A Couple’s Story
We first participated in an iStudentsDuke program for hosting foreign students nearly 20 years ago. Starting soon after we married we established the practice of inviting 2-3 students to our home for Thanksgiving every year and continued after we moved to Durham in 2007. Sharing the Thanksgiving story is a natural way to share our faith, and often led to the sharing of our testimonies, enriching our lives and those of our children in the process. Reading a WSJ Op-ed by Eric Metaxas about the story on Squanto, suggested a background to Thanksgiving unknown to most Americans, and greatly enhanced the power of the historical events by documenting the conviction of Pilgrim writers that Squanto’s role in the survival of the Plymouth colony was nothing short of miraculous.
Our Thanksgiving experience in 2017 is testimony to God’s continued hand at work in our lives. The 3 students who responded to our invitation last year included a French-speaking Duke graduate student. Robin* grew up under divorced parents but experienced some nominal exposure to Roman Catholicism along the way, where she clearly grew some measure of personal faith and hunger. God’s hand in her life was clear after our first meeting when she, clearly enamored with our family (which includes our teen daughter), offered to return to cook for us from her cuisine. Her delightful personality made it easy for us to embrace her, inviting her back for dinner and then to an album release party by the worship team at Christ Central Church just before Christmas. Robin was so impressed with the event that we invited her to join us on Sunday morning for the service, which she began doing on a regular basis, joining us for brunch after the service. It wasn’t long after, while cooking a dinner in our home, that she took the opportunity and privilege of pray to accept Christ as her Savior!
Robin’s spiritual journey surged ahead as she began inviting her student friends to church, including a young woman from S. Asia. She did not hesitate to share her experience with her family when she returned home for Christmas, apparently gushing a bit too much about her new American family, because they were eager to meet us when they visited Durham for Robin’s graduation this May, where they sincerely shared their desire to see us visit them in their home someday soon!
Robin has accepted a job at a small law firm in France when she returns in late August, but not before house sitting for us while traveling when her lease expires. Although we will miss seeing her on a weekly basis, we’re all committed to staying in touch and visiting our ‘adopted daughter’ in France.
Another Volunteer Story
Over the past 4 years my family and I have had the great privilege of building relationships with a number of international students. I could share with you about how these friendships provide opportunities for us to get to know awesome people and learn about different cultures or how our family gets to participate in worldwide kingdom building in our own backyard. I could tell you about the great conversations we have had and that my son thinks our international friends have the best sense of humor ever!
But instead I want to briefly share with you how God has used these friendships to demonstrate His love for me and to gently transform two specific areas of my life.
The first area is service. I like to serve others but I have a very difficult time being served. Hosting students for dinner or offering rides was an easy way that I could serve. What I didn’t realize was that God would use these friendships to teach me how to not just accept being helped or served but to accept being honored. From staying with my son until I got home from work to serving me Turkish tea, from helping me cook dinner to acknowledging me in a dissertation, our students, whose cultures value hospitality, honor and respect, have served, loved, honored and humbled me more than I could ever have imagined and in so doing God used them to change me. Accepting these acts of love and kindness from our students helps me to accept the love and kindness lavished on me by the Father.
The second area is sharing the love of Christ with others. I am convicted on a regular basis of my lack of boldness in telling others about Jesus. Sometimes I worry that I care more about the salvation of other cultures than I do for my next-door neighbors. Unlike our culture, which tends to be hostile toward Christianity, international students are inquisitive about Christianity. They ask questions and are open about their own beliefs. They want to know why you do what you do and what you think. They make it easy and even natural to talk about Jesus and the good news in the context of talking about our culture. These conversations remind me why I believe what I believe and how exciting it is to follow Jesus. God is gently nudging me to be bolder in my interactions with others even as I step out in faith with our international friends.
The scriptures tell us in Psalm 68:6a that “God sets the lonely or the solitary in families.” God has placed specific students in our family for a short period of time to help them learn about and adjust to our culture. He has also placed them there to teach us how to love and be loved through the power of Jesus Christ. Thank you.