Some of what it takes includes highly counter-cultural dependence on God rather than self. Many would argue it includes counterculturally long time with God in prayer to listen during time alone and time throughout the day, & not muffling your ears as God calls you to sacrifice amidst time in the Word and prayer. When I met Will Graham a few months back with Brian Millard, he said that his granddaddy Billy told him that what he regretted the most was that he did not spend more time in prayer and more time in the Word. Keep in mind that he spent far more time in the Word and in prayer than most pastors. Please pray that I would not merely be yapping in my remembrance with this blog, but live in light of the reality of what the Lord has done time and time again in my life.
In most of my life, I have been unable to say whether something was merely my own desires or the Lord’s definitive will. Most of the time, I don’t know His voice. My level of intimacy isn’t strong enough, and too often my ears would rather be muffled to obedience, even if they might be open to knowledge that I want to know. The Lord would be doing me a disservice if He were to tell me anything in such a state. In the following account I share an example of God speaking to someone where there's statistical improbability involved for someone to say that it was just you. Today, as well as in much of my past, such as the first dozen mission trips I went on, I could have never said that any decision that I made was definitely directed by the voice of the Lord, and not just me and my own desires, notions of wisdom, instruction, etc.
For the email below, one may ask, "why don't we see more things like this in the church?" For me, that question can be answered with ease through the story of my own life, and I may have already told it to you. In the end, we don't depend on God enough. In “Forgotten God”, Francis Chan elaborates on the tragic neglect of the American church regarding the Holy Spirit. I’d highly recommend his book, as well as “Crazy Love”.
While I have never had the clarity of confirmation before that I did for the mission trip before this to India, in comparison to any directional questions in life that come to memory, I also never petitioned God for direction as I did soon before going to India. It was during the time in my life where I was praying more than any other time. My walk with Christ, giving Him legit time in prayer, continued after India, into the time before South Africa. Please pray that I would continually increase in dependence on Him, and that I'd see John 3:30 worked out more and more in my life.
This is the majority of an email that I sent to John Hayes, slightly revised; if it was not for God working partially through him, along with many other people and events that I believe God divinely orchestrated, I would not be going.
I believe that providence may surely be at work. God did quite a few things to place John Perkins out of Mississippi and into a meeting room in Chicago to meet with a class of mine on a field trip last Wednesday. While before you spoke to me, I had little idea about what one could do to effect racial reconciliation besides in befriending non-whites and making sure they were treated as equals in my arenas, Perkins' talk with our class greatly solidified and deepened the discussion you and I had. Your and Perkins talks individually, and especially together, separated by only a little more than a week, inspired me to racial reconciliation like I've never been before. These stories were the greatest stories of tangible racial reconciliation I believe I’ve ever heard.
A week ago, I was sitting in on a "Leadership and Evangelism" course, and the selection of this course under the professor that taught it as well as the date in which it occurred are key to my recent decision to go to South Africa. This course is the only one in the masters program that I'm taking this semester. The accelerated masters program for leadership and evangelism is the only program on campus that I'm aware of that regularly meets in a modular format (thus for less than a week but for long hours during those days). If it was not in this format, there's no chance that I would be in the accelerated program. I even dropped one of the two classes I was going to take in Leadership and Evangelism, which could have easily been this one since the one I dropped was a shorter class than this one, and right now I could use all the load-lessening I can get!
The very fact that I was able to sit in on the class rather than taking it as planned is notable because of the fact that for everyone who took the class for credit, this class was around 2,500$.
There were very few undergrads doing the accelerated masters program, and I was certainly the only undergrad who took that class. It's also somewhat strange that I was even accepted into the program, much less actually going through with it, since I had an incomplete last semester, the first I've ever received at Wheaton. For someone who was only taking slightly over the bare minimum of coursework to be considered a full time student, and getting an incomplete in just that, accelerated doesn't seem to look like a very good idea. I was so behind last semester that it took me a very long time over the summer to complete my assignments for my incomplete (but the long time that it took is essential as apart of another long trail of providence I won't even get into!). Going into this year, starting the Orphan Helpers Club here for the first time on campus, and playing club lacrosse again, I shouldn't be taking an extra class. In fact, going into the evangelism class I was (and still am) very behind.
My teacher … just happens to know a man whose mentor is John Perkins, Wayne Gordon. Perkins “just happened” to be coming to town from Mississippi to meet with his mentor as part of an annual meeting for Gordon's medical ministry through his church. Gordon was adamant about making it clear that he didn't agree to meeting with the Wheaton Class because it was a Wheaton class; he came for my professor who he had been in Bible study with for years. He even talked about how he kept saying no to Willow Creek about preaching at one of their Wednesday night services because of lack of time until finally caving in.
What Perkins said moved me deeply. One of the things he talked about was how he himself had been tortured by white police officers, including them sticking forks up his nose, and that his brother had died in his arms after being shot by a white sheriff. He told us about how he set up a tent in his yard at one time in his life to preach due to very high rates of crime at that time in his area. He also told us how, even though he was openly kind towards a sheriff who kept coming to his preaching, it was a mere formality of his in order to keep up appearances as he was preaching. In fact, he told us how he still harbored intense hatred towards white policemen amidst all this. Yet this sheriff demonstrated that he cared for John. He was the first to come as Perkins set up his tent, and the last to leave. He even had his deputies help Perkins take down the tent on nights. He out-loved Perkins, and this deep demonstration of love won Perkins over to being able to love the sheriff back. This gave me a picture of how deeply people's very 'natural' inclinations towards whites in South African townships must be filled with such deep wounds, even among the strong evangelical Christian communities there. This greatly reinforced what you told me about how I could do something about the situation in terms of reconciliation as well, for people's hearts can change tremendously by demonstrating love towards them. What impacted me the most from our discussion was when you talked about how you were preaching one day to black men and you felt the Lord leading you and told them that you were sorry. Even though it was for mere indifference, and for the race and people that you couldn't control, you said you were sorry, and it meant so much to those people who knew that you meant every word of it because you had been with them and demonstrated your love and care for them. As you told me about how some of them broke down in tears, I myself was fighting the tears back (and did a pretty good job, unless you saw a little water in my eye briefly!).
While very clear further providence (although that's another story!) has made it highly apparent that God wants me to look at work with South-East Asian sex slavery in the future, the functional urgency involved in the mission to South Africa is not present in Thailand or Cambodia. You are planning on going for the first time this summer, and I know that first impressions on something that no one's ever done before are a big deal. The ministries in Thailand with Remember Nhu and International Justice Mission have already been established, so I can go next summer, or the summer after if God calls me elsewhere.
I learned tonight that my own father has been a part of racial reconciliation since the third grade, when his dad wouldn't let him have a black friend from school over to his house. I have known that my father has been a good friend to African Americans for some time, being a white president of his public high school after receiving 80% of the vote facing a black candidate in a 60% black public high school.
I'm very glad that you took the time to engage me when I simply said hi that day in the lower level of the Beamer Center! When I said hi, it took me a second to register that I had just said hi to the chapel speaker because my vision's not great and I sit in the nose-bleed section of chapel. I don't remember almost anything about your ministry from the chapel service, which I think I mostly slept through, and there's very little chance I'd have even considered meeting with you otherwise. Thank you
I wanted to send this to you a week ago, although it would have been without a final decision then, because I knew I would need to get into further prayer before making such a momentous determination. I wanted to get back to you within a week, so I've been focusing prayer on this matter since that Wednesday night. After a little one day fast on the last day of the week of prayer, God put the cherry on top when I found out that I wouldn't have to ask you if you knew who John Perkins was, because at a quick glance at your book while doing a little cleaning up (I still haven't really cracked it open!) I found that it was he who wrote your foreword! Isn't it awesome to work with a providential God who isn't restrained by the barriers of time?!
Thank you,
Adam Garrett
In South Africa, God confirmed my long term calling to minister to those involved in sex trafficking when the only published film that we saw as a team was “Not for Sale.” I had no voice in this decision. I had wanted to see this movie for about a year, as I began to feel a call to minister to those involved in sex trafficking. At the time, and maybe still today, “Not for Sale” was the most well-known documentary in existence about human trafficking worldwide.
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