(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)

Good morning, everyone. If I could just grab your attention. Good to hear some discussion happening at the tables.

I'm Anne-Marie Shambaugh. I am the, I guess, coordinator for Faith Stories, our summer series. For those of you who have not been to Faith Stories before, just a quick overview.

Every week we'll hear from attenders of the church who will share about how God has been at work over their life. It can either be a full life story, it can be a specific event. That's kind of the beauty of the class is each week we hear from different people and we hear different stories.

And hopefully you'll hear something in each story that you can connect with, that you can relate with, and get to know each other a little better. So today, just a quick reminder of the rundown since it's been a while. So in just a moment I will introduce our speakers for the morning.

They will share, and then when they're done we'll have maybe 10 or so minutes for a Q&A time with them. So be listening. If you have something you wanna learn more about, that's a good time to do it.

So we'll do that for about 10 or 15 minutes and then we'll have some table discussion after that just about their story, about where you saw God at work and after that we'll be done. So let me introduce our speakers and then I will pray for them and they will come on up. So Mark and Charlene Canada have attended Faith Church since 1988 and they've served in a variety of ministry roles here over the years.

You're gonna hear more about that soon. They've been married for 46 years, have two children and three grandchildren. In their free time, Mark enjoys reading, running, and traveling, and Charlene likes to play the piano and dine out.

So let me pray for them and we'll welcome them to the stage. Heavenly Father, I just thank you for just another year of Faith Stories. I thank you for bringing everyone here this morning to hear from Mark and Charlene and I just pray, God, you'd be with our speakers as they share.

Lord, I just pray that you would give them just peace and calmness and I just thank you so much for them and their willingness to share with us this morning. Lord, I pray for all of us here, that you would just open our hearts, open our minds to hear what you have to say to us this morning, Lord, because ultimately, this class is about you and we want to know you better. I thank you for this class, for this church.

I pray all these things in your name, amen. Mark and Charlene, come on up. Yeah, thank you very much.

It's always good to be with the body in different forums, so yeah, thank you for allowing us. When Anne Marie came to us and asked us to share what God has done in our lives, we reflected on this and thought about what we would talk about, focus on, and the Lord brought the idea of changes and the changes that he has brought to us and wrought in us as a part of his work in our lives. He also brought to mind one of my favorite passages.

It's one that I have sort of a love-hate relationship with. It's James 1, two to four, which says, consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance, and perseverance must finish its work so that you may become, and here's the good part, mature and complete, lacking nothing. And as a lot of you know, that word trials can be translated as temptations.

The idea is, you know, some hard things, and it seems to me that what those things are are often changes, you know, the changes, and they come in different formats. Some changes are a little more welcome than other changes. Some changes are easier to adapt to than other changes.

So again, we're gonna talk about some of those changes. And just by way of a quick highlight, we're gonna talk about changes to our circumstances and our goals and desires over the years, which led to a change in our perspectives and values. But first, a little background.

So I'm Charlene. I was raised in Lansing, Michigan. I'm the oldest of four kids.

I grew up attending church regularly, and I became a follower of Christ at the age of 10. And believe it or not, it was 50 years ago that I headed off to college at Huntington University, where I earned two associate degrees, and met him. Yeah, and the rest is history, as they say.

But anyway, I was born in Valparaiso, Indiana, the oldest of three children. Yes, I grew up as a non-believer. I didn't become a believer until college, at Huntington, where Charlene and I met.

It's a Christian college, but I didn't claim to be a Christian. They didn't require it. Tell that story at some point.

Some of you have heard that, how I came to know the Lord. Got my degree in accounting and philosophy. A great combination.

I recommend it highly to all. And then Charlene and I married beginning of August, and off to UCLA, Los Angeles, and law school. So after law school, we returned to the Midwest, and we put down roots in the Chicago area.

Both our kids were born there. And we moved to Indianapolis in 1988, and came to Faith Church the very first Sunday, and we never left. Partly because our daughter was crying in the room, and we decided not to torture her with church shopping.

But anyway, so we had moved for a job change for Mark, and during the next 20 years here, I participated in women's Bible study, volunteered in the church office, sang in the choir, organized some events, served on the worship team for a season, made coffee, and also on the search team for Pastor Tom. And lots of other things that I can't even remember. Mark and I participated in several short-term trips to Ukraine in our early days, too.

During that time, I was involved in a variety of ways as well. I served as the treasurer, started up the finance committee. I served as an elder.

I became the elder chair twice. Back in those days, we had a different format. ABF leader and teacher.

Adult Bible fellowships, Sunday school classes for adults. You get the idea. I was an usher.

Charlene and I created the A team, which morphed into Greeters and Coffee. So we started that. We were both sponsors of the singles group at a time.

And we were discipled both ways. We were discipled and we were disciplers during that time. Well, one of the ways God brought changes in us was to change our circumstances.

And God did that by calling us to full-time missions. We'd started the missionary care program here at Faith because we felt our calling was to support missionaries and keep them better connected to our church body. That further developed into us becoming full-time, on the field member care providers for Send International.

And we were placed in the Eurasia region of Send. I can't talk, I guess. And that meant moving overseas.

Our decision to follow God's plan changed us from wealthy suburbanites to not-so-wealthy asking-for-money missionaries, which impacted our cash flow, our lifestyle, and the size of our closets. It changed our comfortable surroundings and way of life to a different place with challenges of a different language, new modes of transportation, starting new relationships. The Isingers well know that.

And it kept us on the move from Indianapolis to Ukraine to Siberia to Kazakhstan. After four years, another change happened. I burned out.

And we came back to the States, and Mark was asked to create an organization called Marketplace and Development Enterprises, more known as MDE. MDE is a ministry designed to provide practical support to believers who seek to take the presence and the message of Jesus in and through businesses in unreached communities around the world. The model is a bit like Airbnb or Uber.

The support is provided on two fronts. The first is on the business side to help them go and make money, and the second prong of support is provided on the personal side to help them intentionally make disciples in their context. Those services, this is the fun part, are provided through volunteers, believers who have business experience in accounting, marketing, and the like, as well as volunteers in disciple-making and encouraging and equipping fellow believers.

It's a pretty cool thing, and it's been really fun to watch. And more change happened as we then moved from Michigan to Michigan, then to Kentucky, and finally back to Indianapolis. Oh, I get to keep talking.

You lucky you. I know. Another way God changed us was by changing our goals and desires.

We both left college with the idea that Mark would get a good job, we'd buy a house in the suburbs, have kids, and participate in church and grow old together, all a part of the Christian version of the American dream. God grew us in our planned life for a number of years, but then he stretched us, leading us to do more than we had planned, and creating desires in us to strive to make a difference in the broader reach of his kingdom. And that happened in ways we couldn't have conceived of in our earlier years.

So all of that led to a change in our perspectives as well, and not just overnight, right, but over a period of time as we were undergoing those changes. We went from what I think of as a Midwest-centric couple, born and raised in the Midwest, or those Midwest values, those thoughts, but as we moved overseas, as our circumstances changed, we began to see how big and vast and varied God's world really was. We experienced vastness.

I'm assuming most of you have been to Siberia at some point. So you'll recall, I mean, it's huge. It is basically twice the width of the United States.

It's like seven, eight time zones wide. So when you're sitting on the train going from city to city, you go for hours and hours, and there's nothing. There's just tundra out there.

And I remember thinking, hope we don't break down because we're gonna be stuck here for a while. There's nobody to come help. So we saw that vastness in geography.

God allowed us to see the vastness of his world in terms of people and people groups and cultures, and it's just amazing. Sure, you read about it, and we experienced that a little bit, right, in the United States, people coming, different cultures. But I think once you're there and you see that that's the normal course of life, it strikes you in a different way.

So we saw Ukrainians. We didn't just see them. We lived with Ukrainians.

We lived with Russians. We lived with Kazakhs. We lived amongst Buddhists.

We lived amongst Muslims. We were there living with them. We also, as we were living there, we saw multinational missionaries.

And so, again, for a lot of us, Faith Church sending missionaries, our middle name, we've sent lots of people out to God's glory. But sometimes that makes you think like, oh, okay, if we Americans don't go, nobody's going to go and share. So you're there and you're working with Germans and Ukrainians that are moving to Kazakhstan.

You just see how God is at work in multiple cultures and people to go proclaim his truth. So again, just changed our perspective a little bit. We also saw life as a minority.

Most of us, as I'm glancing around the room, haven't really experienced what it's like to live in a culture as a minority. It does change your perspective on some benefits that come from being in the majority group. Further along that line, because we were in a church in these cultures, we were not just the minority as white Americans, but we were also part of a minority oppressed people group.

The church in most of the places we were living, we weren't real welcomed. And so you had to be, a lot of you know, you have to be careful what you say, who you say it to. You get stopped on the street and asked to show your passport.

We had people come knocking on the door, show us your papers, make sure you're here, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah, you get to understand a little bit better what other people experience when it comes to that. And I think the other thing too that changed, the Midwest centric, I think of Midwest middle class, right? We all kind of know what that looks like.

I'm guessing if I were to ask you in this room, where do you fall in that? Most of you say, oh yeah, I'm in the middle class, right? That's sort of where we all are. That's what we all, we think of. Our definition of middle class, of course, as Charlene mentioned, two cars, a garage, you know, the dog, the school, you know, that kind of thing.

Middle class in Kazakhstan looks a lot different than middle class here. So again, just changes your perspective of economics and what that looks like and what the normal is. I think too, we went from, to some degree, a more limited perspective of God and his work to an expanded view.

We saw how God was not just changing individuals and quote, saving them, and I'm not trying to minimize salvation, but we saw God at work, he was changing cultures, he was changing economics, he was changing society in ways as believers got more and more involved in their day to day life. We've seen that a lot in MDE as we're helping people to go run businesses in Kazakhstan or wherever it might be, India, they come in and they have an impact on how others view economics and how they view money and how to handle money and stress, how to handle stress in the workplace. Again, it's just fun to see and it's been a lot of fun to change that.

Every culture has biblical, we learned, you know, aspects and unbiblical aspects. I know we don't have any unbiblical aspects here in America in our culture, but you know, you just get to see sort of the pros and cons. It becomes more real when you do that.

I think for me, the other thing that changed was I went more from a doer action for people, kind of, okay, my goal here is to do something for these people, right, to help them, and as we were overseas more and more, it's like, you know, there's really not a lot I can do. The odds are overwhelming, they feel overwhelming, and so you get to the point where the only thing I can really do is come alongside and love them and share the truth and trust God that he will provide, and that isn't a bad perspective to have here in the United States as well. And then the last thing changed our perspectives.

He also, I think through this whole process, changed our values. He changed us from us, and I think to some degree us Americans, to us, all of us type of approach. Again, as I mentioned, as you're living amongst Germans and Canadians and Kazakhs who all know and love our Lord and are seeking to proclaim his truth, and I realize this can be politically charged, but we really did change, sort of our national identity fell away more and more, and our Christian identity.

I love Katya because she loves Jesus. I don't care if she's a Russian or not, the hated enemy, right? No, she loves and knows our Lord and wants to proclaim him, so you develop that bond with those people, and it changes you. We came more to care for all believers and all people who know our Lord, and you get to the point where you wanna see more of those Kazakhs, you wanna see more of those Siberians, you wanna see more of those Buddhists and Muslims come to know our Lord, so that was good.

I think another change was, we went from sort of an unreached perspective to a least reached perspective. We, God allowed us to be in some of these places where, as I mentioned before, we were the minority. We talked to some people, yeah, we don't really know another Christian, and so, yeah, we'd love to sit down and talk with you about, like, how do you think about this, and what do you think about that, and how do you handle this from a Christian perspective? Sure, we can go on, they all have their phones, right? They can Google, and they can, they didn't have chat GPT back then.

Anyway, but you get the idea. They could find stuff, but they didn't, and generally wouldn't think to do that, and to have that live interaction just is different. So, focus more on that type of thing, and then lastly, again, our values, as Charlene mentioned before.

Yeah, we came out of college, and frankly, pleasure and comfort in a Christian way was what we were seeking, right? And it's all good, and that's not necessarily bad. You know, the house, the car, the church friends, a family that's nearby, language that's comfortable, and we all speak it, and when we're sitting in a restaurant, we can understand what everybody else is saying, you know, that kind of, it brings a sense of comfort to that, and we moved from that to, you know, valuing true riches, you know, as you experience some of the things, you see the cultures change, you see Christ proclaimed. Sure, hard things, but just the joy of that was huge.

So, for us, God chose, and I think we probably needed to change the what and the where of our lives, to change who we are, and how we think, and how we interact, to make us more like him. We encountered trials and temptations of many kinds, changes of many kinds, but as we sought to persevere through faith, trusting him, he allowed us to take maybe a step, or even two closer to being mature and complete, lacking nothing. As we were talking about this, and writing this up, and praying about this, I feared that this would all sound too noble, right? I mean, boy, they gave up, he gave up his partnership in the law firm to move to Siberia.

It doesn't get much better on the Christian hierarchy, then, right? I mean, in terms of move up, we moved to the top, to the pinnacle, and on all of that. But really, it was a blessing, and the riches that we experienced were huge. I don't know, so last night, I started reading a book, Theo of Golden, I don't know if any of you have read that, okay, so I just started, so Sharni's like, oh, you gotta read this book.

So I started last night, I'm about a third of the way through, and the story is about a 86-year-old gentleman, very gracious, I'm just learning more about him, so those of you who've read the book, don't tell me about it. But he's just experienced a very rich life, and you can tell already, a third of the way through the book, that he's been able to be a blessing through that, and he's been blessed through the highs and the lows, and I feel that way about us. Yeah, sure, Siberia doesn't sound great, but it was enriching, and yeah, it was really good.

Hard, painful, I'll never forget, I'm seeing Tom Macy there. Standing in the airport, Tom was there, Lisa Meharry, and our son Nate, and yeah. Saying goodbye was not easy, it was not easy, but God blessed through that.

We knew that that's what God would have us to do, so off we went, and our life has been enriched through those changes that he has allowed us to incur. And as an added blessing, we've had a lot of moves on both sides of the globe, and a lot of different homes, and made a lot of different friends, but Faith Church has always been our church home and our family.

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