People would come up to me and say, "Oh! YOU'RE the one."
And I would answer, "What one?!??"
Then she or he would say, "One of the ones that Bishop May keeps talking about all over the world."
"Huh?"
"He says that a woman who had been translating American military documents into Russian for the Soviet Government, and a woman who had been a specialist in Soviet Military Affairs in the US Air Force were sitting together planning to reach out to former Soviet immigrants in America for Jesus."
And so the following summer, I found myself walking down an aisle in an almost empty conference room in Washington DC during a break in the Baltimore Washington Annual Conference get-together.
He asked me, "You don't mind when I talk about you and the woman from Moscow working for the GBGM, do you?"
I rolled my eyes and replied, "Well, since you seem to be implying that I was doing something totally different by working for the US government, and then working for the Lord, I do mind. I was always doing what I felt called to do, both when I was in military service, and in ministry. At the same time, I think we are giving her the benefit of the doubt in many ways, because she was a loyal citizen of a government that taught all its citizens for nearly seventy years that God did not exist and that the Church of God in Jesus Christ was evil. She may have been a big conversion, and maybe not!"
The bishop seemed rather irritated with me and dropped the conversation.
In the spring I had had a recurring dream where a Russian man was talking to me something like the way a man from Macedonia talked to St. Paul in a dream as St Luke related in the Holy Scriptures Book of Acts. Whenever I seem to be doing something or dreaming about something that has to do with an apostle or a prophet or someone like that, the Lord makes me quite worried.
So I felt forewarned.
My best friend from Wesley Theological Seminary (WTS) lived in an apartment on the campus next-door to me with her three kids. The address of WTS is: 4500 Massachusetts Ave, NW; Washington, D.C. 20016. My daughter lived there with me during vacations from college. But in the summer of 1993, I was taking part in a program called "A Christian Ministry in the National Parks." I worked at the Paradise Lodge at Mt Rainier National Park in Washington State. That summer my son still had one semester of his senior year in high school. He was living with me and still finishing high school. So my daughter and my son stayed in our home apartment on the seminary campus while I was on the west coast of the US and riding Amtrak back and forth. I visited friends in Iowa, Colorado and Salt Lake City going back and forth.
That was the summer when the "Hundred Year Flood" in the Missouri River/ Mississippi River/and tributaries began in mid-May. As I took Amtrak west, on the news farmers were already saying that the flooded fields had delayed preparation of the fields and planting. When the water had gone down enough for the trans and cars, buses and trucks to use the bridges, it was mid- August..
That summer Krista worked two jobs and Tom worked full-time for the building cleaning and maintenance and grounds staff at WTS.without me but with my son in the summer.
But back to my next door neighbor and me. We were staying with together in the hotel, as usual, when we had a gathering of all of our colleagues in ministry. On the second morning of the conference, my friend woke up before I did. So after I was ready to go downstairs, I was looking for her. I also had a question to ask of somebody in the conference connection room, a kind of headquarters where those who had planned the conference were orchestrating what was going on and making sure everyone had credentials and name tags; tickets for meals and many other details.
I was waiting outside the door way to the Management Office, when one of the pastors in charge of one committee or other came rushing up to where I was standing. He said that there was a pastor and his family from Siberia, Russia. Their sponsors were looking for someone who spoke Russian and English. He wasn't talking to me, but I said I spoke Russian and could help if anyone needed an escort-interpreter.
He answered, "No, the pastor speaks English, so we don't need any help like that."
In the dreams that I had been having about the Russian man calling to me, he had said, "You have to help us. The American Methodist volunteers and Board of Global Ministry employees keep doing what they want to do, what they think we need. They don't listen to us about what we say we need."
Subsequently I went up the escalator to the main lobby floor, still looking for my best friend and roomie. Lo and behold, I saw her speaking with a small group of people inn the main lobby of the hotel. I came up to the edge of the circle, and heard that they were talking to a Russian man, a Russian woman, and a Russian teenaged boy.
The man spoke English in a basic way, but the woman and the boy did not speak English at all, though they all could read English somewhat. The group of people were the Russians sponsors were from a very large UMC in a rural area north of Baltimore.It happened to be the same church where my friend and roomie was serving as an associate pastor, her first charge right out of seminary.
When I was introduced to the Russians, I spoke Russian to them, and they all looked relieved.
The Americans asked me to come to lunch with the Russians so that I could escort interpret for them. They were joining the bishop and other pastors in the Cabinet and other positions in the hierarchy of the Annual Conference.
I did that, and that's when the bishop found out that I speak Russian, and that I was also from his hometown of Chicago, even though we were both at that time in the mid-90s, we were both on the Central Atlantic Coast of the US.
We were asked by someone to introduce ourselves, one-by-one. Then, as everyone else did, I talked about my hometown and where I was serving in ministry. The bishop gave me a baleful look when I said I was from his hometown of Chicago. He had been a civil rights advocate even back as long ago as the 50s, and he was African-American. So, o I said quickly, "I know we were not living in the same Chicago," to which he smugly nodded in reply with something like a "Tsk, tsk," or, "That's what I'M talking' about."
Along with the recurring dreams, I had been fussing at the Lord to be serving three rural churches in America when I had hoped to be serving in Russia or at least at the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church, among other things, the sending authority for United Methodist people in mission all over the world.
At that time in the mid to late 90s, the GBGM of the United Methodist Church was not at all open to women becoming missionaries, unless they were spouses of missionaries or promoted by the Women's Division. The women who went overseas on behalf of the Women's Division that was the first organization of the Methodist Church in the U.S. who started to send missionaries oversea, first to the African nation of Liberia in the mid-19th Century. Those women were ordained and called "deaconesses' and were unmarried. They were each a kind of servant of the Lord similar to Roman Catholic or Orthodox nouns or nurses or teachers who had taken oaths of celibacy, poverty and obedience. Anyway . . . they were a Protestant form of that type of missionary or clergy.
In answer to my fussing at the Lord, God both seemed to be telling me to be patient, and asking me to trust Him.
I was saying to Him that it didn't seem like He remembered why I thought He had called me to ministry. I felt like the LORD had forgotten that I had asked him to serve the Gospel in the former Soviet Union.
Nevertheless, and somewhat miraculously, by Saturday night of the annual conference, I had all the answers to my questions. The replies God gave me were very specific and unmistakable to me.
As I spent much of the days left with the Russians, the pastor and his wife, and their son, I translated both ways for them. Sometimes I explained what the Russians or the Americans wanted to get across to one another. Including pastors and staff members, there were spouses and retired pastors and spouses as well as lay leaders and witnesses like reporters from media outlets -- up to about 1200 people or so helping to translate for as needed.
After the Saturday UMC bishop from the area that included Michigan and Indiana spoke.
Lots of times we become captive audiences to bishops and they like to lift up topics and stories involving their own soapbox subjects.
That bishop from the Midwest started to talk about being in a fast food restaurant in Iowa, when a white teenager who was serving at the counter became very rude to a person who was not white.
The bishop was standing in line between the gentleman who was being subjected to a rude and cruel tirade based on his ethnic origin.
In outraged response, the bishop said, "Just stop it!"
He was very angry about it and made it clear that he felt that enough was enough concerning racism.
Next, the bishop started talking about some missionaries in Liberia where he had recently visited. This was during the civil war in Liberia in the late 80s and early to mid-90s. He went on to speak of something that his Liberian guides near Monroeville, the capital of Liberia, told him. They were giving a tour of the Methodist compound, where there were schools and a hospital, about a woman who was the wife of an agricultural missionary man. They had four children, and had been helping farmers. When their finished one season in Liberia, they had gone back to the US. The man studied in the US to become and ordained pastor. Several years later, the whole family returned to Liberia as a Methodist Mission family..
During this second stint near Monroeville, the wife became ill with a problem that would have been easy to address if they were in the US. But the powers that were made a decision not to send the wife back to the US to have the surgery she needed.
Sadly, she died in Africa because of not being able to receive the medical care she needed.
When she knew that she was going to pass away, she asked that her body be sent back to be buried in the U.S., but that her heart would be buried in Liberia.
The first time I had heard that narration was on the evening before I answered my call to ministry that I had had since I was six years old. The person who told the story was the husband missionary of the woman whose heart was buried in the Methodist Mission Compoud in Liberia.
When speaking to him the next day, I found out that this bishop also, by the way, knew my mother's mother in northern Indiana. This was eight years after I had answered my call to ministry, and the first anniversary of my ordination as deacon/pastor under the rules that had been in effect before the early 90s.
What are the odds that a stranger I had never met would tell the same narration that I had heard the night before I answered my call to ministry?
On that first anniversary of the evening before my ordination through the bishop from the Midwest, the LORD answered the questions I had.
God refuted all accusations I had made including that the Lord was not paying attention to me and in truth was still aware why God had called me to ministry.
By the end of the conference when I was saying goodbye to the Russians, the pastor said to me, "I really need to tell you that you MUST come help us. The people who are officials in the United Methodist Church don't understand what we want. They keep giving us what THEY think we need. You have to come and translate for us because we can't make them understand."
I walked away from them in a daze, thanking God in amazement for all His mercy, lovingkindness, grace, love, peace righteousness and joy..
God is very faithful and awesome.
But the LORD also can be extremely irritating and a bit too mysterious.
🙄😎❤️🌹😊
