Good evening. Thank you for the introduction. As Amy said my name is Abi Byrd and as you have probably guessed I am not from around these parts!! I am from Mahomet!! OK, just kidding, I am from England. I was born and grew up in London. We do live in Mahomet now though and have done for the past year. I have been given the theme of light to talk about tonight. There is a verse in John – a book in the Bible, where Jesus says “I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness.” We are going to keep coming back to that as we go – the fact that Jesus came into the world as a light and what that means for us.
Light is an amazing thing isn’t it? We take for granted the fact that it is all around. As children we want the light left on as we are often scared of the dark. But as we grow older, our fear is less and we may even embrace it. We learn to hide things in the shadows. Sometimes darkness is helpful as it can conceal things we don’t want others to see. But we are drawn to light too aren’t we? We prefer Summer to Winter, people have medical conditions where they need sun and natural light. Plants shrivel up and die if there is no light. At this time of year in particular there is so much light. Inside, outside, on the Christmas tree, millions of lights all out there, twinkling for the world to see. Now maybe we have gone a little overboard on the whole light thing at Christmas, or maybe that is my understated British side wanting to tone things down a little! Who knows??!! The symbolism is there for us though isn’t it? – We have all these lights to remind us of the one who came into the world as a light. As soon as we put even one of those lights into a dark place there is a glow and a sparkle that means the darkness can’t exist. Think of a Christmas tree. If you have just the lights on your tree lit and no other lights in the room, then the feeling is just magical isn’t it? My kids keep commenting on how beautiful our Christmas tree is. A Christmas tree is beautiful. It makes you want to stop and marvel at it. I want to suggest that it is the same with Jesus. He possesses that same marvelous light that makes you want to stop in wonder. Think back to the verse from John that I mentioned before. “I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness.”
Before I go any further, I thought I would give you a bit of background about who I am. You might be wondering why this British lady who lives in Mahomet is standing up here before you. A good question!! I have been married to my husband Brad for 10 ½ years and we have 4 children ranging from 3rd grade down to 21 months. We have 2 girls and 2 boys. If they had had their way tonight I would be standing up here wearing this attractive pair of flashing reindeer antlers. They thought these would just finish off the outfit nicely. They couldn’t grasp the concept that I might not be taken seriously if I wore them for the whole talk. They will think it is hilarious if I tell them I did at least put them on to show you!! Brad and I work for a missions organization called Radstock Ministries and have done for the past 8 years. I do want to preface what I am going to talk about by saying that there is absolutely nothing special about me, or my family. Let me say that again – there is nothing special, nothing remotely. We have been able to do the things we have done by God’s grace alone. My friends and family, particularly my husband will tell you that I am a terrible worrier. I am not proud of that fact, and certainly as a Christian I know I should be able to hand that worry over and let God handle it – right? Well I have to confess I find that a daily struggle. I am sure there are some poor souls out there tonight who can relate to what I am saying - I feel your pain!!
I want to share some of my story with you – a journey which started 8 years ago now. The Lord made it clear it was time to make a change. Brad and I were both on staff at a church in Washington DC, but we were increasingly feeling that we needed to find a situation where Brad could use his International Business experience again in the context of being a missionary. By pushing some doors and exploring several options in Europe we ended up moving to England!! What a breeze! Great missionary posting for me! I could speak the language, that was a bonus, we would be near my family and friends, I couldn’t believe the Lord would be so generous. We lived for 4 years in a town just North of London called Luton. It was a very ethnically mixed town with 120 different nationalities represented. The polar opposite of Mahomet. Brad began to travel back and forth to the Balkans – mainly to Albania and Kosovo. He helped to set up small businesses and he became involved in micro lending. Initially it made sense to be in the UK as the projects needed financial backing and that was where the investors were primarily. Also, if truth be told, I was not about to move our family to a war torn country. I was happy to be a missionary but there were limits……
For those of you who keep up with more International news you might remember the crisis and brutal war and ethnic cleansing that occurred in Kosovo in 1999. Brad started travelling there in 2001, 18 months after the crisis. Even 18 months on the region was in dire straits, most of the buildings were still destroyed; many people, especially the men were still missing. The majority of the men in the 25 and up age bracket had been slaughtered. The reality was lots of widows and fatherless children, many of whom had witnessed or been victims of atrocities that would traumatize them for the rest of their lives. Extremely harrowing to hear and see what the bloodshed had led to, and the consequences that have far more lasting effects and repercussions than the world will ever think to remember in the coming years. We have a very short, selective memory don’t we??
The long and the short of it is that 4 years later the Lord made it abundantly clear to us that we needed to move our family there. So much for my comfortable missionary life!! (I have to say that was a total joke anyway but that is another story for another time!!) It was really a natural progression. The projects needed Brad to be in country by this point to work and be successful. We needed to be there to build relationships, and present the light of Christ hand in hand with the business side of the projects. Most of the landmines had been cleared by then, the region was relatively stable. We had spent extended amounts of time there as a family and we were excited and nervous about the change. Our families and friends were not as enthusiastic. The reality was - we were moving to a war torn, Muslim country. There was a high chance that we would need to evacuate or worse, we would need to homeschool our children, we would need to learn a new and very hard language. Why would we want to do such a crazy, potentially dangerous thing, especially with 3 small children? People just didn’t understand.
I have to say that the 3 years we spent in Kosovo were such a time of relying on God. Those years have shaped our family forever in a good way. It is part of our identity, who we are. Let’s recap back to that “I am an extremely anxious person” comment. There were times when I just didn’t know how I would cope with what I thought might be around the corner. I think the main lesson I learned from being there was that God can be trusted, completely for everything. I came to realize that the worst case scenarios often don’t happen, and even if they do, God can take care of them in ways you could never imagine.
Daily life took a long time. There were periods of time every day when there was no power and sometimes no water. It was completely random, so you couldn’t plan that from 12-2 in the afternoon there would be no power, there would just be blackouts with no warning. They could last from 15 minutes to 48 hours. It was always a surprise!! We adjusted to being plunged into darkness on a regular basis. We never grew used to it. However often it happens, there is always something shocking about the light going out all of a sudden, when you aren’t prepared for it. We did, however have a system. The children would stand still wherever they were, sometimes screaming depending on how much it had taken us by surprise! We would fumble our way to one of the many candles and matches that were in strategic places everywhere around the house. Lighting that first candle always brought such a sense of relief with it. Just one candle would drive away the darkness.
We learnt to be organized and flexible. The health care system was dreadful. The hospital was an extremely frightening place. Doctors genuinely believe that if you have a fever you need to soak your socks in milk and wear them to bed. They believe you will be infertile if you sit on a cold floor. They tell you that if your midriff is exposed and cold it is a form of contraception. (Imagine the number of teenage pregnancies that encourages!)They believe you will be dreadfully sick if you eat ice cream in the Winter. We prayed we wouldn’t need to be hospitalized, or break a bone!! I became a de facto Dr and diagnosed our various ailments. We ate ice cream in the winter if we could find it, we didn’t soak our socks in milk when we had a fever – we imported Tylenol and used that. It has a much better success rate in my opinion and is far more pleasant smelling! I sat on a cold floor and fell pregnant with our 4th child – a miracle! I am standing here to tell the tale.
The language spoken there is Albanian and we fumbled our way, falteringly at first and gradually with more confidence – with some hilarious misunderstandings along the way. We made dear friends who we shared our lives with, all the time trusting God in small ways and big ways. We prayed that His light would shine out of us so that the darkness we saw everywhere and the hopelessness would be transformed. That people would marvel at the light of Christ. We prayed for our friends as a family, we brought food to them, we talked to them about the light and love of Christ. We tried to model that in our lives.
I had the privilege while we were there of running a pre-school for vulnerable and abused children. We were only able to run 2 sessions a week but we would pick the children up from their homes, drop them off after and feed them during the pre-school time. It looked like a normal pre-school does here in lots of ways, but it was a harrowing experience at times. There is no welfare system there and many children are abused. Families close ranks and it is an accepted thing. We had a choice – try to intervene in the families and potentially be denied access to the children, or provide a safe place twice a week where the children could be shown love unconditionally, see the light of Jesus and have an environment where they could be children. We decided on the latter.
I wrestled often with the question – why has God blessed my children with the family that they have? Why were these children who I was becoming more and more attached to in the horrendous home situations that they were? What had they done to deserve this? That isn’t to say that I am a super Mom, and that my house is the fun place to be all the time – trust me, it isn’t!! I am the first to admit I don’t get it right all the time, but it did just seem so unfair. I think one of the hardest things I did on a regular basis was to take the children back to their abusive, neglectful homes. As a Mum, to drive away from a house where the Mother has mental health issues, is illiterate and abusive to her children is almost impossible to do. I would often drive away hearing the children crying as there was no milk, food, heat. Awful. But……I saw the lives of those children change as we shined the light of Christ into them. Faces that were once catatonic lit up. They drew with crayons, they danced to music, they sang. They learned to have water fights and blow bubbles. We couldn’t believe the transformation.
We listened to horrific stories of things our friends had encountered in their lives during the years that we were there. We wept with them and mourned with them. They experienced things we had no way of relating to and could never hope to understand. I would lie awake at night worrying – can you see a recurring theme here?- I couldn’t help but come to the same conclusion time and time again – the only hope is Jesus and the light He brings. The world is a ruined and frightening place because we have pushed God out of the picture. The only hope is Jesus and the light He brings. Although life here is typically nowhere near as extreme as the stories I have shared with you, the underlying theme is the same both there and here. Perhaps you have to look a little harder here than there, but if you look closely you can see a common theme. There is abuse and neglect all over the world. There is abuse and neglect here in Champaign/Urbana. Some children are born into loving homes, and some are not. I find it hard to make sense of that if God will never shine His light on that injustice.
If somebody asked me if I would do the same again with our now 4 children, the answer would be a resounding yes every time. If Christianity wasn’t true then what we did as a family, and the potential danger that we lived in, bringing up our 4 children was absolute stupidity. You could argue that we were doing good, but it would be idiocy and very neglectful parenting to subject our children to that just for the sake of doing good. If the claims of Christ aren’t true, then to be told you are putting your children at risk and doing the wrong things for them is incredibly hard to ignore and power on through regardless. If the promise of heaven wasn’t there, then living with an evacuation bag packed and being on a radical Muslim group target list doesn’t make a lot of sense. (At least it doesn’t to a worrier like me!!)
If, on the other hand, what Christ has said in the Bible is true, then there is every reason to have done what we did. If Jesus really died on the cross to save us from our sin, if He offers eternal life if we repent and believe in Him, if we have the opportunity to walk in His light and never be in darkness then surely we should be willing to tell others about this amazing thing, no matter what the consequences? For our family it meant moving to a dangerous place for a while. For others it won’t mean that at all. The bottom line is it means being faithful to tell others, and to show that light that we talked about, wherever we are. Right now that is here in Champaign/Urbana.
So what does that mean for us this Christmas? These Christmas lights that are so beautiful will soon be gone won’t they? In just over a month they will be taken down and stored in a box for another year. They aren’t lasting. For a month or so they are just a pretty distraction, but they aren’t essential to our lives. If you are a Christian, my prayer, and challenge to you is that people would be attracted to that marvelous light of Jesus, that it would be seen in you clearly. My hope is that we would be beacons of light this Christmas, modeling a different, more lasting promise than the short lived promises a more commercial Christmas can convince us we need.
If you are not a Christian, but some of the things I have said tonight have got you asking some questions - what does it mean to repent and believe? How does that happen? – these are words you certainly don’t hear in every day language! Please don’t leave without getting those questions answered. I love to talk and to meet new people, so come and grab me at the end, I really am very friendly I would love to meet you. If the British accent is off putting to you, then find someone who has been involved in organizing the event, or the friend that you came with. Find a way to get your questions answered. I am also very aware that Christmas can bring up all sorts of emotions in us when we are far from family, or we are thinking about those we love who perhaps aren’t with us anymore, or who we are estranged from. If some of those hard life issues are getting to you, there are people here who would be more than happy to listen and talk with you. Please don’t be embarrassed to do that. Again, you can ask the friend you came with, or someone who looks official and like they know what they are doing!!!
although we are loving the venison that all our friends are offering and filling our freezer with!
Posts
