Life Lessons

I know it has been a couple of weeks since my last post and man has life been busy. I have finally been able to restart Kid's Club on Sunday evenings and I have gotten into a nice routine with Mainly Music. Things are looking great. I will be looking in to quite a few things revolving around a family event series that will go in January and February and to me it looks as if God's hand is already working things out. Isn't just great how God works in and through us and in and through others to encourage us. So this past week was crazy. I had to do all of the preparations for Kid's Club, write a sermon (oh, yes I preached on Sunday, too!), read a book for class, prep for Mainly Music (including birthdays), and then go on a two/three day field trip. So I was one busy lady. But through it all I learned how much God provides the energy and the means to accomplish His work. 
Our field trip was to the early settlements and mission stations in New Zealand located near the Bay of Islands area (for all of you not in New Zealand if you type that into the Google Maps it will show you where we all were), the knuckle of the finger at the top of the north island as I explained it to my mom. We went to these places because we are learning about New Zealand history but especially because we have been reading the book "The Bible and the Treaty". To understand a little more, the country of New Zealand officially became part of the British colonies/power through the Treaty of Waitangi, a document that was between the British government and the Maori. Now there was and still is a lot of issues surrounding this treaty and its meaning and how it was upheld. Well the book discusses the work of the missionaries before the treaty and then after. The story of the missionaries and the Maori that they shared life with fills the pages of this book and overflows with underlying emotion as you read each word. The reality of their life came to hit me full force as we strolled the streets of those first settlements and looked across the same sights they would have seen each morning. We went to Paihia, where the first printing was, the place where the Bible was translated in segments into Maori and distributed (the full Maori Bible was printed in Australia and Great Britain due to cost). Then we took the ferry across waters that at one time had been teeming with ships, sailors, and wakas (Maori canoes) to Russel that had once been know as the hell hole of the South Pacific. Standing in Russel is the oldest standing church called Christ Church. It is surrounded by a cemetery housing several of the names we read about who had changed the history of New Zealand with their faith. The marks of the struggle to bring the Gospel and to maintain Maori culture with the invasion of European settlement were left in the form of bullet holes in the side of the church building. Left as a reminder of what they have been through and it serves as an encouragement to stay strong through the struggles. We sat in whaling pots used to boil the blubber that whalers took without care from the water of the southern coasts of New Zealand. Back across the bay we went to the historic spot from which the treaty was created and signed. We tread the same grounds that just over 170 years the chiefs of the north and the British representatives trod to create this treaty. The mast that indicates the spot of the signing while flying the New Zealand flag at the top and the flag of the Maori chiefs and the British flag. We saw the recreation of the waka that had arrived during the treaty talks bring forth the chiefs and Maori that we under their protection. We also say the house in which the British representative Busby stayed with his family. Journeying further back in time we drove out to Oihi Bay, the bay in which Samuel Marsden landed that historic Christmas day in which he preached the first sermon in the land of the long white cloud. A solemn land that surrounds that monument to celebrate the arrival of the Gospel in New Zealand. The land was barren of any sign of human life. The view would have been similar to what the missionary families would have seen. A rocky beach leading up a steep inclined hill loomed over by a mighty pa (or Maori settlement). As we walked the beaches and retraced some of the steps those first missionaries took I could almost imagine the emotions that wives of those missionaries felt. The loneliness, the vulnerability, the exposed feelings as well as at times a sense of hopelessness in the face of no conversions. They gave their lives in a fight between two Maori iwi (tribes). They gave all they had even though they had not seen one soul won for Christ. The feeling is so overwhelming that it was hard to speak. Imagining if history had been different and Marsden had never worked towards permission to go to New Zealand... The power of the trip has once again altered my thinking of the missionary plight. I was so naive, but to go back to Oihi Bay where it is not built up as some museum to visit, no gawking, no taking pictures of buildings and remains of the first missionaries' lives; there was nothing more than a whisper in the wind that reached right to the soul to proclaim they had ever been there. Even though their work had not produced fruits for them to see, their witness had caused a scene in the spiritual world. Their legacy has lasted nearly two hundred years next Christmas shouting "Rejoice, I bring you good news of great joy!" Christ has come to save us all from our sins!! Even if you don't believe now God believes in you and loves you so much. These missionaries worked to preserve the language by writing it down, to preserve culture by writing it down, made the Gospel applicable by translating it into a message the people could understand. It makes me ponder...where was I when I first heard the Good News? Where were you?