This year's Mission Team in pictures with a brief description of daily events provided by Andy and Marcia Butcher.

A strange thing happened: On the way to the close of the vestry meeting last Sunday, right before we anointed and prayed for our Senior Warden, Bill Stone, the treasurer, Rick Moss, reported, among other things, that we were not in the red. It’s the end of June and summer is upon us, a time when I usually write to you all asking for more support. This is wonderful! What am I to do?

I was tuning into my umpteenth movie on the long ride back from Africa when I heard the Beach Boys singing “Wouldn’t it be nice.” (By the way, you can hear and see the original recording of it on YouTube.) My mind drifted from the movie and before sleep caught me I began to fill in my own lyrics. (By the way -- Sara tells us to sort of do that with our praise on Sunday mornings, not so much fill in lyrics, but in the open moments to fill in our own words to the Lord, or listen for his words for us.) Wouldn’t it be nice to sing a new song to the Lord and hear him whisper your name?

People change, grow and develop into new people. And though family and close community can be wonderful, they can also stifle us or tempt us to stay where we are instead of stepping out on the path that Jesus has set. If you spoke to people from my hometown, they would likely paint a completely different picture of who I was as a Christian in years past than who I am now. I always viewed foreign missions as a distraction from the work we need to do here. Mind you, I did very little work here, but in my mind, it was always local work or foreign work, us or them. My entire view was predicated on human understanding, not God’s economy. In the past several months, God has been showing me just what John Wesley meant when he called for “both/and” not “either/or”.