The SEND U Blog

Reflections and Resources for Lifelong Learning for Missionaries

Category: Books Page 18 of 19

Managing Your e-Books

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On March 1, 2012

In Books

In a previous blog, I talked about the switch I made a few years ago to digital books versus paper copies.   Back in 1987, when we left for the Philippines, we sent all our books in barrels to Manila. Ten years later, when we moved to Russia, we sent the books back to Canada in those same barrels, and took a much more limited number of books with us to Russia in our suitcases. We have now moved to Ukraine, and again some of my books have been sent back to stay in storage in Canada. It is just too expensive and difficult to haul my library every time we move to another country.

 

In that same blog, I talked about the Amazon Kindle as a means of both obtaining and reading English books when you are overseas, and in countries where few English resources are available.   Since then, I have discovered that many of my colleagues in SEND have purchased a Kindle, and have fallen in love with it.   My wife and I now own two Kindles, and use them almost every day.   Besides reading, we both enjoy playing Scrabble on the Kindle, either against the computer or against one another.

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Figuring Out Which Needs are My Responsibility

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On October 14, 2011

In Book Reviews

In the past few days, I finished reading a book, entitled Who is My Neighbor?  Being a Good Samaritan in a Connected World. Steve Moore, the president of The Mission Exchange, authored the book and has created a couple of excellent websites that significantly increase the learning value of the book. I read the book on my Kindle, but the book is also available for free, one chapter at a time, in PDF format from  http://www.whoismyneighborbook.com.The book explores the meaning of the question  “Who is my neighbor?” in a world where we are constantly bombarded by needs from around the globe.  Missionary newsletters, mission websites, and  mission e-mail blasts present us with a multitude of needs from every corner of the earth, to say nothing of what we see on CNN and read on Google News.  For us as missionaries, because many of us live in countries where we encounter grinding poverty, misery and spiritual darkness every time we walk out on the street, we constantly face the question of our responsibility to the needs we see.

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Learning and Servanthood

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On August 21, 2011

In Book Reviews, Learning Attitude

This past month, I read Duane Elmer’s book, Cross-Cultural Servanthood: Serving the World in Christlike Humility.  Elmer, a former faculty member at Missionary Internship (now MTI) has written a number of helpful books about the process of transitioning into another culture and working effectively as a cross-cultural missionary.   Cross-cultural Servanthood addresses the question of what we need to do so that we are actually perceived as servants by the cultures to which we have come.   As he points out, servanthood is culturally defined, so our efforts to serve others may actually be perceived as superiority and condescension by the host culture and national church. Elmer has heard many host culture people say, “Missionaries could more effectively minister the gospel of Christ if they did not think they were so superior to us.” How do we unconsciously communicate superiority, and how can we avoid this and demonstrate Christlike servanthood?

One of the chapters talks about the importance of adopting a learning attitude. As missionaries, we often are infected with the “right answer” virus. One of the symptoms of this infection is that we find it difficult to learn from those whom we perceive to be less educated or less spiritual than us.  Unfortunately, in my personal experience, the more experienced we are as missionaries, the more virulent this virus becomes. Elmer says to combat this virus we need to take a big dose of humility and learn about others, learn from others and learn with others. Although learning about others is important, we need to move on to learn from and learn with the people of the host culture to which we have been called.

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A Praying Life: Book Review

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On June 22, 2011

In Spiritual Formation, Book Reviews, Prayer

A Praying Life bookEquipping missionaries for greater effectiveness must begin with the foundation – a rich and growing relationship with our Lord. A few months ago, I highlighted a book that enriched my personal devotions by showing me a simple method to journal – The Divine Mentor: Growing Your Faith as You Sit at the Feet of the Savior by Wayne Cordeiro. Recently I finished reading another book that has re-energized my prayer life – A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World by Paul Miller.

Child-like dependency

The author helped me to understand more clearly how essential a child-like attitude of dependency is. We need to learn helplessness when we come to God in prayer. Miller says,

‘When Jesus tells us to become like little children, he isn’t telling us to do anything he isn’t already doing.  Jesus is, without question, the most dependent human being who ever lived.  Because he can’t do life on his own, he prays.”

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Creating Margin in Your Life

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On March 23, 2011

In Book Reviews

Many missionaries and particularly mission leaders complain about overload.   Too many emails!   The technological conveniences of email, Skype and Facebook have kept us much more closely connected to our supporting constituencies and loved ones back home than the missionaries of the past.   But they also have greatly added to the onslaught of information that floods our lives and puts pressure on the time available for ministry in our host cultures.   Often time set aside for personal development and training is the first to be sacrificed.

Missionary life was much different in our first term of service.  No, I didn’t arrive on the mission field on a boat.  But my career as a missionary (I was single back then) began before the era of the Internet, or at least the Internet as we know it today.  Back in the early 90’s, we had no telephone in our home in the Philippines, and had to make an appointment at another missionary’s home to use their telephone to make an international call.   Calling back to Canada often took an hour of repeatedly dialing the operator in another town until the operator was finally no longer busy!   Then the operator would seek to connect you to your number overseas, and hopefully that number would not then be busy, and hopefully the connection would survive until you had completed your call!   Believe it or not, I asked Bertha to marry me over such an international call from the Philippines to Canada.   It was a 12 minute call, before the connection failed.   By then she had said “Yes” and so had her father.   But not much more was discussed.   It took another 24 hours before I was able to resume the conversation so that I could tell my bride-to-be where she might find the ring that I had so conveniently hidden for such a time as this!   Another 7 months or so before I would see her.   Cassette tapes and letters (letter = pieces of paper with writing on them folded into envelopes and mailed through the post office) were the primary means of communication.  Now that type of communication provides its own type of stress.  But I definitely did not feel overloaded with a flood of communication!

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