Purpose Asia

  Every night at twilight for the last month you could hear it, the droning hymn. The steady hum of a beehive and the crackle of electricity all rolled into one deep thrum. It sizzled from every tree and buzzed from the moment the sun began to think about laying down for the night, until he covered his shining head in a mantle of deep black. I hadn’t heard it before, or at least I didn’t remember it, and it puzzled me until I started to pay attention. It wasn’t a beehive or an electrical current. Instead, it was the steady, rhythmic thrum of the hard-sided, armored wings of a beetle called the muna beetle*. It’s a brown beetle about the length of your thumb, chubby and winged, and apparently tasty. And, as I asked my friends about it, they really only come around during this time of year. It made me think, this hymn of the muna beetle, about rhythms and seasons. A friend and I were talking the other day about how, when we first arrived here, we tried to make sense of the seasons in...

  My PNG family and I once we arrived in Jiwaka        Fog rolled around us in the thin light of dawn. We waited, engine idling, on the side of the road just past the large billboard welcoming us to Jiwaka province. We had arrived. Across two provincial lines, lots of bumpy road and tanked up with roadside three-in-one coffee we had trekked to come and visit my Papua New Guinean brother Michael's family for a very special occasion. Michael's younger brother and his wife had a new baby and this weekend they were going to have a baby naming ceremony, a celebration that's observed in only a few provinces in Papua New Guinea (PNG). I had never been to a baby naming ceremony, so I was excited to see what this ceremony would be like and to see what this new province, and its unique culture, would be like.    The sun stretched and began to push away the rumpled coverlet of fog, revealing a beautiful landscape of steep mountains, f...

 Hey Dear Friends,  I wanted to let you know that my current method of allowing you to subscribe to my newsletter and receive email notification of new posts will be going away in about a week. I've looked into some alternatives but haven't found a very good one yet.  So...... If you are currently subscribed to this blog and want to continue to receive notification when I add a new post please email me at megan_reed@wycliffe.org and I will make sure that you receive notification via email when I add a new blog post.  Thanks dear friends! I hope to add a post next week about a recent trip I took to Jiwaka Province!  Stay tuned and let me know if you want to be emailed when I write this new post!  Christ Follower,  Megan R.

    Our team working to resuscitate baby J.  Baby J. was brought into our clinic first thing in the morning. He had no pulse and was essentially dead. Our team set to work immediately doing CPR, giving rescue breaths and launching into a full resuscitation effort. You could hear several of us praying as we did chest compressions, drew up medications or glanced worriedly up at the heart monitor.  We’d seen this so many times before and so many times before we’d worked and worked only to see another baby pass away because the baby was too far gone when they came. The room was tense. The doctor called for a pulse check and the nurse exclaimed, “I feel a pulse!” A flurry of orders followed and we continued to try to stabilize the little life that was tenaciously clinging to this tiny thread of a pulse. Within an hour or so the baby was breathing on his own and by the time we packed the baby into our Land Cruiser ambulance for a transfer to the nearest hospita...

     Slate gray clouds settle like a comforter over the distant hills. A spill of golden light gleams at the crest of the valley in the last lantern glow of sunset. Trees stretch and sway in the evening breeze. A little spray of wildflowers leaning on a fence catches my attention. Their buds are not yet bloomed, clenched tightly shut with only a hint of pink at each tip. But that’s not what has drawn me in for a closer look. Instead, it’s the little caterpillar creeping up this flower’s slender stalk. This tiny creature is festooned with deep orange, inky black and decadent sprays of dainty hairs from tip to end. I smile. I love the tiny details in this world. The rich costumes of insects, the painstakingly ornate decorations on the smallest flower, the artistry on a bird’s plumage. They all point to the care and magnificence of God. And more than that, they remind me that if He takes enough time and attention to create beauty and perfectly provide for seemingly insignifi...

These were my thoughts during mid September when the wildfires in the Western states were at their worst and we'd had almost 2 weeks of terrible, toxic smoke in my town. Rain had finally come, and this was what came to my heart and mind... Drip. Drip. Drip. Rain splatters outside my window. It feels like the happy, contented dribble down your chin after gulping water on a hot, thirsty day. For almost two weeks there's been a thick, gagging smoke in my area due to ravenous wildfires. The brown and sickly-yellow haze came and began to squeeze the life from us even as the fires themselves ravaged nearby towns, razing them to the ground in their fury. We stumbled and gasped, blinking back tears from stinging eyes, stinging hearts. The fires have brought with them a heaviness of spirit too. Oppressive and choking, suffocating the tiny oxygen of hope, the little drops of joy, the vainly gripped peace.  I told my Dad today how much I longed to see blue skies. I've felt stifled. A...

Psalms 103:13-14 NIV As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust. I don’t know about the rest of you, but there are days, especially lately, where I reach the end of the day bone tired. Not the well-earned, honest-work kind of tired. It’s the sapped-dry, reached-my-limit, culture stress sort of tired. The kind that comes in times of severe mental and emotional stress, intellectually demanding tasks, or uncertainty. Times like we’re walking through right now. As I was spending time with the Lord this week my heart and mind were pulled back to a Psalm I memorized with my brother in a time I had more sapped-tired days than good ones. It was Psalm 103.  It’s a poem written by David, all about God’s compassion - both to sinners, and to just plain-old frail human beings. The origin of the word “compassion” is the Latin word “compati” which literally means to “suffer with” (Oxfo...