God could have placed you at any time in history. Isn’t that a crazy thought? For whatever reason, God created you to live as a light in your city in 2013—a year that takes up no more space than a raindrop in the ocean of time. It can’t be just coincidence.

There are probably a lot of answers to “why here and now?”—most of which we’ll never discover before meeting Jesus. But if we were placed here for “such a time as this”, a good starting point for answering the “why” could be to look at what distinguishes our little sliver of space from all others.

Things that have been the same for hundreds of years are changing during our time. For 305 years, print was the most dominant form of advertising, but was surpassed by online advertising just within the last few years. For 82 years, television programming stayed the same. Shows aired on a certain day at a certain hour, and we made sure we were home in time to watch them. Now we watch what we want to watch, when and where we want to watch it.

Our populations have changed—not merely in number—but in regard to ideals, morals, economic and political values. Most of these changes have been spurred along but our largest population cohort, Generation Y, or the “Millennials”. This generation of young people, born between 1980 and 2000, number 87 million in the US. These large percentages are present in South America, too. In Colombia, over half of the population is 28-years-old and younger. And, in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, there are approximately 80,000 university students.

In a survey of Millennials from Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, and North America, 64% said they believe they will make a local impact, and over 40% said they believe they will make a global impact. They are optimistic, passionate, global thinking world-changers. We are surrounded by the largest generation of justice-seeking, transformation-loving people that has ever existed. We are surrounded by people with huge ability to make great advances for the Kingdom of God.

We live in a time heavily influenced by its largest generation, and it’s not by coincidence. So what does this mean for all of us placed here in this particular portion of space? Let’s examine how we are ministering to the Millennials around us in our lives and in our churches. Are we sharing Jesus with them in an impactful way? Are we empowering them to be all God has called them to be for the Kingdom? Are we making disciples and developing leaders out of them?

Resource Articles on Ministering to Millennials:
How to Harness Millennials for Christ
20 Points on Leading Millennials

Our time in El Carmen del Itenez started well for me because I was greeted by a man grateful for a surgery we had done on him this past year. It got even better later. A volunteer physician from the US was seeing patients beside me and I noticed a man carrying his daughter to her. His daughter is around six-years old and had meningitis as a baby. She did not receive timely medical care and has suffered the consequences in the form of severe spastic paralysis. The volunteer doctor was regretfully explaining to him that we did not have the anti-seizure medication they needed when some of us remembered—we had a child’s wheelchair on board! It’s a long story how it got there, but suffice it to say it was a Divine intervention. When we told the father we had a wheelchair for his daughter his expression changed. He said, “You are not going to believe this, but this morning at breakfast my wife told me she’d had a dream in which a boat came and gave our daughter a wheelchair. When your boat pulled in, she wondered if this was our wheelchair arriving.” He then explained that he and his wife have not been walking with God. Why would God give a woman in El Carmen a dream like that? I think He wanted her to know that He was personally sending this wheelchair to them.

This was not a donation from the doctors or the boat. This was a personal gift from God Almighty to a little six-year old in El Carmen del Itenez, totally off the beaten track and unknown to all but Him.

written by SAM missionary, Lance Erickson (SAMAIR Bolivia)

This has been a week of intense sorrow coupled with overwhelming pride and bittersweet joy. As I got out of the plane after giving a flight lesson on Saturday, I received a call from my dad to tell me my brother Jay and his wife Katrina had died in a plane crash.

We were very close to Jay and Katrina. Jay and I spent the last six years together in school preparing for service as mission pilots. In the beginning he lived in our house and at the end we lived in their house. Jay and Katrina had just begun serving at the Chitokoloi Mission hospital in Zambia. The accident has made international news and thousands gathered for the funeral yesterday as they became the 7th and 8th Ericksons to be buried in Africa as missionaries. The president of Zambia declared a national day of mourning in their honor. All flags were flown at half mast and all programs of entertainment were cancelled. An appropriate honor for them, but nothing compared to the reward they are receiving from the Almighty Creator of Heaven and Earth.

As I have reflected through many tears on my brother’s life and death and the many testimonies that have been given of his life, I see over and over what I have always known. Jay believed God’s word and he backed that belief up with action no matter the cost. Not just the nice part, that we are saved by grace through faith in Christ, but he believed the hard part, that man exists not for his own glory but to glorify God, that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart soul mind and strength, and that every command truly can be summed up in this, love your Neighbor as yourself. Jay and Katrina’s great sacrifice was not in dying on the mission field. That was a terrible accident. Their sacrifice, and that only by the grace of God, was at every turning point through life where they said God’s prestige is more important than ours, the means to help the hurting is more important than our comfort, the role we can play in relieving suffering is more important than the security of home and family. The need for people to know God is greater than our need for retirement, acceptance, entertainment, or safety. They were patient, kind, generous, and long suffering. It was not the incredible effectiveness of their missionary work in Africa that has made the news of their death so significant to so many, it was the priorities by which they lived that changed the world.

So with terrible sorrow I say good by to my brother and Katrina with no regrets or if-onlys. God gave them the grace to see the truth clearly and live by it. They died together, in a place they dearly loved to be, doing what they loved for the one they loved. They were flying together into the sunset and in a moment they were with the one whose glory they had lived for. The one who loves them even more than I do.

They spent their lives on what matters most. God, by your grace, let us do the same.

Life away from home is much different than I ever expected, and by “different” I mean completely abstract from every foundation to which I once clung. The beauty of it all is that in that abstract separation of knowledge and the unknown stands Christ, sovereign and true, before me with open arms, waiting for me to rest in Him. Since leaving my home and stepping out in faith to serve overseas, God has so graciously shown me what it means to “wait upon the Lord”—a once equally abstract concept that I rarely understood and never applied.

As a missionary teacher, I have found my heart breaking for every student that walks through my door. Each child of God that steps into my classroom tears at the fabric of my compassion and compels me to put aside my own struggles for the sake of showing them the love of Christ, for which they so desperately thirst. When I arrived two months ago, I was crying out to the Lord for justice, asking that He bring righteousness to their lives by erasing their problems. My heart was empathetically churning for their sorrows. What I did not yet understand was that our God is a God who renews, not a God who disables. In Isaiah chapter 40, God promises to give strength to the weary, and that is a promise that He has fulfilled tenfold since my arrival.

My students often come to me with their broken hearts looking for an “easy way out”; and now that I have been in a foreign land, away from every luxury I once knew, forced to depend only on God’s good grace to give me life, I can finally tell them with assurance that though trials will painfully scour their heart, if we let the Lord renew us in strength, we will live to see the greatest blessings He has to offer. I did not realize until moving to Bolivia just how much I was selling myself short by not allowing the Lord to bless me with His mercies. Since being here, I have witnessed countless miracles that overjoy my heart and I have been renewed afresh daily, able to survive each day with excess joy and passion for the next. And because my God is the God He says He is—I will never grow weary.

written by Kirk Ogden, Executive Director

God is on the move in our midst. My recent e-mails have shared some of the hopes for SAM2020, our long-term renewal process within South America Mission. I’ve been thrilled to see God exceed my expectations. In February, we gathered for a week each in Bolivia and Brazil. The time with our missionaries from those countries and from Colombia and Paraguay was rich, challenging and hopeful. The teaching by Dr. George Murray was powerful and convicting. I’m thrilled at what I see happening in our missionaries and in our Mission.

This phase of SAM2020 is about “listening and dreaming.” As we listen to the Lord together, He is giving us some beautiful dreams about what comes next. Sometimes patience is difficult. Our next major event is the Peru gathering April 3-8. We’ve already seen some minor miracles in preparation, including the provision of a facility we could never have afforded. Our previous conferences as well as the details leading up to this one give me great expectation.

Facilities and details are just the backdrop. My greatest thrill comes at watching the Lord gently renewing our hearts. That’s why I chose the above verse. What comes out of us is just an overflow of our heart.  Please pray for our mission-wide re-encounter with Jesus to continue to mold and shape us so that we can overflow in obedience.