The Road Less Travelled By

“The Road Less Travelled By” written by Robert Frost is one of my favorite poems. I especially love the last three lines:

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

I wonder why in the poem the less travelled road made all the difference to the person. I suppose the answer is irrelevant. I suppose the point is that being the road less travelled there was something present that the road had to offer the traveler—something good.

Following Jesus is like that.  Being a disciple of Jesus makes an eternal  difference in our lives as it is the road less travelled by—even in today’s world of relativism and intolerance (in spite of all the vocalized views for tolerance).

Jesus said,

“Go in through the narrow gate. The gate that leads to destruction is broad and the road wide, so many people enter through it. But the gate that leads to life is narrow and the road difficult, so few people find it.” Matthew 7:13-14 CEB

But we are able to find the gate/road to eternal life.  It’s not a hopeless pursuit. 

There was a time in my life as a younger Christian when I wanted to give up being a Christian--not because I no longer believed God existed or that Jesus was no longer my Savior. I was worn out. I was tired. Tired of struggling with sin. Tired of wrestling with myself and Satan. Tired of watching people fight. And I thought that if I gave up, then I wouldn't have to wrestle anymore. Life would be easier. 

But I knew I was wrong in my so called logic. And I knew that I was struggling with following Satan's lies--the easy road. 

Jesus also said,

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.”

Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”  --John 14:1-6 NIV

I knew that if I gave up on God, what that consequence would be. That, and Ed Wharton's class on Christian evidences was very convicting for me to remain faithful. Life with God is far better than a life without Him--in this world and in the next. And so Jesus is that gate through which we must pass. 

And so for Christians, following Jesus is the road less traveled. God gave us grace through Jesus. He took a hard road to bring us eternal life. I don't imagine it was easy for Jesus. He was tempted, and yet was without sin. He probably wrestled with His humanity. He fought Satan. He watched people fight. And yet He endured because He knew what He was going through was worth it to save us. And He knew that life with God was far better than a life without Him. And for us. So Jesus understands how rough life it at times. 

And so He died for us. I don't know of any other "god" that has done that for people. 

Jesus took the road less travelled by--and that has made all the eternal difference. 

-Jewel Melton

AIM 2002, Croatia

He Hears You, Dear One

The support ran out weeks ago. 

Your parents want you “home”.

The people at your congregation keep asking how your “vacation” is going.

Your team keeps fighting.

You and God haven’t spoken in days. 

What do you do when It seems the world has turned its back on you? What do you do when you have only your sword and shield against the invisible armies pumped to end your life at any second? What do you do when you can’t think of how to stay, but you can’t bear to go?

I was in this situation. I lived this reality six years ago. I was in a situation that was wonderful and full of pain all at the same time. The months where you feel isolated. You are eating beans, rice, and whatever moldy vegetables you can find in the back of your cabinet. The days spent crying in bed. 

Crying out to a God who you can’t hear. 

Crying out for comfort. 

Crying out for guidance.

Just crying out for a hug. 

He hears you. Oh pilgrim, he hears you. You are now wandering through a land that is not your own. You can count your belongings on your right hand. You can count your supporters on the other. You may be discouraged like you never thought possible. 

He hears you.

He hears you when you cry out in the night. So isolated because this language is not your own, and you have trouble even trying to buy a cup of coffee. So alone because you can’t seem to connect with the very people paired up to journey with you into the barren land. So afraid because the book you hold in your hand isn’t giving you the comfort and joy it once imparted. 

He hears you.

He loves you, my wonderful friend, He loves you more than you can imagine. Every day his heart bleeds tears for your sorrow. He is trying to speak to you. He is sending his message to You.

I love you dear one. I hear you, and I see you. 

So you wake up every morning. You thank Him for small victories. The car started. The bus ran on time. Your team prayed together. You hugged through the tears. You walk forward. Your head held high with the knowledge of love. With the intention of sharing, of loving, of giving, of serving, of praying, and of preaching. You thank our Father for his grace, and you keep going.

He hears you.

He loves you.

-Lydia Mulligan (Weatherly) 

West Mains, Scotland AIM 2005

A Fork in the Road

           What is God doing? What does God want?  Questions I have asked often in the last two years.  There are so many ways to describe AIM to someone.  My personal favorite is “an emotion, spiritual, and physical at times rollercoaster”, but something I would never change. It has been a journey, but I think I’ve learned a lot about how to answer these questions in a healthy way. I don’t believe that I could ever say I fully know what God is doing, but I always know that He is working. I don’t believe I could fully know what God wants, but I know that He wants for us to know Him more, and be happy doing that.

            I never have been good at making big decisions; I always wonder if what I have decided is what God wants. I have started to learn in understanding God’s love for me—that in the decisions that I make, God does want me to be blessed. The biggest decision that I had to make recently was where I wanted to be after my field time. My options were California or Texas. I went back and forth for the longest time about where I wanted to be, the answer was both, but as we all know I can’t be in both places at once. I was then reminded that it doesn’t matter where I choose to be because God is always working. I struggled with that for a long time, remembering that God may give me two different paths that I can choose from, but He isn’t going to bless me in one and not bless me in another. I find that the only time I won’t see God using me, is when I don’t let Him use me. I constantly need to remember that God is showing us things throughout the day that I can be doing for Him. Sometimes, I’m just not looking.

            As of this last week I have had to remind myself once again of all this, also remembering I may choose something and God may change that up a little to work in different ways. As I said before I had this big decision on where I was going to go after the field. I chose to go to Grass Valley, California because it just seemed to be working out and that God was just putting more open doors there (pretty cool thing to see God was helping me out). But, throughout this last week God has changed that and has blessed me more through this process. I am now moving to Auburn, California where I will be able to live and work in the fields that I wanted to before, but couldn’t. But there are also so many ministry opportunities here. I have seen God just change around plans, but open up ways that I can choose to give myself to Him and let Him use me.

            I thank God for the times that He has given me and the things that He has allowed in my journey with Him. I don’t look back and regret anything, because He is the one guiding me. I thank God for the choices He gives me, but I also thank Him for changing those around when needed.

            I encourage you all to make choices based on what you love to do. I encourage you to choose to walk with God in each of those choices that you make, because if you are looking towards Him, He WILL use you. 


-Jeni Bandanza
 Leon, Mexico 
 AIM 2009

Changing Plans

“ The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family through her. “ ~ Sarai, Genesis 16:2

Most of us are familiar with God’s promise to Abram of innumerable offspring - and we know how Sarah tried to “help” the process along. In fact, I felt so familiar with this story that when I was reading it recently, I was tempted to skim through it just because I ‘knew’ the story already. But, because I felt that prideful ‘been there, read that’ moment, I purposefully slowed down to read it again. And God faithfully revealed a fresh new detail that I’d never noticed previously.

God had decided long ago that Sarai wasn’t going to have children. I feel certain she prayed for children. But somewhere in her journey, she settled with the reality that God had closed her womb and that possibility. I kind of found it curious that she hadn’t tried to build a family earlier through her maidservants – but instead it seems she had just resigned to the state of being childless. When Abram shares God’s revelation with her, she doesn’t seem to lament this change of plans – but shifts into “planning” mode following her belief in his encounter. She simply states what she’d seen all along – that if God’s plan was for Abram to have children, it wasn’t going to be through her. How did she know that? Because that’s how it had always been. The Lord had already closed her womb.

“The Lord has kept me from having children.”

Here’s what I want us to catch. Sarai’s mistake wasn’t solely a lack of faith in God’s ability to keep His word or make His plan happen. Her ‘faith mistake’ was interpreting God’s future plan for her by her past with Him.

Pretty reasonable assumption, don’t you think?

In fact, I’d go so far as to say for most of us, God is only as big as we’ve experienced Him personally at that moment. I mean, we read the stories and know in ‘theory’ that God can do a whole lot, but often we assume that power is for everyone else… for another time and place, and a story better than ours is at the moment.

Think about your own life. Is there anything that you’re eager for God’s involvement in, but you find yourself limiting the possible outcomes to only the realities you’ve experienced so far with Him? Maybe you’ve returned home from the field to a church that you feel will never change. Maybe you start down a path towards a new mission field, only to have God put on the brakes. Maybe your marriage, which seemed so full of life at the beginning, feels increasingly dead as time goes by.

The call to let God work in our lives free from the assumptions of His work in the past is a tough one. Joseph is a fascinating example. When Pharaoh’s dream needs interpreting, and Joseph is called up out of his cell, we assume he reveled in the fact that he was finally vindicated. But I wonder if Joseph was really all that excited? I’m sure being out of prison was a relief, but when Pharaoh says he will give Joseph one of the highest positions in all of Egypt, does Joseph struggle with a little flashback? I mean, in Joseph’s life, interpreting dreams and being raised to positions of power were always followed by dark valleys of injustice and loneliness. Was he tempted to just ask for freedom and walk away from the leadership?

The more life God gives us, the more tempted we are to think we’ve seen Him work as much as He’s going to work. It’s easy to be a ‘fan’ of God and still bind ourselves and our faith up to only what we’ve experienced firsthand. I encourage you to anchor yourself to the truth that God doesn’t say that He can only do what we ask or imagine. He doesn’t even say He can do a little more that we can ask or imagine. He says he can do exceedingly, abundantly more than we ask or imagine. That’s a big invitation to imagine beyond what you’ve experienced so far. Keep seeking!

-Heather Pitney Thornton

Go do!

I remember the first few days of AIM. I was astonished at the lack of sinful people around me. I considered leaving because I didn’t think I would ever be like them. I thought they would find me out for who I was, and soon. But when I thought of actually going home to explain why I quit to my supporters, that seemed even worse than staying. I mean, what was I going to say? Mr. Elder, it was terrible. I decided to quit because they were all so “holy.”

For the first few weeks, I only focused on not doing anything wrong. It was hard at first, but that AIM bubble helped me make it though some tough spots. After a few weeks I got better at it, and after a few months I was doing great - not the greatest AIMer ever at this point, but light years from where I was on that first day. Then I got to the field, and things were wonderful: I was teaching, preaching, getting involved in people’s lives, and I was even lucky enough to dunk a few. By the way, I’m the greatest baptizer in the world. Years of having a swimming pool in the back yard and 2 younger brothers will do wonders for your dunking arm.

Then I came home. Wow. Things were different. I was no longer the missionary. Once the dust settled, I had few responsibilities at church. People didn’t seem to be interested in what I had to say like they did in South Africa just because I was an American, go figure. I started to get bored with going to church. I started making excuses to myself about why I didn’t have time to evangelize, or study my bible, or even be kind to someone who needed it. I remembered what things were like before I left, and I tried to fit back into that routine because it felt safe. Before long reverse culture shock set in and I was just trying to make it through the day, just trying to make it through life, and hoping to make it through to eternity. It was terrible.

It didn’t hit me at the time, but, spiritually, I was moving backward. I was back to just trying to not do anything wrong again, and I had buried my talent. My reverse culture shock didn’t come from missing South Africa, like I thought at the time; it was from missing the lifestyle of sold out service for the Lord.

In the book If Only, Dr. Neal Roese describes the 2 kinds of regret. First is the regret of action, or the sins of commission. Second is the regret of inaction, or the sin of omission. I think we all struggle with this regret of inaction.

I don’t know what’s in your life exactly, but I’ve never done those terrible sins that you hear about. I’ve never committed murder, I’ve never committed adultery, and I’ve never stolen someone’s life savings. Yes, I have done things that I wish I hadn't done. But for me, my biggest regrets aren’t what I have done, but the things that I was too big of a coward to do. There would be something that I knew I needed to do, something the Lord had placed on my heart to get accomplished, but I wouldn’t do anything.

The church has been fixated on the sins of commission. We have these long lists of don’ts. Our attitude has been of spiritual maturity by subtraction. In other words, if I don’t do this list of sins for 20, 30, 40, 50 years then I will become spiritually mature.

Mark Batterson writes in his book, In a Pit With a Lion On a Snowy Day, that when you think about it, spiritual maturity should be by multiplication. Goodness is not the absence of badness. We can’t do enough nothings, we can’t subtract enough, and we certainly can’t just run away from sin in order to become spiritually mature. Our calling is much higher than to simply step away from what’s wrong. Yes, keeping sin at bay is part of it, but not all. You can do nothing wrong, and still do nothing right. Trying to live a life without sin while neglecting works of service is deadly to your soul.

The reason that ruler in Matthew 25 was so upset with the wicked servant for burying the talent is because that was the only sure fire way to accomplish absolutely nothing. When we bury our talent it’s no wonder Christianity is boring to us, and this lifestyle is not attractive to people watching us, because it’s just a list of things not to do. It doesn’t get the blood pumping.

To one extent or another we all know this to be true, maybe we just haven’t put it in words yet. Think about it. If you were at work and at the end of the day your boss came in and asked what you got done that day, if you said, "Nothing, not a thing. But I didn’t hurt the company either, so we’re good," what would he say? James says, "Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do."

We fill our days with things that in the grand scheme of life and eternity mean very little, and then we make excuses and say that we don’t have time to serve the Lord. But when we make the realization that acts of service to the Lord is one of the few things in the cosmos that does actually matter, we free ourselves from the lie that doing nothing wrong is enough. So the next time you think to yourself, I really should go talk to my brother about the gospel, or the next time God puts someone in your path to show kindness to, when you feel that blood pumping in your veins, GO DO IT. Look for those God-ordained opportunities in your life, and dig up your talent. Start changing your lifestyle back into that sold-out service for the Lord. That’s when the Lord will say, "Well done, my good and faithful servant."

Jeremy “Tigger” Vass

Are you walking by faith or by sight?

Are you walking by faith or sight?

I know that I am walking by faith because everything is great, no one is complaining, people like me, good things keep happening, and most of all I know that I'm walking by faith because other people tell me I'm doing a great job!

It is easy to fall into the habit of judging our spiritual lives with physical eyes. How do we judge the faithfulness of Stephen in Acts 7 When he stood by faith and proclaimed Jesus? Did he do the right thing? Was he walking by faith? Did his message become less faithful when the crowd dragged him out of the town and began to crush him with stones?

Sometimes the physical result of our daily walk is not the best identifier of faithfulness. If we look to the physical for affirmation we are training ourselves to walk by sight and not by faith.

Was the old woman who gave her last two coins in Luke 21 faithful in her giving? Jesus seemed to think she was faithful. But what if she were to run out of food at the end of the month? What happens if there is an emergency? She gave everything she had! Maybe she should have only given one coin and saved the other in reserve, in case of emergencies. Maybe she was TOO faithful!

Walking by faith has less to do with seeing physical results and more to do with trusting in a powerful God to accomplish His will in our lives. Lets worry about physical results less and trust in God more.

- Mike Wiist

The God of the small stuff

I love science. Not all of it though. Biology leaves me confused, and though I admire folks who make that their life-work, it's not a field that has much appeal to me. I love the certainty of chemistry and the 'relative' (excuse the pun) certainty of physics. But there's a field of science that I've grown enamored with in the last decade, the field of biochemistry, the study of biology on a molecular level, examining the way “life” functions beyond the level of cells, at the level of proteins and DNA. While I haven't yet found a Biochemistry For Dummies, I am always looking for a new textbook or some other entry-level book to help me understand it more. I recently bought a coffeetable book, Nano Nature by Richard Jones. He took images from scanning electron microscope, and revealed a world of beauty and detail at a level that few people in the entire world knew existed. It is easy to look at a flower, or a butterfly, and to marvel at its beauty, but to know that the scales of a butterfly's wing (I didn't even know that the wing had scales on it!) are each a separate color, and are also grooved for what I would imagine are some improved aerodynamics opened my eyes to the amazing way this world is put together.

Why's that important to me? I confess that sometimes I get to living like all God is concerned about is the big picture. I don't take the little things to Him, because He's only going to work on the major stuff, whatever that is in my head that week. (I don't know where I've drawn the line, but it's there somewhere.) And the 'big' Christian acts, like Sunday worship or teaching Bible class, get my attention, but the 'little' ones, like daily listening to Him or talking to Him, get put on the back burner. (I know, it's so backwards, but that's how we live, isn't it?) But when I read about biochemistry and see the detail in the natural world a molecular level, I'm reminded that God is as concerned about the little details too!

I don't think this is important for an AIM alumnus only, but for those of us who have been involved in the “big” picture work of sharing our faith in a 'foreign' country, sometimes the everyday living out of our faith can feel small in comparison. I hope that you will remember that God doesn't feel that way, that God wants you to be as faithful now as He did when you were in Lubbock or on the field. And I hope that you'll help us to encourage each other to reveal God in the “details” of your life.

So how have you seen God's concern in the “small stuff” in your life?

- Donovan Fox