya, bearing the words "the Unfinished Task." On the back were written all the names of the students and how each intended to be involved in cross cultural missionary work. Simon Mwangi was one of those students and I am thrilled to see the fruit of that class expressed in his ongoing ministry. So, there you have it--enough inspiration to put me behind the keyboard and enough inspiration to stay at the task of finding every possible way to make disciples and be a mentor to others.