Pay Close Attention

The Real Purpose
The Gold Standard of Freedom
The Real Purpose
Feeding people, raising orphans, providing power...most of what we'll do is very mundane.  Mundane, but needed.  It's also not the reason we're going out there.

All these things need done, and by volunteering to do them, you'll get in contact with the people God is calling you to touch on his behalf, with no way to predict whom you'll encounter, except by the Holy Spirit.  Then, you can do the things we're really going out there to do: by the Spirit.

Imagine this scenario:

Suppose you're training in spinning and weaving.  One day, during your personal prayer time, the Holy Spirit shows you a particular pattern, and has you make a three matching dresses in three specific sizes.  You make the dresses, and, lacking further instructions, set them aside.

Later, you see a posting on the missions board for a Granger mission to Indonesia.  You feel a prompting in your spirit about it, so you go back to your ship and spend some time in listening prayer.  The Holy Spirit shows you the face of a woman, whose name is Ina, and her two daughters, and tells you their names.  He tells you that the woman's husband was killed today, and that  the dresses you made weeks ago are for her and her two daughters.  He also tells you to send them by a certain Granger who's headed to Indonesia on the mission you saw posted on the board.

You write all this up in a letter to the woman, and give it and the dresses to the person you were directed to, who's going on the Granger mission to Indonesia.  You're headed a different direction on a different mission.

While on the Granger mission, your Granger friend forgets all about the dresses.  Then, one day, while distributing food to refugees, your friend take a break and sits down with some refugees to have his own lunch.  As he's listening to their stories, he hears a woman talk about her husband being killed several months ago, and he notices she has two daughters with her.  All three are barely covered; they're wearing, literally, rags.  He asks her name; it's Ina.

Your friend excuses himself and goes to his ship to get the package you sent.  He takes it to Ina, and gives it to her with the letter. 

The dresses fit her and her daughters perfectly, with a little  room to put back on the weight they've lost to starvation. 

She reads the letter and bursts into tears, overflowing gratitude, as she explains that the letter was written the day her husband died, and the dresses were made before that.  She also tells you that the dresses are made with a pattern that's exactly the pattern on the shawl her husband put on her at her wedding, which tells her that God is her Provider and Protector now, and she and her children will never go hungry or clothed in rags again.

She becomes a Sea Lion, and conducts missions around the world until she's martyred at eighty years old, preaching the Gospel of Jesus in a hostile city.  Her daughters become a doctor and an engineer, and join the Sea Lions, and eventually follow their husbands to the Resettlement Fleet, helping former slaves get started in their new lives after slavery.

And you will have made it happen. By the Power of the Spirit, with a humble spinning machine, a loom, and a sewing machine, using them to reach half the way around the world, to teach an unbeliever that there is a God, and that He knows her name, you'll write it on her heart in a way that she can never forget.

These are the "good works that God created for us to do before the world began."  We'll accumulate them by the thousands, and write them in the Books of Remembrance, for later generations of Sea Lions to learn, and do.

The grunt work of feeding people, building power plants, gathering and disseminating information, preparing for the Beast system...those aren't the real reasons for becoming a Sea Lion.  Those just keep you busy and productive while you do the really important stuff - like making three dresses.




Pay Close AttentionThe Real Purpose
How Much Can You Afford To Lose?