Paul's PNG Mission Trip - Ep 11

[pandrews]

(July 5th, 2010)

I hope you all had a happy 4th of July celebration! (For those of you
in the USA that is...)

The day passed here without any fireworks, fanfare, or recognition.
I'd
almost forgotten about it until I happened to receive an email saying
so. It's amazing how easily some things are forgotten, or overlooked.
How many times in our lives are the needs of others overlooked for our
own selfish needs? Even though I'm supposed to be a missionary, and
I'm
supposed to be caring, catering, and aware of the needs of the people
of
Enga, more often than not it's the people here who are caring for me.

Since I'm the only "white-skin" at the station, some of the residence
of
Mambis have been quite contentious about stopping by and asking for
news
from over seas, or just seeing how I'm doing. They don't do this in a
style that I'm familiar with though, but I know what their intentions
are. A few times I've had people stop by for no other purpose than to
give me a stalk of bananas, or a bag full of pineapples. It's their
way
of saying that we're "one bel", we're family, I belong.

It's quite a strange dichotomy to have people who are so willing to
share the little that they have with me, who has been blessed with so
much. And yet, it's exactly the people who have so little who give it
the most freely? What is it about wealth that makes us so possessive?
On Saturday, a guy that I met for ten minutes to buy pineapples from
two
weeks ago stopped by. He farms pineapples as his only source of
income. Unfortunately in the last few years he's had to scale back
his
pineapple plots to less than a quarter of what he's had before because
he had gotten hurt and couldn't walk up and down the very steep
hillside
that his garden is on. He had stopped by just to give me some more
pineapples, and some bananas that he had _purchased_ at the local
market. His gift was for no reason, logic or favor. He simply wanted
to share some of his blessings with me. He possibly did it just to
spend five minutes with me.

God has given us all more blessings than we can count, and I don't
understand why. He owns _everything_, and yet gives it freely. God
gives from his heart to say that we are one, we're family, we belong
to
Him. He gives without though of returned favor, He gives and watches
as
we misuse His gifts, He gives the things most dear to Him... His Son.

Since He has given us so much, shouldn't we spend just five minutes
with
Him?

Paul Andrews
http://zloof.blogspot.com/
http://www.lcms.org/pages/internal.asp?NavID=14786