Conquering Fear!
On March 6th -17th Rob and I travelled to Greece to start our tour of four countries in 12 days. The purpose of the trip was to meet up with Tommie Naumann an incredible evangelist and missionary who has recently teamed up with MV to become a field coordinator based in Greece.
Tommie and his wife Gunilla have been working in the Balkan countries since 1995 with the incredible vision that "the motherlands of the gospel shall give birth again." They now support a network of churches in all of the countries that we visited: Macedonia, Greece, Syria and Jordan.
With such an established network all ready we were going out to see where Missionary Ventures can fit in to the work that Tommie is already doing; see if there are projects that we can support or opportunities to send teams. I am pleased to say that there is absolutely loads going on there that we can be involved in and it will be very exciting to see what becomes of this new partnership over the next year.
However although classed as a work trip I really felt that God had some challenges in store for me in this journey.
You only have to talk to my wife to find out how apprehensive I was before I went; muttering several times that "I just don't want to go anymore" the night before we travelled! This was mostly down to my hatred and fear of flying, and the trip was to include 9 separate flights. I had also heard lots of off-putting things about the treatment of Christianity in the middle east countries we were going to visit. So both of these topped with a fear of talking to large groups and I wonder why I even said yes in the first place!
But God as usual knew exactly how to encourage me and bless me for diving in. Every step along the way we met some amazing people.
Each of these people either made me laugh, gasp in amazement or just want to move countries to be able to work with them. Every new place I went the fear would rise and then I would meet my God-sent 'contact' and it would go away again; or rather be replaced with awe.
So who did I meet? There was the karate expert aged 18 who, along with 5 other lads he trains with, are moving into a town in Macedonia known to have no believers in it in order to start a place of prayer and evangelism from where they will also live. 
There was the 14 year old son of Tommie and Gunilla, who despite his parents being crazy missionaries still manages to work on an education remotely, learn the drums and also find time to beat visitors at several PS3 games. (I did get the high accolade of "you weren't as rubbish as I thought you would be!" though.)
There was the pastor of a small congregation in Damascus who after being arrested and interrogated by police for two days and then banned from meeting together with other Christians still managed to gather some of his congregation together to pray with us and take us out to a local youth bar where we could beat the locals at pool! There was also a man who only recently had converted and been freed of his drug addiction and already had an amazing vision to open and run a live-in drug rehab centre in Skopje, the capital city of Macedonia. His desire to help was just infectious!
These were just a few of them and if you ask me I will tell you about all of them. They were all amazing people and God really opened my eyes to see just what can be done when we yearn to see God work and don't just talk about it but do it.
On the last day of meetings in Jordan before we started our long journey home Tommie challenged me to share something at the meeting that night. Well, after days of being with people who faced government oppression just to be able to pray I couldn't really say "no, I'm scared". All that day whilst we were catching some amazing sights down by the river Jordan and up in the mountains of Gilead I couldn't shake the constant thought of just what was I going to say!
In the afternoon I sat down with a bible, pen and blank paper. Then, of course, it hit me: 'overcoming fear'. Okay so my fears about flying and going into unknown countries weren't anything compared to the fear of constant oppression just for following Christ. But the way we overcome fear is just the same, and God had been teaching it to me all the time: in the knowledge that God is with us (Joshua 1v9) we must take the first step (Josh 3v13) and then once this, the biggest hurdle, is crossed we progress by taking things one day/step at a time (Matt 6v34).
Of course it was nice getting back to my wife and young daughter but that time away was probably the closest I have been to God for a long time. I hope if I get challenged again to do something like that I will remember the blessings and not the fears!