An example of sacrifice

I mentioned earlier that I caught up with some friends who were staying out at Lane Cove River Tourist Park. I thought I'd share a little more about these friends because the story of how they are working for the gospel is encouraging and one that perhaps wouldn't immediately come to mind when you think "gospel work". I'll let these friends stay semi-anonymous at this point and call them J (the guy) and S (the girl). They're married.

I am not even so sure how I came to be such good friends with J and S. We have never lived in the same town. I met them originally when I was involved in a ministry to Christians in the defence forces and went along to a conference called Fighting Words, aimed at encouraging and exhorting Christians in the forces. J was, and still is, in the Airforce and S is very much onboard with defence force happenings. Later that year I went along to Club 5, as it was then called (a conference for people considering ministry) and J and S happened to have travelled to be there. I didn't yet know a whole lot of people from Sydney, so they were familiar faces in the crowd and I stuck with them quite a lot that weekend, we had a really good time, and before too long I was visiting them for the weekend up in Newcastle.

When long service leave came around for J, which it does quite early if you are in the defence forces because your training and university counts toward it, he decided to go to Canberra and do a version of MTS, working with defence cadets. He managed to get the whole year's leave by making a deal with his commanding officer that after that year he would take a posting to Wagga Wagga. Nobody wants to go to Wagga Wagga. J is now at the rank of Squadron Leader and going to Wagga is just not the thing to do - it means something of a slow death of his military "career".

But they have other reasons for going to Wagga. Out there are several training bases (an Airforce training school 10 km out of Wagga, and the Army Recruitment Centre, Kapooka, out of town in the other direction) through which hundreds of young men and women move every year doing training courses of various sorts. And mostly they are "troops", doing trades, not "officers", the people with degrees. J has several awards and scholarships behind him for his academic performance, S has a Ph.D. Wagga and the troops could look like a waste of their combined intelligence. But that depends on how you're looking at it. They also said they'd give it ten years. That is also suicidal for a military career, to take the same posting for ten years.

But they have gone there for the sake of the gospel. There they seek to have a Christian presence on the training base, to get amongst the troops, run bible studies, courses, open their home, generally reach out to this mass of young people sent out to Wagga for a time as they set out in life.

The thing about any sort of evangelistic ministry to the military is that you really do have to be in the military to do it. You can't walk onto a defence base and start a bible study or run a workplace or campus outreach event - you won't get through the gate, and even if you did you probably wouldn't understand the language that they speak on the other side of the gate. They live a life-style that is basically foreign to the rest of us and is a sub-culture all its own. Many of the people doing these courses also live on the bases for that time, behind the security gates, so you won't find them during a neighbourhood door-knock after-hours. They are basically inaccessible to the usual full-time gospel worker. That is why it is so valuable that J has stayed in the Airforce, but has made sacrifices within that to be strategic for the sake of the gospel. It gives him access, provides him with the means to live where these people are, provides him with opportunities, empathy and camaraderie with the people he seeks to reach. He has handed over his career to the cause of the gospel without leaving it. And S is right there with him welcoming young troops into their lives and raising their kids in Wagga Wagga.