Over the next few weeks, a number of folks are hosting an evening with Jen Morgan while providing some tasty morsels for your enjoyment. Currently home for a few months with plans to return in the fall for another ten months, Jen is Vista’s first and only long-term missionary. Let me encourage you to attend one of the Dessert Gatherings near you. We’ll be serving good ol’ normal American desserts – nothing like what you might be remembering from the Indian Jones trilogy…like monkey brains or fish eyeballs.
By hearing from Jen and learning what God has done and how he’s directed our steps in Cambodia, you’ll be excited and informed about our primary missionary effort as a young church. She won’t be asking you for your financial support, so don’t worry about having to navigate that awkward space. I’ll be addressing her financial needs at a later time. Jen will talk to you about her story of faith leading up to her decision to go; the enormously difficult challenges of becoming immersed in a foreign cultural; the new partnerships that have formed and are forming for us; and the exciting direction God seems to be setting for us in the far-reaching and gut-wrenching realities of human trafficking. And most certainly she’ll fill you in on our kids in our Phnom Penh home! No boring home movies, and plenty of time for Q&A.
We find ourselves blessed to have one called as uniquely as Jen and to be involved with something so deeply filled with purpose and promise – if you choose to continue or become involved, I suspect it will be one of the best and most rewarding things you did in this life with your time, energy and resources. God is clearly on the move here…it’s not a good time to be on the bench! Get in the game. Everyone can play in this one.
Monkey brains sound delicious, especially with some A-1 steak sauce.
When I think of the work Jen is doing, it reminds me of something the Bible speaks to very directly. As a Christian seeking to do the will of God, life can sometimes be rather confusing, causing me to ask, “What does God really desire that I do?” James said it very succinctly when he writes, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world” (James 1:27).
I am glad we, the church, are given the opportunity to support this mission. Some of the new direction the Lord has put on Jen’s heart for helping in the despicable human trafficking stuff is even more exciting in that it ultimately will be helping orphans who have no other options to have other options.
I’m sold!