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“I knew that if they went to church, they would change. We can start over. I knew God could change us, and He did.” – Maité, The Greatest Journey discipleship program attendee

You may know Operation Christmas Child through the colorful red and green shoeboxes in the foyer, but do you know that Operation Christmas Child is more than those boxes? It all starts with boxes being filled with toys, school supplies, and other gifts for children, then they are gathered at collection center and shipped out to local churches around the world to distribute to their communities. This even includes closed countries due to their new online shoeboxes option. That special day when a child receives their box is only the beginning of the adventure.

Samaritan’s Purse says “The mission of Operation Christmas Child is to demonstrate God’s love in a tangible way to children in need around the world.”  The shoebox is the first step in their outreach. After a child is given their box, a gospel message is presented to them and they are invited to participate in The Greatest Journey discipleship program. This program is 12 weeks long, and is designed to be a follow-up to the gospel presentation given during the initial shoebox festivities. Fifty-two million children have enrolled in the program since 2009, and more than 27 million of those children have made professions of faith! These children go on to witness to their families and change their community for Christ.

Through our partnership with Operation Christmas Child, Mountain Christian Church is taking part in the Great Commission. You bring change to people around the world by filling a shoebox, either in person or online, and sending to a child who desperately needs the gospel preached to them. We are changed when we are faithful to the call of Christ to “make disciples in all nations”.

Maité’s family is one example of this life changing transformation through knowing Jesus. Through Maité’s family prayer and witness to her parents, they were saved out of addiction into saving faith in Jesus Christ. I encourage you to take some time and listen to their moving testimony in their own words.

The saving power of the gospel is what Operation Christmas Child is all about! Around the world, people are yearning for hope and transformation. We are called to take part in the great commission and send the gospel message of hope to the world. I can’t say it better than Charles Spurgeon:

“If there be any one point in which the Christian church ought to keep its fervor at a white heat, it is concerning missions. If there be anything about which we cannot tolerate lukewarmness, it is the matter of sending the gospel to a dying world.”

Sending the gospel to a dying world starts with your gift to a child through filling a shoebox. You are a part of spreading the gospel to children around the world, changing families, and changing communities. The fields are white for harvest! Will you join us in the work?

One of the most beneficial spiritual disciplines for me has been memorizing long portions of Scripture.

Now, before you click away because you assume this article isn’t relevant to you, or because you want to avoid another guilt trip that you’re not measuring up to some spiritual Christian standard, would you give me a couple of minutes? I’d like to make a case that memorizing long portions of Scripture is indeed relevant to you and is not about your measuring up, but about your joy.

Confessions of a Bad Memorizer

I know that for many, joy is not the word they associate with Bible memory. Boring or can’t do it or undisciplined might be what comes to mind. I know. That was me.

I remember once, as a young adult, deciding I should take Bible memory seriously. In the flush of idealized resolve, I bought a Navigator’s Bible memory system. As is typical of idealized resolve, it dissipated after a couple of feeble tries, and the system then went unused until I eventually threw it away.

Years later, when my church leaders encouraged members to memorize certain verses each week, I was hit-and-miss. It wasn’t a faulty program; it was a faulty me. I had a fairly bad memory to begin with. I would memorize initially, but it seemed I just lost it so fast. I figured I would never do well at memorizing.

Plus, I harbored some skepticism about whether Bible memory really made much of a difference. I figured it was good — like a comprehensive workout at the gym is good — but I wondered if the actual value wasn’t somewhat inflated, considering all that extra work and time. I had some theological education, attended a theologically rigorous church, read theological books, was involved in Christian ministry, and generally read through the Bible every year in my devotions. How much more would memorizing do for me?

A Memorable Discovery

It was actually an experience in my devotions that pushed me toward a memorable discovery. In my late thirties, I had just completed the book of Hebrews (again) in my reading plan, and it left me a bit frustrated. Hebrews is so rich, so full of glorious truth. But every time I read through it, it was like I just skipped across its surface. I wanted to dive in.

Then I had this unusual thought: I need to memorize this book. Wouldn’t that get me deeper into it and have it get deeper into me? Then I did math: 13 chapters and 303 verses. Seriously? Could I, a bad memorizer, memorize 303 verses? And retain them?

I knew that John Piper used a memory technique taught by pastor Andrew Davis to memorize larger blocks of Scripture. So I decided to try it.

I found this technique worked! It took me quite a while, but I committed all of Hebrews to memory. And as I did, it was like swimming in the book. Deeper dimensions of the text and its application opened up for me. I followed the author’s flow of thought in ways I hadn’t seen before. I learned the warp and woof of each chapter. But more than all that, there were moments I worshiped Jesus as I saw him through the lens of this book — moments that I had not experienced in my read-throughs.

That experience of more profound worship of Jesus made me hungrier to know even more of him. So after Hebrews, I made the crazy decision to memorize the book of John. It took a long time, but again, it was wonderful. It was a long, deliberate, nourishing walk with Jesus. From there I went to Romans, then to Philippians, then to 1 John, then to 1 Corinthians (which I nearly completed — I need to get back to it), and then to a number of psalms.

The memorable discovery was not that I, with my bad memory, surprisingly could memorize big chunks of Scripture, but that doing so yielded joy. The exercise, the discipline, of reciting and repeating forced me to meditate on Scripture in ways I hadn’t done before. As a result, I saw more, understood more, enjoyed more complex tastes of God’s goodness (Psalm 34:8). Bible memory, specifically longer sections, turned out to be not merely exercising a few more muscle groups in the Bible gym, but rather a means to more profound worship and more fuel for prayer.

The Bad Memory Myth

Now, knowing I’ve memorized a few books of the Bible might make you skeptical of my claim that I have a bad memory. If so, that’s only because you don’t know me. My wife and kids will confirm. I regularly blank out on names of people I should remember (I dreaded the reception line at our wedding). I regularly can’t recall specifics of a past conversation or event or book I’ve read that I should remember. Which means I live with a measure of social anxiety that one or both will happen in a public setting (because they do).

I think my brain’s file-retrieval system is below average — less like an orderly file cabinet and more like a messy desk with piles of stuff on it (“Ugh! Where’s that name?” Rummage, rummage. “I know I put it here!”). I do best with a lot of repetition and review. I guess it keeps things near the top of the pile, which is another benefit of memorizing long portions of Scripture.

My experience has taught me not to believe the bad memory myth — that having a bad memory disqualifies us from memorizing much (unless we’re a rare medical/neurological exception). Rather, a bad memory makes memorizing all the more needful and helpful.

Harder doesn’t mean impossible. It just means people like me have to work harder to memorize and retain than people blessed with a good memory. Which is not much different than saying that people like me have to work harder to lose weight and keep weight off than people blessed with naturally faster metabolisms.

God is not egalitarian in his distribution of talents (Matthew 25:15), spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 12:4–6), roles (1 Corinthians 12:18–20), bodies (John 9:2–3), and faith (Romans 12:3). We all have weaknesses that require us to labor more than others must. And this is really good for our souls. It teaches us perseverance and endurance as well as humble dependence on God and appreciation for others’ strengths.

Start Small and Realize a Benefit

I share with you my experience as a bad memorizer for two reasons: (1) if you’ve never attempted memorizing long portions of Scripture, it’s likely well within your reach; and (2) it really is all about joy. If you hear any should implied in what I’ve written, don’t hear it as a legal should that you must do to please God or achieve some elite spiritual rank. Rather, hear it as an invitation to joy — like a friend who says, “You should visit the Grand Canyon”; or a prescription for joy, like a doctor who says, “For the sake of your health, you should really consider getting some exercise.”

If you’d like some specific coaching on how to get started with a particular memorizing technique, I’ve provided that elsewhere. But if you’re new to this, here’s my simple counsel: start small and realize a benefit. Choose a meaningful psalm (like Psalm 27) or a meaningful chapter that’s not too long (like 1 Corinthians 13). Or if you really want to try your hand at a book, I recommend Philippians. Give it a try, stay with it, and taste the joy.

Once you discover you can really do it, and you discover that it yields joy, you will very likely want to keep going. And that’s the beginning of the adventure. Keep venturing! Because there’s a lot of glory to see and savor.

Desiring God. Scripture Memory Wasn't for Me. Jon Bloom. April 5, 2019. https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/scripture-memory-wasnt-for-me

It comes at night. Almost always, it comes at night. It begins with just a whisper of urgency, a small note of concern. It travels the currents in my brain, hitching a ride with firing neurons, grabbing the wheel of logical thinking and veering sharply off course.

Anxiety wrecks my nights.

These episodes began right before I turned thirty, about the same time my physical health began to unravel. The amount of stress we were living under at the time was the perfect springboard for my mental health to leap into dark waters. I worried about things that were normal, but most of the time I worried about things that made no sense. Eventually, I found myself sitting up in bed in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat and gasping for breath, unable to quell the racing of my heart. When I tried to land on a reason for my panic, my thoughts tied themselves in knots I couldn’t untangle. I couldn’t define the source of what felt like electrical impulses coursing through my veins, but my heart hammered with each alarming jolt. I can tell when anxiety wants to take center stage in my mind. It slips in the back quietly but rushes the stage full force. It makes the walls feel close in the room. I can’t get a good breath. And then starts the spinning of illogical thoughts; they come at me so fast I can’t categorize them. Not that it would help; anxiety robs my thoughts of logic.

Six years later, I am still dealing with anxiety attacks and trying to understand the triggers. In the last six months, I’ve discovered that anticipatory thoughts are my biggest trigger—preparing for a new experience or an event that relies on my presence or ability. My subconscious thoughts, specifically, are the enemy here. I can fall asleep easily before an event, trip, or new experience only to be jolted awake with a vague, unsettled feeling of fear. I will lose the rest of my night to anxiety and my attempts to stop it. I’m learning to combat it with grounding techniques, simple activities that help differentiate between what’s real and what’s imagined. Simply holding on to the edge of a table and reminding myself that the unsettling “what if” isn’t actually happening. What is real is that I’m standing next to this table—this real, wooden, rickety dining room table. It is sixty years old and belonged to my great-grandparents before it took up residence in my parents’ dining room. When my parents moved to a new house eleven years ago, they gave it to me. It’s warped from that sweltering day my parents moved and a surprise summer storm popped up before they could get the furniture inside. I can feel the rough texture of the surface where the raindrops did their brief but long-term damage. The realness of this table helps while I pray for the Lord to settle down my illogical thinking. Even if I can grab one of these runaway thoughts and follow it to its logical end, there is really nothing worth fretting over. I know this. I know it. I am working to understand how to unravel the illogical parts of it.

What’s more difficult, though, is plumbing my theology and grappling with why my beliefs are not enough to halt my anxiety in its steps. When I have rock solid certainty in what I believe about God and the safety of my soul, I still struggle with the tattering effects of anxiety.

Anxiety makes me feel weak. And I hate that.
In the middle of an attack and usually afterward, I berate myself: “I should be stronger than this.”

Last week I traveled across the country alone to a conference. It was a series of “firsts” for me, and I’d had a crippling episode of anxiety a couple of nights before my trip. On my third night away, I had just settled down to sleep when the power went out at the hotel. With only a little bit of battery power left on my phone, I quickly searched for a reason for the outage. It was a citywide blackout that kept us in the dark until morning. Knowing how hot it was outside, the darkness felt especially close, and the claustrophobic grip of anxiety rushed in. What if it gets really hot? What if the outage lasts until I’m supposed to leave? What if I can’t leave? What if something dangerous caused the outage? What if I can’t get home? I called my husband to help me shake it off, but I couldn’t stop the racing heart, the cluttered thoughts, the fear of being stuck. I paced, I prayed, I tried to go to sleep. But at 5 a.m., when the power kicked back on, I was wide awake. I had an important meeting in a few hours, and my confidence was in absolute shreds.

I texted some prayer warriors and tried to go about the business of dressing and preparing for my day. I rehearsed my pitch while applying mascara that dripped down my cheeks with tears of frustration.

“I should be stronger than this. I’m an adult. I’ve done much harder things in my life than this. I should be stronger than this!”
But I wasn’t. I’m not.
While I tried to mop up the disastrous attempt at makeup, my phone dinged with the following words of a dear friend: May mean something, or nothing. But in praying, I’m hearing, “I’m right there with her.”

I sat down on the hotel bed and grappled with the words. God was with me. In the middle of my breakdown, He was with me. He has made and kept lots of promises throughout history, but that promise of His perpetual presence is the one I need one hundred percent of the time. He is with me and not ashamed of my weakness. In fact, He can work something good from it.

Later that day, after hearing other conference attendees laugh off the power outage, I had lunch with a friend and confessed my panic attack. “I hate how weak it makes me,” I told her. Even so, I felt familiar words rolling off my tongue: “But I guess the Lord’s power is perfected in my weakness. I know it is.” Sluggishly, I remembered to believe it. Fighting shame that what other people could laugh about had put me through a mental wringer, I worked to believe what was true. The apostle Paul said it so well, and I could not be more grateful that this portion of Scripture was included in the Bible:

Therefore, so that I would not exalt myself, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to torment me so I would not exalt myself. Concerning this, I pleaded with the Lord three times to take it away from me. But He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” Therefore, I will most gladly boast all the more about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may reside in me. So I take pleasure in weaknesses, insults, catastrophes, persecutions, and in pressures, because of Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
2 Corinthians 12:7b-10 (HCSB)

I may be weak, but God is strong, and anxiety reminds me that I am not God.

Anxiety keeps me in a posture of desperation; it keeps me dependent on Him. Anxiety knocks my idol of self-sufficiency off its pedestal. My meeting may have gone well, but it was not because I was full of confidence and good ideas. I went to that meeting in tatters, with a grip on reality that was frayed at the edges, with confidence that was shaky at absolute best.

Anxiety meant that I had to lean hard on the Lord’s presence. Because He is unendingly strong, I can lean as hard as I need to. He can take all my weakness and prove Himself strong. I can come to Him with a knotted ball of tangled thoughts, and He can sit with me on the edge of the hotel bed. I can admit that I do not have all of this together, that my confidence can never be anchored in myself. It just can’t be.

Anxiety: I am not stronger than this.
But He is.

With each episode, I’ve come to realize my panic is not always an absence of faith. Anxiety is an opportunity for me to lean into faith in spite of my doubt. It is a vessel for seeing my weakness and knowing where true strength lies. Not in me, but in the God who is with me. He knows I’m weak. Anxiety may be the thorn I need to remind me that He is strong. It’s upside-down thinking, but while I use techniques to settle my physical weakness, I also ground myself in the truth of the gospel to settle my spiritual weakness.

There is nothing wrong with being weak before a strong, present God.

Anxiety: Should I Be Stronger Than This? Glenna Marshall. July 25, 2017. https://www.glennamarshall.com/2017/07/25/anxiety-i-should-be-stronger-than-this/

Five hundred years ago, a lowly German priest walked up to the church door in Wittenberg and posted a document that altered the course of history. It has now been five centuries since Martin Luther stood up and confronted Roman Catholicism. The kindling had been laid over decades, and Luther’s little, almost accidental spark soon set all of Europe ablaze.

In time, this lowly monk proved he had what it took to hold his ground against the church and the world — and under God, he became the tip of the spear for massive reform. In one especially memorable scene, he stood before the emperor and declared courageously, risking his own life, “Here I stand. I can do no other. So help me, God.”

But Luther did not stand alone. The Reformation was not about one or two big names — Luther, Calvin, Zwingli — but about a massive movement of Christian conviction, boldness, and joy that cost many men and women their lives — and scattered the seeds that are still bearing fruit in the twenty-first century. Not only was Luther surrounded by many Reformers in Germany, but lesser-known heroes of the faith rose up all over Europe — heroes like Heinrich Bullinger, Hugh Latimer, Lady Jane Grey, Theodore Beza, and Peter Martyr Vermigli. Luther was the battering ram, but he ignited, and stood with, a chorus of world changers.

And here we stand today, more than five hundred years later. Luther wasn’t alone then, and he’s not alone now. To celebrate the Reformation, we produced a 31-day journey of short biographies of its many heroes, just 5–7 minutes each day.

If you want to learn more about the Reformation — and both Christian heroes you know, and others you’ve never heard of before — subscribe to Here We Stand on Apple Podcasts .

Here We Stand: A 31-Day Journey with Heroes of the Reformation. 

https://www.desiringgod.org/here-we-stand

We are continuing our series on getting to know your church leaders a little bit better. Read along to learn more about Becca Huston, who serves as one of our Women's Community Bible Study leaders. 

Where were you born, and do you still consider that home, or somewhere else?

I was born in Texas but I have been in New Mexico since 1998 so this is definitely home.

What did you want to be when you grew up – and is that still a dream?

I always wanted to be in the medical field. First a neonatologists but then realized the part of medicine I really loved was in the description of a nurse. I fulfilled this dream and still love it.

What or who was your earliest spiritual influence?

My best friend as a child, her mom showed me what true devotion to God looked like.

How and when did Christ call you to Himself?

When I was about 21 in college through many different people.

What is a scripture you often read or share with others?

Psalm 116:2 Because he bends low to listen I will pray as long as I have breath.

What is a special answered prayer you’ve received from the Lord?

A beautiful marriage.

What is a blessing and what is a challenge in serving as a Bible study leader?

The blessing is being obedient to God and therefore in His will growing in my knowledge and relationship with Him. The challenge is living it out.

What are your hobbies and how did you get into them?

I enjoy fitness. I got into it in college and really just desire to be healthy and strong for whatever God has for me next.

What is your favorite family tradition?

I love going to church with my family on Easter. It is the day I revel in my redemption and the grace that has been poured out on me.

How do you enjoy spending a day off?

Going on a date with Chandler.

What is the perfect meal?

Spinach salad with goat cheese and any type of soup.

Who or what never fails to make you laugh?

My kids make me laugh…. although Chandler is hilarious too.

We asked Chandler the following questions: 

What is your favorite trait of Becca?

My favorite trait of Becca is her heart for the hurting. This plays out in a few ways that leave me in awe of her. She's regularly making a meal to give someone or have in the freezer for when someone needs it. She loves encouraging moms and wives over a cup of coffee and she's quick to ask if she can pray for someone in the middle of the store for the struggle they just shared with her.

What is something Becca does that will always make you smile? 

What Becca does that always makes me smile is when she gets to laughing really hard she almost stops breathing and has to let out a long sigh. This just causes me to laugh and so we go on laughing.