CoffeePods
A series exploring Christian healing in a handy coffee-break sized podcast. Plug yourself in, pick up your mug of coffee, and let's go.
CoffeePods
Swimming with God's Current: Faith That Carries You Forward
Welcome to Coffee Ponds, a coffee break sized podcast exploring life and Christian healing. Ready, grab a brew, plug in your earbuds and let's go.
Speaker 2:Back for another episode of Coffee Ponds. Good to be with you, Chris. How are you?
Speaker 3:doing Hi, doing great, doing great. Had a great weekend.
Speaker 2:Good, I'm actually going to ask you about your weekend because you're a man I see on social media who gets up to stuff. You go and visit places. You know how to enjoy it, yeah.
Speaker 3:It was fun. I played guitar with one of my good mates in our worship band at church on Sunday and we got to play one of my favorite praise songs. The kids come up at one point in the service and we play the kind of rock and roll type song with drums and we had actually had a really good church service, although I think I got a bit of a rebuke from my wife's sermon, which was kind of interesting, but it's motivating, it's made me, yeah, but it's good. I did attend a charity event for a Sri Lankan charity. I got invited to go and it was an orchestra, a small orchestra, that played music to raise money for this charity in Sri Lanka, just south of India, and the music was really beautiful.
Speaker 3:But one of the things that caught me was he put this word. He put this word. Anukampa was the word. It's a Sanskrit word. I don't know Sanskrit but in his little notes that they gave us, in Sanskrit it means the quaking of others, the quake of others. So Bhoomikampa is an earthquake, right. So Bumi Kampa is an earthquake, right Earthquake, and Anu Kampa is connected to the quaking of someone because of the Holy Spirit. Oh, wow. So it was a really interesting idea and he was connecting it to an early CMS missionary, an early CMS missionary.
Speaker 3:Cms is the Church Missionary Society, which I guess historically was more of an evangelical missionary society.
Speaker 3:That was started in Aldersgate Street not far from John Wesley's City Road Chapel, and I guess the earliest members it was 1799 when CMS was started, and William Wilberforce, whose claim to fame was abolition of slavery, john Newton Amazing Grace, they were all early members of CMS and they sent a missionary.
Speaker 3:His name was Walter Senior and Walter Senior went early in the 20th century he was a missionary for CMS to Sri Lanka and so there were several people that were at this fundraiser who came to faith because of the ministry of Walter, which was kind of cool, and they live in Britain now and one of them is a professor at Kingston University. It was really wonderful that he was saying that the idea of finding the Anukampa in faith, that moves other people, and so we listened to the music and we were all moved. And then afterwards I had the biggest Indian Sri Lankan feast. We went to a local restaurant and they basically hired the whole restaurant and there must've been a hundred people and live music and I did leave when the dancing started, so I stayed for just a little bit of the dancing you weren't feeling it.
Speaker 3:I had to get home because I had to play in the worship band on Sunday. But such a wonderful thing in the culture of South India and the love and the joy of those people was infectious and I suggested we have sort of an Indian-themed worship service at the church sometime and get them all to come.
Speaker 1:That would be amazing.
Speaker 3:It would be great they were such good people and to hear the story of the CMS missionary and the impact, knowing that this is before there were antibiotics. I mean he was going to a place where people were dying of typhoid and malaria and water problems and he would be sending an English missionary out there and the risk of dying was very, very real for the sake of sharing the gospel in some corner of the world, and so that was exciting. That was kind of my big weekend activity and I really enjoyed it.
Speaker 2:It was I want to learn more about cms now yeah, I was actually just gonna ask something about that, so don't worry if you don't know the answer. But um, the first question, which is a little bit more light-hearted, was do you have a favorite maybe sri lankan dish from that restaurant? Is there something like that's my go-to when I eat out at that sort of?
Speaker 3:you know it was it was some sort of a sweet potato dish that I have never seen in my life yeah and it reminded me of kind of southern cream corn in america it it. It was yellow, um, and I said what is this? It's just delicious. But it had a sweetness to it, but it also had a kind of mashed potato-y feel to it. It's hard to describe. They had a green bean dish too. That was great. There was this other thing that was really hot, and I'm not a spicy person, but no it was everything very rich and distinctive.
Speaker 3:They had a chicken dish for the meat eaters and they had these little what do they call the samosas for vegetarians. That were also really tasty. And one of the ladies that was there she, she walked over and she goes oh so you like Indian food? And I said, oh yes. And she said, and I said it's sort of mild. And she said, well, I'll invite you over to our house and I'll cook for you and I said oh yeah, this is getting better and better.
Speaker 2:That will be the best food you probably have there.
Speaker 3:Oh, I know it because she's like, oh, I can make this and I can make this yeah.
Speaker 2:I remember.
Speaker 3:I'm excited.
Speaker 2:I this and I could make this. Yeah, I remember I'm excited, I was. I was living in nepal for three months and we were in the village sort of the back villages rather than katmandu and those areas and there were people. They were, their hospitable hospitality was just incredible, um, in terms of so they had a, they had a pig that they decided to. It sounds awful, but to kill for apples to eat with them and we remember you know it smelled amazing. The heat, though, on the food was intense.
Speaker 2:I've never had anything like it, but it has made my tolerance a lot better for spicy food.
Speaker 3:Wow, anything like it, but it has made my tolerance a lot better for spicy food. Wow, yeah, when I went to ghana the first time, I ordered pepperoni pizza and the pizza came out it was pepper pizza and it was the hottest pizza. And then I didn't want to be rude and not eat because it would be so rude, and so I struggled. I had sweat pouring off of me. It was just yeah, that was my arrival in. Uh, in kumasi was eating pepper pizza. Wow, the hottest pizza ever made wow, uh.
Speaker 2:So the only the other question I had around this concert, um and cms is you mentioned, uh, sr going and being a missionary. Was it just sharing the gospel or were they going and praying? Were they? Did they have medics? Do you know?
Speaker 3:My understanding is a lot of the early CMS missionaries, and there were. What is it? Spck Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. There were other mission societies in the 18th and 19th century. Cms was about taking the gospel to people, but also education and health care. Oh cool, yeah. And so you'll find a lot of the remnants of these mission outposts. There'll be schools, universities, hospitals, and it's really amazing that the lasting effect of mission work from Great Britain during that period.
Speaker 3:So you're thinking about the time after George Whitefield, after John Wesley, charles Wesley, and so the missionaries of the late 18th century that started CMS. They were all about taking the gospel to the world. You know, john Wesley said the world is my parish, so CMS was about taking the gospel to the world. And then you take the other things that come with the gospel, which is an awareness of health care and awareness of reading and education and scripture. Translation was a big thing that suddenly the Bible became translated into all sorts of different languages, so you have the Bible Society and other things that cropped up at the same time. And so I think in Africa you can go to places where they even had religious orders that were founded, so you would have nuns living and educating children in schools, because if you go to some of these countries, the state doesn't actually provide education. I mean, in Kumasi, I think, still the eye care is done by an Anglican charity. So if you have eye problems you would end up going to a church-sponsored organization. There are a lot of advances that are being made now in all sorts of different places in the world, but 100 years ago the only way you could learn to read was to go to a church school that happened to be near the church in your little village.
Speaker 3:So you really, and I think in missionary work right now in Africa. My knowledge is limited to the west side of Africa, but a lot of the people will have missionaries coming from northern Africa who are Islamic, and they come into a village and they say we'll build a school, we'll drill a couple of wells and everybody becomes Muslim in the town, and the people will say well, their God must be the real God, because he'll provide education and water, and so the chiefs will often make a decision to which faith to follow. And so when you talk to some church leaders in Presbyterian Church or the Anglican Church in some parts of West Africa, they'll say we need resources Because to let the people know that the God of Abraham, isaac and Jacob and Jesus Christ is the real, the way, the truth and the life. Well, we need to be able to show that in the form of running water and education for children and health care, and so resourcing the churches also helps to to root the gospel, and so it's a very real thing.
Speaker 3:You can imagine being in a community and they say, well, who's God's the real God? The one who gets me water? And it's a. It's a hard, hard reality that I don't think we in the West really fully comprehend what, what that would be like if you're there with your children and you want your children to have the best they can have, and and there's money flowing from different places and you just you know which way do we turn with our faith? And that's tough, that's really tough.
Speaker 2:What do you think? A ministry like ACORN and just as disciples but obviously I'm focusing on ACORN because it's who we are, on on acorn, because it's who we are but what do you think our role is when it comes to um healing of these, these situations? I mean, obviously we're talking we've just talked about africa, um Sri Lanka, but even in the UK, where you know, where things are not equal maybe for everybody, how can we help as a healing ministry? Do you think?
Speaker 3:bearing witness, because I think about the leper or the woman who was hemorrhaging, the paralytic, these people that Jesus encountered in his told go and share this good news to the world. And so the ways that they could tell the world is to walk and to go and to venture up into, you know, to Corinth and to Philippi and even to Rome, to go to the center of Rome and tell the story of Jesus' miraculous power. And we've inherited that story. But we've also inherited our own encounters with the living God. And each of us who have experienced the power of the Holy Spirit at the bedside of someone who's sick or someone who's asked for prayer and we've actually seen healing, we've encountered the Holy Spirit alive and working.
Speaker 3:You know that, as the anicampa the anicampa that we have experienced the Holy Spirit stirring, then it's our job not to keep that a secret. You know, it's kind of like there's some organizations that exist and amazing things happen and you say, well, that's our secret, it's the secret recipe of how we make our fried chicken. You know we don't tell anybody and I say, well, acorn exists to share the reality of that secret to the world and to say this isn't a secret, this is a promise, and to me that is such an amazing thing to think that somebody can now, through the wonder of the internet, they can log on in the corners of Virginia or the corners of Mampong in Ghana and they can listen to the good news of Jesus Christ and think to themselves this is real.
Speaker 3:You know, the disciples lowered that man who couldn't walk in this little hut through the ceiling, and Jesus said which would be easier to say that your sins are forgiven, or get up and walk?
Speaker 3:And so he goes, okay, well, get up and walk, you know, and they all saw that. And we still tell that story, 2000 years later, to a world that desperately wants to walk in different ways. But I feel like the desire to walk without a limp is greater and greater every day when I see so much brokenness in the world and this hunger for more love. And so Acorn is right at the heart of all of the turmoil, as I said to somebody not too long ago. I said we're at the center of the hurricane, where the wind is still, Everything swirls around us, but Acorn is at the center and we're testifying to the calm heart of God. Just by being an organization in a crazy world that refuses to enter into the craziness, we stay rooted in the promise of God and we stay out of the conflict and the turmoil. We're not going to get embroiled in theological, doctrinal debates and things like that. We're just going to be prayerful people, being faithful and doing what God would have us to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think people notice that, not just because it's intriguing which I think it is but also because it's an invitation, when we are tuning in with the Holy Spirit and what he's doing for other people, to experience him too. And I love those moments where we are doing just what you're saying we're sharing the gospel with people, we're being prayerful and we're in the eye of the storm really, and suddenly someone encounters jesus and I just. It always brings me back to a place of humility because I think to myself we we're not doing anything. Hard is it's not hard work, is it being being a disciple or praying at an acorn healing hub? But people are experiencing the goodness of God through that and I just, yeah, I love it.
Speaker 2:I love what we're able to do.
Speaker 3:Saying yes seems to always be well. In some ways it's easier than saying no. But I guess if you're jumping into a stream and swimming upstream it's going to be hard. But if you jump into a stream and go where it takes you, I think that is an amazing thing to feel the power that carries you forward. I know we watched that sad story from New York City where that big ship, the tall ship, hit the Brooklyn Bridge and what I read about it was that it lost power. And so if you look at the video, the ship actually hits the Brooklyn Bridge, going backwards. Yeah, Because the ship is in this strong current that's flowing and the whole ship is moving backwards and it backs into the bridge and it takes off the top of the, the mast, which is so sad because there were people standing on the mast and I think a couple of people died and and.
Speaker 3:But I think to myself, swimming against the current in anything we do, if we any endeavor against the current is going to be a rough go, it is. But swimming with the current you know I'm mixing my metaphors terribly, but you know, going with the flow and trusting God, surely there's an empowerment that happens in that, and even prayer. When you're praying with people who seek healing, who are hungry for the pain to go away and for things to be better, God intends for all of us to live in peace and harmony, and God intends for us to be well. So the idea that we somehow praying is going against the current. It's not. It's actually telling somebody jump in with me and let's go in the direction that God would have us go, which is to your health and your wholeness and your well-being, Because God intends for all of us to be. You know one, as he is one. You know all of the scriptures that point to that unity and that harmony and peace, and so I guess that's kind of where I am today, at the beginning of this week.
Speaker 1:Thanks for checking out Coffee Pods. Don't forget to like, subscribe and share. Catch you next time.
