American Missionary Fellowship

At the national staff meeting as we enjoyed being together, we laughed at and with each other. We enjoyed encouraging each other, but also telling stories and recalling incidences that were just plain funny. There are people in the mission who are great storytellers and huge jokesters. There are people in the mission who simply enjoy life. Because they enjoy life, they enjoy laughing.

We’ve just completed a week at the national staff meeting in Forest Falls, California. Eighty-four of us gathered together to seek God’s will and spend time discussing, learning, and exchanging ideas. But when I think about the week, I think about the evenings, when we were simply allowing God’s Spirit to move in our lives.

Our son, R.W., is working full-time, going to graduate school full-time, and living in the Chicago area in the middle of winter. Until recently, his only form of transportation was a bike. For the past eight years, we’ve had a Jeep for our kids to use. It’s been sitting in front of our house, and I decided to drive it to Chicago so R.W. could have a form of transportation other than his feet or his bike during the cold winter months.

It’s twenty-eight hours of pure driving time from southern California to Chicago. It took me just over two days to get there. I used the time to think about what was important, about what was happening in my life, and about the kinds of things that are important to the future of the mission. During those twenty-eight hours of think time, I came up with three things that are very important to the life of the mission.

As you probably know, our national staff meeting will take place in California in about three weeks. All the area coordinators, the regional directors, and several other invited guests are coming together to learn and to grow, to seek God in a corporate way.

I recognize that, even in bringing up this topic, it leaves people out. But this meeting was all we could afford, and I really believe that it is what God wants for our mission - to bring us together as a unit to seek Him for a week.

As I think about 2010 and what it will mean to me as a person, to the Burns family, and to American Missionary Fellowship, I would like to suggest five things we need to be open to.