Untitled Sermon (2)

The university group was a wonderful place to become a Christian because there was a lot of time and well, time, to be discipled and trained and I learned how to share my faith. Being a university group, it was a brainy kind of place. We spent a lot of time learning to read the Bible for understanding and thinking through difficult passages. I was rewarded for this hard work in that I learned to love the Bible and I started to see how it is one big story of God as creator just loving his people and going after them again and again to bring them home. But somehow in all the intellectual approach my heart got a bit left behind and by the time I was finishing at university three years later I was wondering how believing in Jesus could seem so cold and lifeless. It didn’t stop me from believing but I did wonder whether God had more than what I understood. And I read biographies of Christians who spoke about a very alive relationship with Jesus. I’d had a dose of truth to the head but it hadn’t grown through to my heart. I started to pray about this very issue, and I prayed about it for two years.

One day I asked my mum, who is a Christian, ‘how do you know this is real? How do you really know?’

Her answer has stuck with me all this time. She said ‘There are things in this that you can’t prove, so there has to be faith. But what I know is this – in Christians I see the most life transformation, I see the most real change, and it is good. I’ve seen it in people I know. Jesus brings change to people, sustained change, and it is good.”

After I finished at university I went to China for a year to study Mandarin Chinese and share Jesus with university students through mission organisation Interserve. My mum and dad and a few friends came to wave me off in the airport. I gave a few hugs and I never looked back. I was on an adventure and I was glad for it.

While I was away I went to a conference for long term mission workers and the speaker offered to pray about specific things people were struggling with. I jumped at the opportunity for prayer. I poured out my story of the last few years, of the spiritual dryness, of a two year relationship with a guy in Adelaide that hadn’t ended in marriage and any other baggage I’d been carrying around. We prayed. And something amazing happened. God answered those prayers. There was this welling up inside me of feeling toward God. Just a quiet filling up, almost like warming up in a patch of sunshine on a cold day. And he spoke into my heart “you are my beloved”. I just knew in my mind and my heart that I was loved by God who made the whole universe.

That prayer answered has had long lasting effects on me. Six months later I was back in Adelaide and people said “There’s something different about you. You are lighter in your spirit, happier”. In a very personal way it set me on a life path with God because I knew He answered my prayer.

From then on, I threw my lot in with Him. Whatever this life brings, I am on the path with you O God.

After the year in China I was captivated with the idea of going back to work there again and to take more opportunities to share Jesus with people. But after a year or two of working in Adelaide I went in a different direction - to Papua New Guinea - on an Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development project, which takes Australian young people to Asian and Pacific countries to work on projects that increase understanding between countries. I was offered a six month project on an island in Papua New Guinea helping to develop eco tourism. I was to live and work out of a hotel run by an Australian family. I’m up for adventure I thought. Sounds interesting to me. So I signed up and off I went.

In the end I was there for five months, and it some specific ways it was one of the more hellish experiences I have ever had the pleasure of surviving. I mean that.

The island I lived on is really a tropical paradise. Clear warm water, bright coral reefs and coconut palms. A scuba diver’s paradise.

The town was also isolated, well off the tourist trail. There were quite a few Australians working there, but the town was so isolated it had developed a frontier mentality. People saw each other and the natural world as an unlimited supply of resources to be exploited for their own use. Everyone did as he saw fit. So there was exploitation, and there was violence.

The hotel owner that I worked for led a group of local toughs who policed their area. I witnessed them beating a man in the street as payback for something he had done.

The town had a deep water port so it was a stopping place for container ships and a base for industry. This meant that there were many more men in the town than women. There were also many, many lonely men. Lots of lonely men working 12 hour shifts on tuna boats or flying planes or some other industry. Lots of lonely men at the hotel and in the town.

Everyone drank too much. Many people had reputations as to how much alcohol they could put away. I once travelled in a ute for the half hour trip between towns driven by an Aussie guy who was driving drunk. I also hid in my room one night while a drunk man I hadn’t even met rampaged around the hotel looking for me. The next morning the women who worked at the front desk joked about it. It was just another night and another day.

In the six months I lived there I also contracted malaria twice, and a small cut on my ankle turned into a big tropical ulcer that had to be lanced and drained.

Every day I experienced oppression of my spirit. Every day I struggled to find someone to trust. The longer I stayed, the longer the list of people I didn’t trust grew. I didn’t have any Christians to meet with regularly and because of this, the flame of faith in Christ, which should burn bright inside our hearts like a raging bonfire, was reduced to a tiny flickering flame. It didn’t go out, but with no one to share Christ with, and so much oppression, it was reduced to the smallest flame.

When I got back to Australia I was pretty broken; I needed counselling but I felt like I couldn’t even begin to tell people what I had just experienced. God provided for me. I was introduced to a beautiful woman at my church called Leslie Inauen. She had become a Christian in her late thirties and had lived a bit before then. She had even been into transcendental meditation before she became a Christian after reading the book of Daniel (side note - this is a miracle!). There was nothing I could say that would have shocked her. So I poured out stories of my time in Papua New Guinea. She listened and prayed with me. Just listened and prayed. Listened and prayed. Over several months. I have never forgotten her kindness in ministering to me in that way.

It is a testimony of God’s grace that He has used the experiences I had in Papua New Guinea to profoundly shape who I am in three specific ways.

First, in this time I learned a lot about how to love people who I would call ‘unloveable’. I remember thinking ‘I can’t spend six months on my own’, so I’d face up to the people around me and learn to see them as people who God loves. I would see their past their behaviour to the brokenness of the person inside, even as the stench of their lives filled me with dread.

Second, I learned that its very difficult to do Christian life on your own. We need to be a part of a community of believers that we can pray with and to walk together. If it’s ever your choice, don’t isolate yourself from believers. No woman is an island.

Third, God taught me something very special about the Christian’s role in speaking out loud against injustice, oppression, exploitation and the like. I didn’t take advantage of this freedom to speak out enough when I was in Papua New Guinea. I don’t think anyone would have listened. But I would have brought truth out into the open. I would have exposed the lies and the evil I saw for what it is. Our minds can play all sorts of games with us, but truth spoken out loud is powerful, even for ourselves. Try talking to yourself! Or perhaps you will need to speak out on behalf of someone else and stand up for what is right…

The trauma of my time in Papua New Guinea got buried a bit as the years passed, but it again in God’s grace it didn’t stay buried forever. When I met Ben in 2009, I could not trust him. I fundamentally mistrusted his intentions . I had spent so much energy safeguarding myself in the trauma of my Papua New Guinea experience that I had a lot of difficulty discerning the difference between genuine friendship and a relationship based on exploitation.