Two weeks ago, I (Rich) returned from my 16 days in India and another six days in Bangladesh. In the map above, the straight segments are flights, and the squiggly segments are a crude approximation of the driving we did. The black segments indicate week 1, flying into Delhi and having a few days in North India and then a few days in Northern Orissa (segment 5). In Northern India I was in two places I’ve not been before, meeting up with pastors and lay leaders and connecting with two capable translators who are helping me to begin new Zoom classes with pastors in Himachal Pradesh and Punjab states.  It was a very encouraging time with new networks of pastors. In Northern Orissa I was with the partner and translator with whom I have had the longest collaboration. We held a graduation ceremony for the 18 pastors who have gone through my Sketches of Leadership course, as they were awarded a “Certificate of Completion” from Church of the Rock Theological College. My translator is educated and has a MDiv from a theological seminary in India, but many of these pastors do not have any diploma beyond high school; for some of them this certificate may be the one they display on their wall indicating their Biblical training. I was deeply moved as they testified to how their own teaching has deepened and changed to become more inductive and interactive, and how that has strengthened the growth of their churches and their church members.

The second week of my trip took me to Dhaka, Bangladesh (marked by the orange line  on the map). There I taught 20 organizational leaders in a MA program about fundraising, emphasizing that it is Biblical and in fact is honorable ministry, to the people we are asking to join our team who make our ministry possible. Training developing world leaders in fundraising is very satisfying for me, as it is an important skill for them, especially as the focus is sustainable fund development, helping them to build up a culture of local giving for local ministry, not just relying on big granting institutions or generous churches from the West. These students lead organizations serving the poor, children and others rescued from trafficking, and other vulnerable populations throughout Bangladesh.

The final 9 days of time in India was spent visiting 19 villages and medium-sized towns, teaching church members and training pastors in inductive teaching, mostly using the first five chapters of Mark. This was a tiring but rewarding and gratifying itinerant mission. We were several times in strikingly remote locations, including where every family had a big pile of wood in front of their house, collected from the surrounding scrub land and small trees and used in cooking their daily meals. At the same time, I noticed no small amount of cell phones, and several times when the electricity in the building shut off, cell phone flashlights popped on and we were able to continue the teaching with their light until the power resumed a few minutes later. An odd mix of premodern technologies (cooking meals over a wood fire) and ultramodern smartphones!

During the first week, I taught on Elijah on Mt. Carmel, describing the showdown between Baal and Yahweh and Elijah’s boldness in defeating the vast number of prophets of Baal. One 16-year-old girl, “Ranjita” responded to this teaching by returning to the home village she had been chased out of a few months before. She is a new believer, and  both her Hindu parents and occult-supporting people in her home village had expelled her. Upon returning to her village, she found a young man who was sick and being prayed for by his Hindu family. She told him that the Lord was God and more powerful than the Hindu gods to which his family were praying. She prayed to God in Jesus’ name, and he was healed. The man’s family was glad for the healing but not happy about her preaching about Jesus. Then a second person, whose family practiced occult rituals, was sick. She again spoke powerfully about Jesus and prayed for complete healing, and the boy was healed. The family and the occult leaders were so angry that they prayed to their demons to kill Ranjita. The demon’s response surprised them all! “We cannot touch Ranjita, because her God is the Most High God.” Now Ranjita leads a small group with seven families who have turned to her God! All this happened in the last month.

Visiting relatively remote villages, I taught two or three times per day. Everywhere in India it is hard to miss the gender imbalance in the church. The pastors are (mostly) men, but the church members seem to be 75% women. The young women and teenage girls come to church with their notebooks, in which they write the words to new songs and take notes on the Bible teaching. It was much rarer to see teen boys with notebooks. So, it was encouraging to hear that, as a result of the teaching, 3 young men have come forward to receive a six-month training internship with my translator and partner in Southern Orissa. They will stay in his little guest room for a few months and will travel with him to remote villages.  They will go through both the Sketches of Leadership classes I am teaching as well as additional training done by my partner. He was very encouraged by this development, and is well poised to see these young men grow up to be rural church-planting pastor-evangelists.

Since getting back, 3 new zoom classes are starting, the early fruit of the trip, and the existing groups in the locations I visited have added new members. I get lots of feedback that people enjoy the training, but the feedback that is the most gratifying is when I hear stories of people who hear the word, accept it, and act on it in ways that produce a harvest, some thirtyfold, some sixtyfold, and some hundredfold. It is a privilege to be able to teach people who are so consistently good soil!

I have been teaching Mark 15 for many of my Zoom classes this week, in light of Holy Week and Good Friday. If you would like to read my Good Friday reflection (about 5 minutes reading), visit my blog post here.

Lisa Reflects on the past month:
What a momentous five weeks it has been! On March 2, I flew to Albania, where I joined 160 theological educators from around the world, gathered to consider the challenges and the opportunities ahead for the church. Every meal was a chance to meet with faithful faculty, deans, and doctoral students from Egypt, Brazil, Ethiopia, and everywhere in between. The conference featured Impact Teams, like daily tracks, and mine, Women Thriving, considered the challenges of female students, faculty, and leaders and how they are courageously and creatively facing them. I was able to pull together a wonderful team of presenters from around the globe, and was so pleased with the conversations at each session. I'm so grateful to have been able to attend this gathering.

I returned very late Saturday, sent Rich off to India Sunday, and on Monday, my mom's visiting nurse team declared her to be within a week of her death, due to her congestive heart failure. This began a whirlwind of details, getting her oxygen, a hospital bed, and palliative medicines. While I missed Rich immensely over the next three weeks, I can truly say that I experienced God's care, provision, and even a minor miracle or two! Both Becca and Avery's church and our church mobilized to bring me meals, and various friends and pastors came to pray and say final goodbyes. It was truly remarkable that a woman who moved here during a pandemic, at age 91, became so dear to many people here. She rallied to thank them, tell a joke or two, and receive their prayers for the first half of the week, but by Thursday she was too weak for that.

One of her final conversations was with a dear friend here whose child was in need of an organ transplant. My mom told her that her first words to God upon entering heaven would be about that! On Sunday, March 16, she began to be in real pain, which we met with medication, and she died that night. The following day, these friends received news that a matching organ had become available, and she had a successful surgery the next day.  Now, we don't know exactly how that all worked in the divine plan; we will simply say that we are so grateful!

Lesser miracles in terms of provision included that a dear friend from CA had already planned to come for much of the next week, which was a huge help to me, and the kind friends I've made here who are nurses or doctors who were able to pop in with helpful advice and encouragement throughout the final week of my mom's life. Thanks as well to all of you who sent notes and messages of care as well. If you have interest in reading my sharing about my mother at the memorial service, visit my blog post here.
 
We both very much appreciate your prayers as we continue to serve both in Durham and in Asia, and as we seek God’s guidance regarding our next steps in the coming months.

As Jesus goes to the cross, he stops teaching, but Mark starts teaching us in parables. He introduces two characters who are the human face of the implications of the cross.
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It is ironic that the Chief Priests, Scribes, and the crowd at Pilate’s audience clamor for him to release
Barabbas. Barabbas is the kind of man they are portraying Jesus to be—one who has rejected the authority of Rome, a challenge to Caesar. But Pilate knows that if Jesus were such a man, they’d be clamoring for him to be released (because they hate the authority of Rome). Barabbas is one such man, and until a few hours ago, the third cross being prepared for the condemned men had his name on it. But in a moment of unexpected grace, Barabbas is set free, while Jesus goes to his cross. Lucky Barabbas!

But Barabbas has a significance beyond his own story of freedom. Barabbas is the only untranslated Aramaic in Mark’s gospel, but Mark has given us the pieces of Barabbas’ name to be able to work it out ourselves. In Mark 10:46 we learn “bar” means “son of”, and in 14:36, in Jesus’ prayer, we learn that “abba” means “father”. Barabbas was a rebel, a “son of a father”, which is about as generic a boy’s name as you can get. We are all rebels, children of our parents. Barabbas is “Joe Everyman” and his cross was ours. Jesus took our place upon that cross. As he himself said, he came “as a ransom for many”.

Then Mark introduces another new named character in his story, Simon of Cyrene. Usually, if you want to name someone, you might say, as Mark does, “Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus.” But it was rarely done to identify someone by their children, unless the children would be known to the people you are writing to. Indeed, I assume that Simon of Cyrene became a believer, and his (now adult) children are known to the people of Rome, where Mark is first putting his gospel on paper. And Paul mentions a Rufus living in Rome (Romans 16:13) when he writes his letter to that church, before he arrived in Rome shortly before his death. So the most logical explanation of this is that Simon of Cyrene, a random passerby at the time of Jesus’ death, became so taken up by the story that pressed itself upon him that he followed up with it, joined the believers in Jerusalem, and eventually his children were believers in Rome.

Jesus, in Mark 8:34, said to his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Simon of Cyrene is the first person to take up the cross, literally Jesus’ cross when he no longer could carry it, and follow Jesus along the way to his death. This would have had a profound impact on Simon, and he is a model for us of one who follows Jesus, saying yes to suffering, to the cross we each must bear, and saying yes to Jesus’ call to follow him to our death, whatever death comes. Jesus’ death, not ours, is the ransom. Our suffering or death cannot save anyone. But Jesus does promise that, as we follow him, saying yes to suffering in his name, our death can be, like his, redemptive. Our suffering can be meaningful, purposeful, healing and redemptive in our own life and the lives of many others. By the power of Jesus’ cross, our suffering too has power.

So Jesus’ death is a ransom. Jesus faced a grim and painful death on a cross marked out for us. He died for us. Yet also Jesus’ death is a model. We are called to follow him and embrace redemptive suffering in his name.

“I choose purple and green!” I felt downright giddy as I announced this at the dinner table, at age 8 or so. “And I choose blue and gold!” my older sister Ruth chimed in, equally exuberantly. These sentences were in answer to my mom’s offer to paint our bedrooms in any two colors we chose. She may have had something more subtle in mind, but she stuck to her promise.
This feels emblematic of my mom—her eagerness to make everything a team sport, her willingness to relinquish control and trust people, and her enjoyment of the unconventional and the colorful. I didn’t know how unusual this was until later. I had never really thought about the fact that our backyard was the place all the kids naturally landed after school, until one kid pointed it out. He said it was because, “Your mom lets us have fun. Our parents are worried about us making a mess, but your mom likes mess! She listens to us like we’re real people. She bakes us cookies and teaches us games and turns on the sprinkler for us to run through.” That side of her was out in full force at the Halloween party where she stuffed herself inside a fold-out ladder and had my dad drape it with sheets, so she could turn on a flashlight and shout “Boo!” as each child came up the driveway.
She loved to host parties for adults, too, even though she was not, truth be told, a great housekeeper or cook. It didn’t matter. I remember the handmade signs she and my dad made inviting international students at San Jose State to come over for Thanksgiving dinner, and the motley groups that gathered around our ping pong table. It wasn’t about the food; it was about friendship and the wide-open table.
It was also about the laughter. I remember the fancy molded Jello salad that hadn’t set quite enough by the time everything else was ready at a dinner party. As she and two of her friends were trying to get it onto a platter, the operation went south, and somehow it slid right into the kitchen sink. Instead of this upsetting them, they threw back their heads and roared with laughter as it shimmied down the drain! I distinctly remember looking up at their faces with a mix of disbelief and fascinated attraction—I couldn’t understand why they weren’t devastated. But I longed for that kind of freedom to fail, to let go of what one had hoped for and to simply delight in what is. To find humor in any situation, and to do life with dear friends at one’s side. These were life skills that served my mom well as she weathered many challenges.
My mom was quiet, but she was so brave. I remember her saying, as we faced the large waves of Santa Cruz, CA, “The ocean is your friend. You don’t need to fear it. If you get caught in a wave, just relax and think of it like a trip through the washing machine. You’ll come out alright in the end.”    This had in some ways been her life experience. Her childhood had been really hard, with a father who was both physically and verbally abusive.  But by the grace of God and sheer pluck, she came out more than alright in the end.
I think that’s why the story of Emily the Cow resonated so deeply that she specifically requested it be told at her memorial service. Emily was a cow headed to slaughter in Massachusetts in 1995. The workers were on their lunch break, so Emily saw her moment to break free. She got a running start and leapt in all her bovine glory over a 5-foot-tall fence and ran deep into the forest, where she evaded capture for six weeks, until a farming family bought her from the slaughterhouse and let her live out a happy life in their meadow.
I think my mom’s leap out of destructive mess of her childhood home came in stages and through surprising choices—the unlikely choice to spend a summer during college serving Mexican children in a migrant camp with her church young adults group. Or the bold choice to buy a used but sporty Studebaker Coupe convertible while she was a single woman working in San Francisco after college and go charging up and down the hills of the city in it with her friends. The choice to see a very quirky man, with epilepsy and mild autism and the odd name of George Washington, and say, “Now there’s a man with a heart of gold. He’s the one for me.” They leapt together out of the hardships of their childhoods by the grace of God, into adult lives that were brighter and more colorful. She and my dad followed Jesus together joyfully and wholeheartedly.  
The world of careers was frustrating and disappointing for her. She worked after college for the Methodist publishing house, work she genuinely enjoyed, and then later teaching English as a Second Language and as a popular substitute teacher in elementary schools. But her primary vocation as of 1960 was lavishing care upon a child with disabilities, my sister Ruth, advocating tirelessly for her full inclusion in schools well before that was common, and watching in amusement as Ruth introduced herself to literally every person in the grocery store, to the chagrin of her more introverted sister! My mom didn’t have a career, but she had a vocation, which she lived out faithfully and well.
She was also an eager supporter of my vocation from a young age. I remember the time I was about ten or eleven and in wide-eyed wonder after having stayed in the adult service at church for the first time. The pastor had preached a rather mediocre sermon, though I was not discerning enough yet to know that. I asked, “Could I do that someday?” Her response: “Probably a lot better than he just did!” She marched me on up to him and had me ask him how one becomes a pastor. His rather uninspired reply was, “Uh, well, you go to seminary.” She fulminated to my dad all the way home that he’d missed a chance to talk with me about becoming a leader who loves people and cultivating my love of Scripture. I love this story because it shows her quick wit, something so many friends and relatives have commented on, which stayed with her even to her final week, and it shows that she took faith and ministry seriously, from her own work as an elder to her deep gratitude to those who pastored her well in her final years.
Her willingness to risk and trust God took her life on a surprising twist near its end. Becca shared about that, but I want to add one more thing she said about it.  When Rich and I began pondering a missional venture back in 2019, she said, “I don’t want you waiting around for me to die before you say yes to God’s calling. Make your plans to go and something will work out for me.”
Little did she know how warmly the amazing church community of Emmaus Way would welcome her. But this past spring it became clear that the arrangement with her facility was no longer working, and we needed to make changes quickly. That was when a friend of ours and of Triangle Grace church raised the possibility of us living here, in a home that has been a forested haven of peace for my mom’s final months, and with kindness from many here as well. We are so grateful to both church communities.
My mom had some strikingly vivid dreams toward the end of her life. Last year, she dreamed that my sister, who died in 2016 and had never driven a car, pulled up in a car and drove her around, with my dad in the backseat. They were excited to give her a tour of a stunning new place, with mountains like nothing she’d seen in their beauty and vastness and the intensity of their colors. Truly a foretaste of heaven. I like to think that the skies, trees, flowers, and mountain ranges she saw were filled with vivid colors…colors like purple and green, and blue and gold—like the colors she so generously gave to us.