Call him the Indiana Jones of mission trips
Bobby Gale leaned across the table and told me Maebob’s Diner served the best meatloaf this side of the Wilkinson County line. He then ordered fried chicken off the menu, so we had to laugh about that.
For now, Bobby is home. He is back where the tea is sweet and so are the ladies. He can rest his head on his own pillow at night. He just returned from Louisiana. During the next few months, he will pack his suitcase for places such as Ghana, Kenya and Cost Rica. There are mornings when he wakes up and tries to remember where he is. Sometimes, it’s an unfamiliar place.
“Yeah É home,” he said, laughing again.
The sign by the kitchen door describes the odyssey in a few adjectives, verbs and nouns: “Our home is just a little house, but God knows where we live.”
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Keith Brown, Michael Lolwerikoi, University of Ga. head football coach Mark Richt and his wife Katharyn, Nancy and Bobby Gale celebrated “Faith, Family and Missions.” |
Bobby Gale is a man on a mission, more specifically a mission trip. He has a heart for service wherever he is called. Sometimes it’s the mud huts of Africa. Sometimes it’s the rubble of a hurricane. He has made countless trips to Louisiana, where folks are still picking up the pieces 31 months after Katrina. He is a formidable gust of wind himself, and not just because of his last name.
Even if he didn’t love adventure, it would find him anyway. Just call him the Indiana Jones of mission trips.
He has survived malaria, dodged an earthquake in Costa Rica and escaped a volcano eruption in Guatemala. Once, while he and others were working on a parsonage in Cuba, military helicopters kept circling overhead to “remind us they were there.”
“This is not a game of Monopoly or Risk,” he said. “We are playing for keeps. It’s a serious call from God.”
After 16 years in the pulpit as a Methodist minister, Bobby has spent the past five years organizing mission trips to “wherever the spirit of the Lord leads us.” He has traveled to 17 different countries. He and Nancy, his wife of 29 years, planted their toes in Irwinton and took a step of faith by starting a ministry called “Unto the Least of His.”
He works out of his home on Bear Camp Road in a house a group of volunteers built for him. He has no staff, except for Nancy. “It’s a two-horse organization,” he said. “She’s the workhorse, and I’m the show horse.”
A few years ago, he met Keith Brown, who had traveled with volunteers from Macon’s Riverside United Methodist Church to help with reconstruction efforts after Hurricane Katrina.
They struck up a friendship, and Keith accompanied Bobby on a mission trip to northern Kenya last year, where they spread the gospel and helped oversee the drilling of a well in a village where folks were having to carry buckets of water for miles.
To help raise funds to build five additional wells, Keith helped organize a celebration of Bobby’s ministry in April at the Methodist Home for Children and Youth in Macon.
Called “Faith, Family and Missions,” the event also touched on football. The guest speaker was Katharyn Richt, who was introduced by her husband, University of Georgia head football Coach Mark Richt.
The Richt family has made several mission trips. Katharyn recently chaperoned a high school mission trip, and Mark is taking about 20 of his football players on a mission trip to Honduras next month. Bobby admittedly doesn’t know much about football. But he does have a game plan.
“I’m going to keep doing it until everyone has water - or a cow or chicken,” he said.
You cannot put a price on what he does.
The article, by Ed Grisamore, first appeared in the Macon Telegraph.
From the Counselor's Notebook: 'God as a mother doth speed'
Martha M. Tate
“Praise to the Lord, who doth nourish thy life and restore thee, fitting thee well for the tasks that are ever before thee.
Then to they need, God as a mother doth speed, spreading the wings of grace o’er thee.”
Joachim Neander, 1680
God is both Father and Mother to our spirits. We are guided and nourished by the various energies of God. And, our conceptions of God, especially in the early days of our faith journey, are influenced by our experiences of our own fathers and mothers.
Much has been said about the paternal relationship shaping our perceptions of God. The same is true with mothers. When one’s maternal relationship is troubled, it can be difficult to open to the Mother love of God.
I have been blessed. Mama’s love introduced me experientially to God’s nourishing spirit. The gentle touch of her well-manicured hand could make my fever feel better, even if it did not go away. The joy we shared as we sang together, sailing down the familiar ribbon of road from Albany to Baconton in route to visit family, released my heart to feelings of happiness. And, in so doing, trained in me an optimistic spirit. Her constancy of presence, in good times and in bad, taught me perseverance and gave me the felt sense that, even when I was lost, I would be found because she loved and believed in me so.
So, for me it requires no imagination to know the feminine face of God. To trust that, as a loving Mother, God will speed to my confessed need, spreading pinions of grace over me.
Yet, God will not be confined to or defined by our human relationships. When we are orphaned in one way, God mothers us in another. Whether through friends, ministers, teachers, therapists, or extended family, we can be mothered into health and healing.
Lily, the motherless heroine in Sue Monk Kidd’s popular novel, The Secret Life of Bees, searches until she finds this experience. In the nurturing arms of a cadre of black, once battered women, Lily’s spirit is resurrected. When Lily is healed enough to hear it, August, the matriarch of the bunch says to her; “Listen to me now, Lily. I’m going to tell you something I want you to always remember, all right?” “You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside.”
August refers to the feminine face of God as Mary. She says; “When you’re unsure of yourself, when you start pulling back into doubt and small living, she’s the one inside saying, ‘Get up from there and live like the glorious girl you are.’ She’s the power inside you, do you understand?”
“And whatever it is that keeps widening your heart, that’s Mary, too, not only the power inside you but the love. And when you get down to it, Lily, that’s the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love-but to persist in love.”
“This Mary I’m talking about sits in your heart all day long, saying, ‘Lily you are my everlasting home. Don’t you ever be afraid? I am enough, we are enough.’”
Thus, to our need, God as a Mother does speed. May you open your heart to it, and enjoy the blessings of Mother’s Day each day.
Martha M. Tate is a licensed clinical social worker in private practice.
Pathways to His Presence: Rising to Expectations
B.J. Funk
“We need to come from behind stained glass and touch stained lives.”
The reality of that sentence ran like an electric shock throughout my body! I kept listening to the speaker, but my mind stayed with her first sentence. What marvelous truth! We might think this statement urges us to go into the ghettos of our town and help the downtrodden. It definitely could mean that. However, stained lives sit on the pew with you at church. They are usually masked with a clean outer appearance and a smile, but underneath resides pain that has come from hurts and difficulties. Bruises and stains have been left from seasons of rejection. Some church folks learn to cover their stains well. Most on that same pew would never even suspect.
That’s why I am so honored when someone will come to me and trust me with his or her stain. One of my most cherished opportunities as a pastor is to walk with someone through their pain and into new possibilities. I love one-on-one times when I get to remind stained lives that Jesus Christ owns a laundry service. He is the only one who can bring any of us out of where we were and into where we want to be.
Someone has said, “Meet me where I am, and I remain immobile. Meet me where I was, and I regress. Meet me where I am not, and I rise to the expectation.” Sitting on your pew at church is someone who is remaining immobile. Someone else is regressing. As the heart of Christ, we are to encourage others to rise to the expectation we have in them. We do it, not with criticism, but by loving them into the awesome love of Jesus Christ.
Help someone rise to higher expectations, and watch them bloom with new possibilities.
Rev. B.J. Funk is associate pastor of Central UMC in Fitzgerald.
