March, 2025 – About Those Boundries
Recently, my pastor in Massachusetts delivered a sermon on ‘boundaries’ that we may be required to cross in our lifetime. And that may happen at any point from re-locating, to being put into a new position in our job, to lifestyle changes with either a marriage or a death in the family. My pastor’s message was from Acts 10 concerning Cornelius, a captain of the Italian Guard, and a devoutly godly man. An angel appeared to him saying that God was aware of his prayers and charitable gifts and then instructed him to send to Joppa for Simon Peter. Thus begins the tension in Peter’s experience with ‘boundaries’.
Peter had a vision whereby the Lord was telling him (a very hungry Peter) to kill and eat foods that he had never eaten before. He was a Jew. His diet was kosher. As the Lord was affirming that it would be okay to eat the foods he saw in the vision, the three men arrived that Cornelius sent to fetch Peter to go with them. Cornelius needed to talk with him. Peter is a Jew – Cornelius is a Gentile. The two peoples/races were civil but had no regard for each other. Actually, Peter told the men in 10.38 – “You yourselves know that it is forbidden for a Jewish man to associate with or visit a foreigner (Gentile)” – but knowing this was an ‘assignment’ from the Lord, he went on to say, “yet God has shown me that I am not to call any person unholy or unclean”. And off with them, Peter went. What a ‘boundary’ for Peter to have to cross! – to go and minister to those unfamiliar with his own customs, culture, foods, way of thinking, faith, and perhaps even dress.
I couldn’t help but to think about my own life and all the ‘boundaries’ the Lord has asked me to cross. I actually could start from the time my family moved from the ‘woods’ in Maine to a bit of a larger town not far away when I was ten years old. I had spent those first years in an extremely sheltered environment where the sixty people in the tiny town were nearly all related – and we truly lived ‘community’ – didn’t try to – it’s just the way it was. However, I’m going to fast forward to just a few of God’s ‘assignments’ for me.
Going to college in three states away really was ‘boundary crossing’, but between my 3rd and 4th years of college (in the Missionary Peace Corps led by my school), the Lord urged me to minister in Trinidad and Tobago for three months. Oh, my! I ‘wasn’t in Kansas’ anymore. I wasn’t even in New England – I was way outside familiarity faced with more challenges and ‘boundaries’ to cross than I ever knew a nineteen year-old could experience. That experience gave me ‘falling in love’ with people all of a different color.
But other things I didn’t love – snakes, four inches in diameter and up to twenty feet long, spiders the size of tea cups with some of them deadly poisonous as were the scorpions, bats zooming in and out of our living space and ministry place (because there were no window panes in the windows), frogs the size of a coconut (in its green shell), cockroaches three and four inches long and at times crawling up the back of my legs – and at times no refrigeration resulting in having to put food on top of a pot which was turned upside down in a larger pot with water in it in order to keep it from ants. We laid on our beds from 11:00a to 3:00p from the intense heat and humidity – really couldn’t even read because of the humidity making the pages of a book so limp that it was nearly impossible to turn them without their disintegrating in our hands. The food was not my favorite either, and at that, one would have to continuously wave their hand over their food to get a mouthful without a fly in/on it. I have example after example concerning this ‘boundary’ the Lord required of me – but just one more. We had an overnight trip from Trinidad to Tobago on a wooden boat with a capacity of 300 people – yet, there were 500 people on it – besides goats, chickens and who knows what else. There were only chairs to sit on – most were lying on the floor of both the upper and lower decks – all the while enduring fifteen-foot waves. YET!! – when God asks you to do something, HE is in control, knows what we will like – and for sure, I say once again, I ‘fell in love’ with the people God sent me to – and so much so that I cried the entire 5-hour flight back to New York!
Without going into detail, my experience in England for a month ministering to Gujarati Indians crossed so many ‘boundaries’ – the food, culture, language, EVERYthing God called me there in order to minister.
No place could have been more different than my time teaching in the public-school sector in Providence, RI. I was in a high school of two-thousand students representing at least ninety-four different languages and dialects – all liking different foods and music and dress! Realizing because of some poor life-choices, that I might never be on a foreign mission field again, it was evident that God had brought to me the ones with whom He wanted me to share Him – students from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, China, Viet Nam, and more to share with them the Good News of Jesus. It was amazing!!
My experience volunteering (working!!) at a Rescue Mission was another ‘outside the box’/a ‘boundary’ to cross not like anything that had ever been on my radar. I had never associated with/ministered to ex-cons, drunks, druggies, child molesters (both men and women), those with every offense toward mankind you could imagine, YET, it was the joy of my life to be their servant – and to share our Jesus!
I have had more ‘boundaries’ to cross, but lastly for this article, I will only mention my calling /my ‘assignment’ to Romania and the many, many, many ‘boundaries’ I would have to cross to minister to the ones to whom God had sent me. That would be worthy of an article (a book in the future!) all on its own. If JOY has eclipsed all the difficult ‘boundaries’ God has called me to cross, I think back to Simon Peter and the JOY he must have felt in being obedient to the Lord’s calling him in ministering to Cornelius. (Thank you, precious Holy Spirit for including that story for us in the Scripture.) I love it that Peter says (from 10:34,35) ‘God plays no favorites! It makes no difference who you are or where you’re from – if you want God and are ready to do as He says, the door is open!’ And from personal experience, I would add that the boundaries are open. We just need to be willing to go through them as God bids . . .