Missions

Musings and meditations about missions from a missionary.

Missionary Calling: 7 Ways to Identify your Calling

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In this brief video, Tara Sophia Mohr (not identified as a Christian) speaks in general about identifying your calling in life.

See video at end of this post…

I would note that this is just a simple motivation type talk where Tara speaks in general to anybody about their calling in life. What I took away from this is that this is exactly what you as a missionary need to understand and present to your potential missionary partners so that they understand your calling. One thing is that you are called (not all missionary candidates are called by the way), and another thing is to communicate that calling to others, especially those that support you, and those that potentially are considering supporting you. This means that you need to highly persuade them of your calling. The elements that Tara presents are very useful in this task.

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Using Color correctly in Slide Prentations

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First of all, these principles are basic art class principles. Color is extremely useful in presentations, but note that there are some rules to observe.

Most missionary presentations use very few title slides, but some use a background kind of effect with an image within that “frame”, and a title. The frame and title would be where you would apply the principles in this post.

There is a very useful and nice program called VideoScribe that allows you to make a whiteboard type video, where a hand actually draws the image. These color balancing tips come from their website (you don’t have to use their program to follow this tip). I will use there images and add logos of companies to illustrate what they say.

http://www.sparkol.com/blog/captivate-your-audience-with-these-pro-colour-tips/

I will summarize the rules here.

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Hardships of Missionary Life

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Problems of Missionary Life

When a person chooses to be a missionary, there are certain sacrifices that they make in order to partake in this kind of ministry. Essentially you lose a lot of your “identity” to become a missionary. The simple question, “Where are you from?” becomes a complicated question because while I was born and raised in South Carolina, I have spent more time in Mexico than the US. Mexican people we visit. Sometimes they joke saying, “David is more Mexican than we are!” I have adapted to Mexican culture and foods, and I really like at least most of the Mexican foods.

But this price we pay is difficult to handle many times.  You kind of “lose your identity” in the process of being a good missionary. We must celebrate the Mexican holidays and basically follow the Mexican culture, because you just cannot survive without doing that. Image if a Mexican was to pastor your church and not celebrate the Fourth of July! He would be extremely out of sync with the people he is trying to reach.

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Missionary Software Recommendations

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Note: This page will be updated regularly with new recommendations.

I (David Cox) have been a missionary for about 28 years now, and if you count the years on deputation, around 30 years. In my lifetime, I have gone from nothing electronic to speak of to using powerful desktop computers now. When I was in my schooling years (1964-2002) computers hit the scene and are now common. My education (much after school was self-taught about computers, and I even taught myself Foxpro relational database, and programmed my own software) has spanned both no-computer, and computer. So let me start off by a couple of much needed points that people need to understand.

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