The Veil is Lifted

On the first morning after we had arrived in Baja, Hungary, Bill Drake lead the OM Arts team in a short Bible study.  To lay a foundation for our time there in Baja, he spoke from II Corinthians 5 where that apostle Paul speaks of us having a "ministry of reconciliation."  We are not to preach ourselves, nor the greatness of our beliefs, but rather we are pointing people to be reconciled to God through the sacrifice of Jesus.

Any time I look at a passage in Scripture, I always like to go back a little way and get a "running start".  No verse in the Bible stands on its own -- it is always preceded, and followed by other verses, and is most fully understood in its context.  I went back and started looking at that passage, and over several days, worked all the way back to II Corinthians 3:7.  There, Paul is comparing the "ministry" of the Old Testament Law with the ministry of the Spirit of Christ.  He recounts the story of how Moses, when he came down from Mt. Sinai with the tablets of the Law, had to cover his face with a veil to shield the people from the glory shining from his face because of the time he had spent with God up on the mountain.

Then Paul brings up an interesting point.  The glory of Moses' face -- ie., the glory of the Law which Moses represents -- was not permenant.  In fact, the reason that Moses veiled his face was not so much because of the glory itself, but to hide the fact that it was fading away!  Paul uses this to draw a contrast between the fading glory of the Law, which can only condemn us, and the eternal glory of Christ, who actually brings us righteousness and eternal life!

Paul goes on to state:

(14) For to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read.  It has not been removed because only in Christ is it taken away.  Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts.

Those verses struck me in the context of our coming to Hungary. Here we were to bring the ministry of reconciliation to these people, but there was a veil over their hearts! No amount of preaching, explaining, pointing, painting, acting, singing or standing on our heads was going to remove that veil. Only Christ could do that.

As I pondered the idea of the veil, I began to pray, asking Christ to show me what the veils were here in Baja.  I started writing down the names of different veils as they came to me in quick succession.  I don't claim that these are all the veils over the faces of the people of Baja, or of any other town, but I felt the Lord was specifically pointing out these six as things we were to contend with.

This is the list:

The veil of Simple Ignorance:  Sometimes we know people who are ignorant because they close their minds and do not want to know.  However, more often than not, people simply do not know the news of Christ.  They've never had someone live the life of Christ in front of them.  They may have heard myths and fables read to them to put them to sleep at night, but the Truth has never reached them.

The veil of Pride:  In particular, I had the feeling that this was the pride of self reliance and tradition; "We can do this on our own, just as we have done for generations!"

The veil of Witchcraft:  This was not "witchcraft" in the sense of spooky old women in black dresses and pointed hats, but the spirit of witchcraft -- often manifested in power and control over people through spiritual means.

The veil of Numbness:  This was a bit of a surprise, and I had to pray about this one longer than the others, but then it made perfect sense.  This is the numbness of, "I have been in pain for so long, I don't even feel it any more."

The veil of Fear:  Fear is always a veil, but especially in this case I had the sense that it was a fear of change and the unknown.  Not wanting to step off of the path that we have been on for generations.  This veil felt like the flip side of Pride, again pointing to the sense of history and generations of people.

The veil of Secrecy and Shame:  This was perhaps the scariest of all the veils that I felt.  I had a strong sense that this was related in particular to the evil of human trafficking, which is a huge issue in Eastern Europe.  I don't know to what extent it is an issue in Hungary, but I had a strong sense that it was there.  Much like botulinum toxin, it only takes a tiny bit of this evil to poison an entire population.

I continued to pray about the veils.  Some of them overlapped, but each had it's own personality.  However, knowing about evil is all well and good, but it's not the point of why we were in Hungary for.  Anyone can point out evil -- it's all around us.  Specifically identifying evil is good, but again, it's pointless unless there is a solution.

But there is a solution.

The solution that I kept coming back to is right there in II Corinthians 3:14-18, which I started to quote above:

(14) ... only in Christ is it taken away.  Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts.  But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.  Now the Lord is the Spirit, and there the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.  And we, who with unveiled faces [contemplate] the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

The veil is the same today as it was in Paul's day, as is the solution.  Through the redemptive work of Christ, the veil is lifted, and we behold the true Glory of God.  We are transformed from the inside out.  Christ overcomes each of these six veils through His power in the lives of people, as His Glory is reflected from our faces, and into the lives of the people around us.  Imagine a prisoner on death row, being led out with a black hood over his head, and when the hood is pulled away, instead of the execution chamber, he is standing in the middle of an open, brightly lit field, free to go, knowing that his wrongs have not only been forgiven, but paid for by someone else who has died in his place!

Now, as an artist, I HAD to respond to this!  Over the nearly three weeks we were there in Hungary, I had an opportunity to do a lot of different expressions of art, from simple teaching of children to individual sculptures to the graffiti wall we did on Friday night.  However this one piece, titled "The Veil is Lifted", does the most to embody the heart of what we were there to see happen.

The Veil is Lifted

Since we had no kiln, I was never able to fire this piece, or any of the others we did while we were there.  However, I was able to leave it there at the Prince Arthur English School, where we were working with pastor Arnold.

When I spoke with the team later, we wondered if there might be a seventh veil.  Not that the number seven has any magical significance, but it is often used in Scripture as symbol of completeness.  More on that later...

(Quotations from the NIV.)

Hope

It's funny how sometimes God will use a really small thing to give you a little glimpse into His heart. At the edge of Baja, on the banks of the Danube, there is a small stone tower. There is a steep set of steps along the outside of the tower which climb to a small, circular platform at the top, around which runs an iron railing. There is a circular bench in the center of the platform where one can sit and gaze out over the river and the forests which line the far bank. It's a wonderful place to sit and rest in quiet.

What is worthy of note though is the railing which runs along the steps and around the platform. There is a tradition, started in Hungary and now spreading to many other cities, that a couple will take a lock and engrave their names on it. According to the tradition, if they attach the lock to the railing and then throw the keys into the river, then their love will endure forever!

A few of us from the OM Arts team wanted to go out to see the locks. I ended up being a little behind the others, so I spent the half hour walk along the edge of the canal approaching the park by myself. As I was walking, I couldn't help but notice the rolling black clouds of a thunderstorm fast approaching from the other side of the river.

The storm held off long enough for me to get to the park, even though I could see the lightning flickering in the distance. To one side of me there was bright blue sky, full of sun and hope. To the other, ominous black clouds approaching fast.

I sat for a little while on the bench, looking at the locks, and it suddenly hit me that I was seeing a picture of life. Every one of those locks represented a couple, a story, a dream, a hope for the future. Like the bright sunshine, they had seen a time of joy and expectation. Some of those dreams were only born yesterday. Some had been there for many years. Yet, in the background, the storms were approaching. I wondered how many of those dreams had been broken or crushed over the years. How many dreams had turned into nightmares? How many have lived on, struggling against the storm? How many were still flourishing, bringing life and light to others around them?

What I saw was more than a silly tradition and a bunch of old locks on an iron railing. I saw lives of real people. These are the same people Jesus sees. These are the people Jesus has sent us to, to enter into their stories and reflect His love to them, and tell them there is a Savior who is stronger than tradition, a Savior who commands the winds and the waves. I felt a sense of the urgency of that call.

So, I guess God can even talk through a bunch of rusty old locks...

Marsha, painting along the Danube

Hungary Update

Hungary:

As you may remember from previous updates, I spent most of the month of July traveling with an OM Arts team in Hungary. Every time I go out on one of these trips, I learn to appreciate more and more the value of getting out of the office and seeing what exactly all of my IT work at OM USA is actually supporting.

You may also remember that, as we were planning the trip, there were a lot of questions about what exactly we would be doing. I'm learning that this is pretty common – you set your goals and make your plans and collect your materials, and then you hit the ground on the first day and discover what God is really planning for this trip! Goals and plans and preparations are necessary, but you learn to hold on to them with an open hand!

One quick story:

Our OM Arts team was made up of six visual artists working along side the music and dance teams. I will never cease to be amazed at the caliber of people God brought on that team, and how He molded us together in the couple of weeks we spent together! We had a couple of main objectives as we were in the city of Baja (pronounced: Boy-ah). The first one was teaching art classes in the small English school there, and developing friendships with the students. Another main objective though was to create a large scale piece of art which would be a part of the final concert in the main town square of Baja on Friday evening... and be able to do it in five minutes on stage! The concert would bring together music, testimonies, dance and art as a complete presentation of the message of the Gospel. To that end, we spent a lot of time at the start of the week praying for the specific message that the Lord wanted us to communicate with the people of Baja.

The sense that we got was a message of how God takes our brokenness – through sin in and around us and all the wear and tear of this life – and somehow transforms that into beauty. He doesn't always "fix" things in our lives, but He takes those things and transforms them into something that makes us whole, strong and even beautiful. The word we found in Hungarian which best communicated this transformation was, "Csodálatos", which means full of wonder and beauty and awe. It even has the sense of birth and new life. We decided to do the piece as a "graffiti wall", a canvas around 5 feet by 12 feet, which we could do with spray paint and multiple layers of stencils and free hand painting. On Friday (after a LOT of scrambling to pull together all the details), we were able to actually get the "wall" up on stage at the end of the concert, and do the entire piece while Bill Drake and his band played behind us. When we were done, Bill explained the message behind the piece, and then invited people to come up and put their hand prints in paint on the wall as a visible statement of their commitment to be a follower of Jesus.

There were a lot of the students from the school who came up to add their hand prints to the wall, as well as some others from the audience. I was busy behind the stage taking care of some of the stencils and materials we had used to make the piece, but when I came back around the corner to the front of the stage and saw the wall and all the hand prints there, I was struck by the thought that each one of those prints represented a person, a life, a story of someone who was making a step forward. Each of those steps were different – some were probably more serious or thought out than others – but each was still a step. It was more than just a pretty piece of art up there on stage. It was God using art to communicate the deeper message of His Love to the people of Baja.

Tales of the Tyrone Tryons - April, 2010

Dearest friends and family,

Shalom! A couple of Sundays ago, as a part of our preparation for the Easter season, we had a time celebrating the Passover Seder meal at church. Murray, from a Messianic Jewish ministry, led us through the Seder, explaining each step and symbol as we shared the meal around tables ourselves. It was amazing to meditate on how Jesus Himself celebrated the Passover, and to see how each part of the meal points to His redemption for us! Hallelujah!

We were reminded about the great need to pray for the Jews around the world... and to pray for Muslims, too! As we see in the news, the Near East is shaking, and we need to pray fervently in these days! We keep hearing amazing firsthand reports of what God is doing there – reports that you don't hear about in the news – but there is still great persecution. Just this week in that region, a church leader was released. He had been arrested after baptizing new believers there, not knowing someone was using a cell phone to video the event – a video which was then shown on the national TV. He had been sentenced to death for his “crimes”, it is a great miracle that he was released. Thank you, Lord! Keep praying for our persecuted brothers and sisters.

What's going on in IT?

iConnect: Some of you may have heard of the “iConnect” (Blackbaud) project that the IT team at OM USA has been working on. After several years of work, the project had finally reached the “Go Live” milestone. There are still several portions of the system which need to be implemented, but there were enough pieces in place that most of the people in the office could begin using the new system.

For all of you who are familiar with implementing large projects like this, you know how things are always rocky at the beginning! However, the system is finally coming to life. It will be a while before people have used the new features enough to become comfortable with them (and for us to shake out the bugs), but we are up and running. Thank the Lord for bringing us to this point! We really hope that this system will be a powerful tool to help OM tell the story of what God is doing around the world, and to invite our partners and supporters to become a part of that story!

The Americas Server: While a few of the larger national offices in OM have been spending a great deal of time sweating over iConnect, the majority of the OM fields are still using the existing Petra system for personnel, finance, recruiting and a host of other IT functions. As an organization, we have found that, even though we have tried to make the Petra system as simple as possible to maintain, some of the smaller field offices still have a difficult time finding people with sufficient IT skills (or time) to keep the system running smoothly. As a result, some of the larger offices, such as USA, have set up “hosted” services for the smaller offices. In simple terms, we have a central computer in our office that the other offices can dial in to over the Internet. This way, these smaller offices have access to all their IT data and functions, and we in the US can take care of making sure the systems are properly maintained and running smoothly.

My newest responsibility is taking care of a dozen or so fields throughout South and Central America (hence, the name, the Americas Server). While this is a pretty significant amount of work, it also gives me a great opportunity to serve many smaller offices around the Americas, and to directly support their ministry through this hemisphere. It's another example of how we can use the latest whizzbang tools of the IT industry1 to see the Gospel spread to every corner of the earth!

Sue's News:

Sue has had changes in her life as well. She was asked to assume the Book Store Manager job at OM USA in January. There are 3 important subdivisions of this job. Let her explain:

The “Brick and mortar” store (physical store) – Sue now oversees the 9-5 bookstore that is open at OM USA with the assistance of several valuable volunteers. She enjoys ordering and receiving lots of new books! The bookstore has given her the opportunity for plenty of reading, too (almost always at home), since publishers and new authors keep giving her new titles to check out! With a lifelong love of reading and books, it is fun, fun, fun! (Did you know Sue won a reading contest in Second Grade and still has the prize–a book of course–to prove it?) Part of this job is also an outreach to the Tyrone community.

Secondly, the job means providing book tables upon request for local church missions conferences. With the help of volunteers, we have provided three so far this year. Sue has always been greatly blessed with the inspiration of missions conferences, thanks to the heritage of Grace Covenant Church in Rochester, NY. Now it is a blessing to share great books with many at these conferences. Sue reads as many of these books as possible to provide good recommendations for purchases. It is a wonderful privilege to follow Operation Mobilization's 50+ year tradition of using literature to share the Gospel.

Finally, the newest part of this ministry is the OM USA online bookstore. The online site is technically “working”, but we are still learning how to add new titles, make changes, correct prices, etc. Sue calls this her "monster in the closet"! She is learning how this all works, with a 250 page manual to study. Prayer, please! You can check on our progress yourself at https://store.omusa.org/.

As we look to the future, OM USA is continuing to expand its literature ministry. Sue receives daily requests for books by phone and email. With our own mail room (where Sue still helps out for a few hours each morning), we can ship orders to most parts of the world. We are able to receive discounts from most publishers, so we are able to offer books at a reasonable cost – often below the price of other on-line bookstores! Anyone may phone 800-899-0432 or send a request to sue.tryon@om.org to order most Christian books.

In addition to her work with the bookstore, Sue is still taking Spanish lessons every week at our local church. There is a significant Hispanic population in this area, and knowing even a little bit of Spanish can open many, many doors to meaningful ministry right here where we live.

OM Arts:

As I alluded to in our last letter, I am continuing to move toward more involvement in the ministry of OM Arts (http://www.arts.om.org/). The Lord has been moving us forward at a dizzying pace as I have had the opportunity to join a local Arts organization here in Fayetteville, and to purchase a second-hand kiln to start developing my own studio. I'm afraid our cars have seen the last of the inside of our garage. ;-) I have applied to join OM Arts team going to Hungary for this summer (http://www.arts.om.org/mission-trips/visual-art/hu1.html). One interesting piece about this trip is that it combines both art and working with teens in a different culture. Please pray as Sue and I seek the Lord's will for this trip, as well as several other opportunities (including a return trip to Moldova where the team there would love to have us follow up on the ministry which we began last year!). You wish sometimes that you could do everything, but the Lord has given us real bodies that can only be in one place at one time...

In Closing...

I was reading a prayer from another missionary that we support in Chile, and something he wrote really struck me. He was expressing his thanks for all the people – people like you – who stood behind his team in their ministry. I would also like to express our thanks to you in the same way for the many ways that you stand behind us as partners. Those who support us financially are obvious, but just as important are those who pray, and write letters and emails, or call on the phone. In our position here in the US office, we see very clearly the way this partnership impacts people all along the chain that God has created, from the home church to the mountains of Kyrgyzstan or the little villages of Vietnam. Standing here in the middle of that chain, we see very clearly how we could not do this without your obedience to God's call. Thank you for your faithfulness!

Prayer Time: Thanks be to God!

• For Sue's new responsibilities as the Bookstore Manager
• For real tangible progress on the Blackbaud/iConnect project.
• For opportunities for ministry this summer

Requests for prayer:

• Guidance and wisdom and perseverance for Chuck in both teen ministry and IT projects supporting OMers in the US and beyond
• Big breakthroughs in implementing the online bookstore.
• Wisdom,guidance, and strength in Sue's diverse job responsibilities
• Wisdom in planning and finances as we consider short-term missions opportunities for 2011

God bless you and your family as we see Gods's Glory unfolding in the wonders of spring. We praise the Lord for you!

In His Service,

Chuck and Sue Tryon