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

OM Flood Relief in Pakistan

By now, you have probably heard of the horrendous flooding in Pakistan. The has UN said the final toll could exceed the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake combined.

Since flooding began in Pakistan in July 2010, the OM team in Pakistan has been struggling to bring aid and the Christian message to flood victims—so far they have fed nearly 2,000 families. For more on what OM is doing, see the link: http://omusa.org/pakistan

$35 feeds 1 family of 6 people for 2 weeks