Tearful Plea

At a recent training one local field worker mom stood up and passionately asked for prayer for her children. She shared how her children are constantly bombarded with religious indoctrination at school and in the community and because their family is the only believers in their neighborhood, her children don’t have the support and balance they would have had from extended family. With tears in her eyes she said, “I’m trying to reach them, but I’m becoming afraid of losing my children in the process.”

There are many wonderful things about raising children in a cross cultural setting. They learn to appreciate different ways of doing things and looking at things. Their world is much larger than a single culture upbringing. They often become bi-lingual and bi-cultural. But there are also costs.

They don’t feel like they fit anywhere. They often have to endure being stared at and being treated as “different” from other people around them. This is especially hard when they become teenagers.

Parents embrace cross-cultural work as a calling and a choice. Children have no choice. They are where they are because of their parents. While the power of “the call” is very meaningful to the parent, it often doesn’t have the same power with the children. This willing sacrifice and abandon by the parent can become a deep resentment in the heart of the child unless God intervenes on many levels.

Ideally, the children will embrace a family calling and feel the same strong sense of God leading them to their people group and adopted culture as their parents. This process of the children embracing “the call” needs to be nurtured by the entire community of workers.

The evil one loves to attack God’s called out ones, and he often does so by attacking their children. The devil is no gentleman. It’s not beneath him to attack and destroy a child if by doing so he can stop God’s work from moving forward. He will do it gleefully if he gets the chance. Let’s not give him the chance on Sumatra.

Pray that God will guard the hearts and minds of worker’s children on Sumatra.

Pray that these children will embrace God’s call to the nations as their own.

Pray for workers on Sumatra to be sensitive to opportunities to nurture “the call’ in the lives of all the children on their teams.

Pray that families on the field will have wisdom to protect and nurture their children in the face of community pressure and in the absence of extended family support networks.

Pray for moms who often times are called upon to singlehandedly create a loving, nurturing Christian home in the midst of non-Christian or even an anti-Christian environment.

Pray for the evil one to be bound and have no opportunity to harass the children of field workers on Sumatra.