At War

“Go to Ukraine? You must be crazy! There’s a war going on over there right now! Better to stay where it’s safe. Go sometime when the fighting is over.”

“Ukraine? I want to stay as far away as possible from there right now.”

“There are other mission fields, other opportunities that are just as good. Why go there?”

For those who have wondered about my silence for the past month, I spent the two weeks following my last post teaching character based on Biblical principles to kids at a camp in western Ukraine. Before tell much further, I’d like to quickly tell the story leading up to it as I believe it helps to see how God had His hand in this summer.

At the end of last summer, God inspired me that rather than pursuing any kind of journalism for a future career, perhaps I could find something in missional communications. Right about this time, I also felt God guiding me to rejoin the team that goes to camp in Ukraine the following summer. The problem with this was that I had just spent my last college-free summer on a mission internship with a church in Szolnok, Hungary – another opportunity God led me to do. Summer 2015 would be my last college summer and I would need to find an internship for journalism credit, and most internships lasted the whole summer.

Following that sense, I kept my eyes and ears open for an internship opportunity that would fit the timeframe. If God wanted me to be on the team to Ukraine the following summer, He would provide an opportunity to make it work. I looked into a few general internship opportunities during that fall semester and watched each opportunity’s potential fall through.

Despite a couple setbacks, I still felt God’s drawing me back to Ukraine for the camp. So on faith, I talked with a friend from Harding who might be interested to come. Despite summer activities and the war with Russia on Ukraine’s eastern border that usually keep others away, she was enthusiastic and onboard for going… I still had nothing but faith to convince me I could even go. And if I were to go, I felt I would need to find the right internship by mid-January.

On the second-to-last day of the semester, an unanticipated turn of events led me to the Center for Business as Mission office on campus. On my way there, I had no idea God was leading me there to learn about an internship opportunity in the Philippines that would not only fulfill the journalism internship requirement in the perfect time frame but would also deal with mission-oriented communications.

Though I never would have dreamed God would lead me to the Philippines, He found purpose in doing so, both to benefit those in the Philippines and to make the trip to camp in Ukraine possible.

If you’re wondering who would want to go to Ukraine when there’s a war going on, my response is this: Whether we recognize it or not, we’re all at war –with ourselves, with the nations, with spiritual forces. I could have chosen to be at war with the Spirit inside me and disbelieve it would all come together, or fear what might happen if it did. But there’s a spiritual battle to be fought, and I’d much rather be fighting on that battleground than with myself.

At camp this year, we taught about the Fruit of the Spirit. As well, we gave each camper a children’s, a teen’s, and an adult’s Bible with complimentary material so each can further study and learn how to conquer his or her own spiritual battles. We were also able to give Bibles to give Bibles to the staff and counselors and give as many as 120 Bibles out in the local area around the camp. Most, if not all, of these were eagerly received. They can tell they’re at war – not just with Russia but with spiritual forces as well – and they’re eager to stand firm against these forces (Ephesians 6:12-13).

The war we face by going on this trip has always been the spiritual war that continues every day, but God is ever our director bringing every success. This year, if we’d had one less person, our team wouldn’t have been able to make. My story is only a piece of the puzzle of how God made this year’s trip possible. Each one of us made sacrifices to go, and without everything that came together, so much good we were able to do and spread wouldn’t have happened.

“But thanks be to God, who always leads us as captives in Christ’s triumphal procession and uses us to spread the aroma of the knowledge of Him everywhere” – 2 Corinthians 2:14

Younger camper Sofia shortly after receiving her new children’s Bible.

“…Just like it so happened that Daniel found himself in the Center for Business as Mission office at the tale end of this past fall semester, through an interesting turn of events, hearing about an internship that fit perfect with what else he hoped to do in the summer” (excerpt from “It So Happened…” posted May 1, 2015).