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Sallie Schaaf Borrink

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Staying Is The New Going – Ministering Where You Are

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April 15, 2017 | Sallie Borrink
2 Comments
View Full Post with Embedded ContentStaying Is The New Going – Ministering Where You Are

I have never had an overwhelming desire to do foreign missions. I’ve never even done a short term missions trip. The Lord has provided so many situations right where I am at the time that I’ve never felt that I was short on opportunities to share the love of Jesus with other people. This includes the time I spent doing campus and sorority ministry many years ago. It was right where I lived and full of opportunities.

The fact of the matter is we’re surrounded by people every day who need the love and forgiveness of Jesus. We don’t need to get on a plane, train, or even a bus to meet them. We can do so right where we are and we should not discount the importance of the regular people all around us in our everyday life.

Staying Is The New Going

A friend mentioned Staying is the New Going – Choosing to Love Where God Places You and I wanted to see what it had to say. I was curious if the author, Alan Briggs, had come to some of the same conclusions I’ve come to over the years regarding being faithful with what we’ve been given, even if it is just two talents.

Staying Is the New Going: Choosing to Love Where God Places You

Chronic illness and other daily challenges have made my world much smaller – even smaller than it used to be. But that doesn’t mean God can’t be working through me. I found myself nodding in agreement with this passage in the chapter “The Glory of the Mundane.”

The Bible has a list of stories of people who wanted to do anything but what was right in front of their faces. Moses didn’t want to face Pharaoh. Joseph was dubious about taking Mary as his wife. I can bet Judah wasn’t excited about living well in Babylon. Obedience is rarely easy, and faithfulness isn’t glorious. Would you line up on opening weekend to watch a movie about a single mom in a small Midwestern town who loved her kids well while working two jobs and faithfully serving a few people around her in the name of Jesus? That’s not the next box office hit, but that could be a life of legacy. It’s not glorious, but it brings glory to God.

God has given us only so much energy. This realization should lead us to careful boundaries and stewardship, but it can also lead us to an obsession with efficiency: we want every time we serve people to have a tangible impact, to demonstrate that we are “useful” for God. There isn’t a scorecard for faithfully abiding in places and relationships. We long to experience the beauty of spiritual banquets in the time it takes to serve up a Happy Meal. Something just doesn’t add up.

I have been on the journey of recalibrating my vision from immediate impact to longevity. There is nothing sexy about this shift. It takes constant commitment to remembering to keep faithfulness as the metric. It’s more about covenant than emotions, more about obedience than motion, more about my life being affected than effecting those around me. Ministering with Jesus is a descent into humility, not an ascent into influence.

Our task is not to have a massive impact. We want to change the world, but our true task is to be faithfully present long enough for Jesus to change the world through us. Jesus alone has the power to change hearts.

I completely agree. Our calling is to be faithful. To remove the clutter and focus on what God has uniquely called us to be and do in our little corner of the world. That is truly all He asks of us.

Staying is the New Going - Ministering Where You Are

Category: Christian FaithTag: Community, Hospitality2 Comments

My Little Red Schoolhouse (Almost) Little Free Library

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January 1, 2015 | Sallie Borrink
8 Comments
View Full Post with Embedded ContentMy Little Red Schoolhouse (Almost) Little Free Library

When I discovered the Little Free Library movement I thought they were so cute and such a great idea. If you aren’t familiar with them, they are small libraries people put in their yard where they can share books with their neighbors.

People borrow a book and return it when they are done. Anyone who has books they would be willing to share with others can also leave them there.

I mentioned it to my father-in-law in September and sent him a link to a Pinterest search full of Little Free Libraries of all kinds.

So guess what I got from my in-laws for Christmas?

Yes! My own little red schoolhouse to use for a free library!

Little Red Schoolhouse Free Library 6

Technically it isn’t an official Little Free Library. To do that you have to pay to register it and I’m not going to do that (at least for now). But David painted a sign to make it The Highlands Free Library. (The Highlands is our development.)

Little Red Schoolhouse Free Library 4

So we’ve filled it with some books we had to share and hope that others will use it.

Little Red Schoolhouse Free Library 3

We’re in the back of the development on a cul-de-sac, but there are many people who walk dogs so hopefully people will stop and look.

Little Red Schoolhouse Free Library 2

And once the weather gets nicer and children are around more hopefully it will get even more traffic. (We’ll also paint the post white in the spring.)

Little Red Schoolhouse Free Library 5

In the meantime, I think it’s just so cute that I’ll enjoy looking at it every time we come and go if nothing else!

Little Red Schoolhouse Free Library 7

Learn More About Little Free Libraries!

The Little Free Library Book (Books in Action)The Little Free Library Book (Books in Action)

My Little Red Schoolhouse (almost) Little Free Library

Category: Our Cozy Family Life, The LibraryTag: Community, Joy8 Comments

The Loss of Real Communities

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October 26, 2012 | Sallie Borrink
9 Comments
View Full Post with Embedded ContentThe Loss of Real Communities

Suddenly the door opened and Pa burst in, saying, “Put on your bonnets, Caroline and girls! There’s a meeting at the schoolhouse!”

“Whatever in the world–” Ma said.

“Everybody’s going! said Pa. “We are starting a literary society.”

For the next Literary, there was music. Pa with his fiddle and Gerald Fuller with his accordion made such music that the schoolhouse and the crowd seemed to dissolve in an enchantment. Whenever they stopped, applause roared for more.

It seemed impossible ever to have a more marvelous evening. But now the whole town was aroused, and families were driving in from the homestead claims to attend the Literaries. The men in town were on their mettle; they planned a superb musical evening. They practiced for it, and they borrowed Mrs. Bradley’s organ.

“Literaries” and “Whirl of Gaiety” from Little Town on the Prairie

Moderately Gifted People in the Community

Rick Saenz recently wrote about something I’ve been mulling over in my mind as well. In Best fiddler in the county, Saenz starts with a quote from Kurt Vonnegut:

Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions.

When I was growing up, I often sang in church. Like most smaller churches, we had several soloists of varying degrees of skill. I was a good soloist and enjoyed singing. I would never have won American Idol, but it didn’t matter because American Idol didn’t exist. It also didn’t matter that I wasn’t Sandi Patti or Amy Grant. I could sing their songs, but no one expected the soloist in their local Baptist church to actually sound like them. They were professionals and on a completely different level.

I always felt appreciated when I used my gift and I always felt joy when I did so. I had a gift to share with my local church and I used it. I sang in the choir and small ensembles as well.

Times have changed so much that the local mega- and semi-mega-churches now use worship teams and the soloists can’t simply be good. They have to sound like they could be touring nationally. And if the local church doesn’t have someone like that they can either pipe in professionals or mix the sound so much that someone sounds better than they actually are. All I had was a background tape and a basic sound system. What you heard was what was me.

Young women used to be the belle of the county. Everyone in the county knew who the local beauty was. In fact, living in a county actually meant something. Our high school sports league was based on our county. Now teams travel all over the state each weekend to play football. There is no local rivalry any longer.

The Loss of Real Communities

As mentioned in the Gatto video I included the other day (in Home Schooling versus Home Education), we don’t live in communities any longer. We have networks. We don’t have a community in real life. We have professional networks. We have a network of blog buddies and women from social media we’ve never met in real life, but who know us better than the fellow members of the church we attend each week.

I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t think living in a global community is doing us much good. Whatever we have gained from the global community has diminished our local communities. I think the excessive mobility of our country is doing us more harm than good. We’ve lost our distinctiveness in different parts of the country. It still exists in pockets, to be sure, but the never-ending moving done by people throughout our country is ripping to shreds any local social fabric that was still hanging together by a thread.

You can see it in the churches. Megachurches where one pastor speaks to multiple campuses via a screen. Instead of thirty pastors shepherding smaller congregations and using their gifts every week, we have one pastor who wouldn’t know 97% of his congregation members if he passed them on the street. When I was young, an elderly retired missionary taught junior church in the basement of my church. Serving Jesus was real and she was in my church year after year. Now children go to huge children’s worship centers and have a teacher for a few weeks and then a different teacher another quarter and so on each year. They may never even see that teacher again. She might move away or attend one of the other services. Is this community?

A friend sent me an email recently in which she mentioned the constant changing attendance at their classical Christian school. Families coming and going each year. There for a year or two, gone for a year, and then back. I know this happens many places. Trying out homeschooling, trying out a private school, trying out a charter school. Parents take schooling one year at at time and make changes based on the needs of the children, the family, academics, etc. But it is very hard on my friend’s children as they make friends who then leave. So even in a classical Christian school you aren’t immune from the coming and going that lessens the community.

We’ve lost something critically important. And, sadly, I don’t see any way we get it back as a country. I think if we want community it is something we have to work very hard for as individuals and families. I think about this a lot in my desire to build a strong community for Caroline. But how do we go about doing that? How do you swim against the tide of the culture surrounding you? Is it important for you to be in a community? How do you build community for you and/or your own family? What have you been willing to sacrifice to achieve any level of meaningful community in your own life?

The Loss of Real Communities

Category: Christian Faith, Simple LivingTag: Community9 Comments
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I’m Sallie, Christian wife, mother, and homeschooler. Welcome to my cozy corner of the world. Our little family lives a quiet simple life of home education, self-employment, and laughter. I share what I've learned to help others navigate this world with truth and beauty. Please start here. ♥ 

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