Jessica prayed through another painful time when her fiancé left. “His life was on a downward spiral. I was spared from a lot of trouble and heartache,” she notes today. Simultaneously, Jessica’s mom was hospitalized. So Jessica helped homeschool her younger brother Jacob while attending college full-time. “God really showed His mercy to me during that time,” she says.
Whether praying for a suicidal acquaintance, standing up for religious freedom in school, or walking through the pitfalls of life, Jessica has seen God meet her in every way—a miracle that keeps her grounded in her faith. And she is gaining the respect of her friends and community.
“To this day,” Jessica says, “I believe if you pray and stand up for Jesus, others will respect you.”
I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile.
(Romans 1:16)
WEEK TWO JOURNAL
• Do you feel God is “messing up” somewhere in the world?
• What would it take for you to begin to trust Him, regardless of the outcome?
• Do you feel as if you are too much of a “mess” yourself for God to use you in a messed-up world?
• If you could pick a way to be part of His plan, how would you like God to use you?
• What Bible verse or passage of Scripture has been most meaningful to you this week? Why?
week three
1
norah ashkar
Faith and Film
No offense,” said a fellow New York University student to aspiring filmmaker Norah Ashkar, “but I hate Jesus.” Norah had never even said His name. Her class had just finished viewing her first black-and-white short film, and during the ensuing critique one of her classmates quickly took issue with the visual references it contained to her Christian faith. The images were subtle ones—a loaf of bread on a kitchen counter and a nearby box of Life cereal paying silent tribute to the “bread of life”—but they were not overlooked. Her sharp-eyed critic loudly and passionately voiced his disapproval, and soon he was not alone.
While she admits his outburst stung, Norah says she wasn’t particularly surprised by the reaction her piece generated. Her early semesters in the creative community at New York University film school had taught her that tolerance is a widely praised but selectively practiced virtue. “The other students here are tolerant if they like you,” she explains, “but if you don’t fit in, they don’t like you very much. They all believe the same basic stuff, and they expect you to believe it too. If you don’t, you’re the odd man out.”
First drawn to animation as a career, Norah began exercising her creative gifts early. A self-proclaimed doodler, during high school she attended a summer program in animation at the University of Southern California and followed it the next summer with one at NYU, where she admittedly caught the film bug. Then she applied for entrance to both universities and began to pray—not simply that she’d be accepted at one or the other, but that she would be allowed to attend either one.
One of twin daughters in a tightly knit family, Norah comes from a mixed home: her mother is a Christian and her father a Muslim. He did not favor his daughters attending out-of-state schools and was not at all receptive to their growing faith. “We didn’t talk about it,” she says, “ever. We used to say when we were going to church that we were going to hang out with friends. I’m sure he knew where we were meeting those friends, but we didn’t flaunt it, so he didn’t ask.”
When the hoped-for acceptance letter arrived from NYU, Norah asked her friends to pray and sat down with her father to discuss her future. To her utter delight and relief, their prayers were answered. He allowed his daughter to move to New York City, and a new adventure of faith began.
Although she tried to prepare for what she felt would be a lack of spiritual support in her newly adopted city by e-mailing churches in Manhattan and putting out feelers for connections with other believers, Norah acknowledges that it was difficult at first to establish a network of friends. She laughingly remembers what she calls “the day I met my first Christian at school—a volleyball player from San Diego in a Switchfoot T-shirt.” Seeing the shirt promoting a Christian band, she approached him and asked about his faith. When he said he was a Christian, she quickly replied, “Me too” and recalls that he seemed as relieved to find her as she was to find him.
Slowly, Norah began to piece together a web of like-minded fellow artists, both within the university and outside it. “I attended a Campus Crusade winter conference,” she says. “That helped me connect with some other folks I might not have otherwise met, and things just sort of grew from there.”
Soon Norah became a regular at transFORM, a monthly meeting in Manhattan where Christian artists gather, both to interpret popular culture and to show one another their work. Along the way she also met established believing artists such as New Yorker Makoto Fujimura, founder of the International Arts Movement (IAM) and a presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts. These interactions with artists of deep faith and strong influence had a profound impact on Norah and offered plenty of life-giving encouragement.
Her continued association with peers in the art world has taught Norah that excellence in her craft can give her a hearing where her faith alone would likely prevent her being heard. “They think they’ve heard the truth. They think they know it. But many of us who believe are talented too. We’re good artists, and in this environment, talent is respected.”
In her classes at NYU, Norah’s goal is to show up, work hard, get assignments in on time, and be supportive of her fellow students. Her work ethic and positive attitude have already found favor with some of her toughest professors—including ones whose beliefs are strongly opposed to her own. She’s found a mentor too—an NYU instructor who has observed her diligence and believes in her talent. That association led to her first paying job as an artist—a summer internship as an office/production assistant on an MGM film featuring Steve Martin as the Pink Panther. It was Norah’s first film industry paycheck, and she was pleased to have had the opportunity to earn it.
Norah will finish her studies soon and wonders what the future will hold. She’s chosen an industry that she admits is not at all sympathetic to her beliefs, and she knows the way will not be easy. “But this is the dream God has given me,” she affirms, “and I’m going to follow it.”
She offers this advice for other aspiring artists who might come after her: “Work hard. Don’t be afraid to go for your dream. Find a group of friends whose support you can count on, and be an encourager for them too. Most of all, trust God, and put your focus on following Him.” She says, “I learned this verse a long time ago, and I’m finding out every day how true it really is: ‘Greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world’ [1 John 4:4 NASB].”
Norah not only believes it—she’s counting on it to sustain her in a world that hates the One she loves.
You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.
(1 John 4:4)
2
brett trapolino
God’s Open Door
The assignment: move with your husband of eight years and your three young children to a place you’ve never seen. Adjust to the unfamiliar rhythms and practices of a Third World country, and learn a language completely unknown to you. Live at first with a young pastor, his wife, and their small children in a home barely big enough for them. And for an added challenge, prepare for the birth of your fourth child in a place where modern medical facilities are severely limited and infant mortality is high.
This is not a nightmare. Instead, it’s the very scenario that causes Brett Trapolino’s eyes to sparkle with joy, and the corners of her mouth to turn up in a shy but easy smile. She confesses that while she is unsure about what God might have in store for her, she’s thrilled at the prospect of following Him into the
unknown.
When Kirby and Brett Trapolino married, neither had any idea that they might one day live in Ongole, India, partnering with local believers to support and serve an orphanage, a Bible college, and a church-planting ministry. Kirby met Pastor B. Samson, head of what is now Peace Gospel Ministries, when he was single, and Samson was the twenty-year-old son of a beggar, preaching in the slums of Southern India. But the two men formed a bond that would change both their lives.
“Kirby helped me by raising funds in the United States,” says Samson. “He encouraged me to press on in the Lord, to dream big, and to believe that the Lord could do it, even though I was living on three dollars a week as a slum pastor.”
Kirby continued to support Samson’s work and to visit India, even after he and Brett married and began their family. In the States, the young couple launched a business together, moved to the suburbs, and began to serve in their local church. But over time, the land and people that had captured Kirby’s heart nearly a decade before began to call Brett too.
And the time seemed right to go. Peace Gospel was supporting thirty orphans in three temporary shelters and had trained seventy-six full-time ministers and planted forty-two churches in remote villages. Bible studies were being translated into the Telugu language for the first time. The Trapolinos’ treasure had been invested in India, and their hearts were ready to follow it there.
“Even while we live in the here and now,” says Brett, “God is always preparing us for the next thing. What we’re living now—this is not it. God wants to give us other comforts. He wants us to know mystery, to trust Him, and to wonder. I’m hungry to fulfill what He has made me to do, and He’s redefining what greatness looks like to me.”
Having grown up Catholic, Brett says she had known about God since she was a child. But it was in college that her faith in Christ became real to her, although she readily admits that she struggled with an eating disorder and with periodic bouts of depression. A theater major, Brett remembers participating in a guided exercise in one acting class that became a personal turning point in her life. “Someone is waiting for you,” the instructor said. And as Brett moved toward that “waiting one” in her imagination, she says simply, “It was Jesus. And I knew that it was Him.”
When she reflects on her journey so far, Brett says, “God has shown me so much mercy. When He has a purpose for someone’s life, it will not be thwarted. He’s given me many second chances. I probably shouldn’t even be alive, and I’m the mother of three, expecting another baby and facing a huge change in life without the kind of fear I might have once had. But I believe that what the Bible says in 1 John is true: ‘Perfect love casts out fear’ [4:18 NASB]. This season for me is about hearing Him in the small things—about learning to serve, to stay hidden, and to esteem others more than myself. I love what He is teaching me. And I want to know Him more.”
Although the move to India was well under way when Brett learned she was expecting, the pregnancy did not change the Trapolinos’ plans. “We did pray about it,” Brett says, “but Kirby and I both believed we were still to go, even though in the world’s eyes, it seemed foolish. We knew that God had opened the door and that there was no other way for us but to go through it.”
As a result of the pregnancy, Brett couldn’t get any of the immunizations recommended for the family before they left the country. And the physician who delivered her first three children issued strong warnings about the prenatal care (or lack of it) she could expect to receive in India.
On her final visit to that physician, Brett prayed that God would speak a blessing over her through her unbelieving doctor, and He did. “She made it clear she was against my going,” says Brett. “And she told me all the things that might go wrong. I didn’t argue with her. I thanked her. But I also told her as gently as I could that I knew God had given us this baby at this time, and that He could care for it even in such difficult circumstances.”
Then, Brett told her very professional, capable, and matter- of-fact physician that she loved and respected her and strongly desired to have her blessing on both her pregnancy and her plans to have the baby in India. And the same doctor who had never demonstrated any overt affection to her patient stood, embraced Brett warmly, and gave her that blessing.
For Brett, it was a very physical reminder of what God continues to do in the lives of those He loves: “God doesn’t run out of blessings. He has a dream for each and every man and woman. Our job is to delight in who He has made us to be—to walk with Him and to rejoice in that. My prayer each day is that God would let us know more and more what it is to fall in love with Jesus—and give us the courage and desire to follow Him anywhere.”
I can do everything through him who gives me strength.
(Philippians 4:13)
3
katherine von bora
Called to Be Different
Tiny Katherine von Bora was only five years old when her father left her at the gates of the Benedictine convent school near Brehna, Germany. Katherine’s mother had died that same year, and her father soon remarried. A small daughter was too much of a burden, and her father felt that in the convent she would at least receive a good education. Once there, her options were few. So, although Katherine never aspired to the secluded life of a nun, five years later she was transferred to a convent in nearby Nimbschen and made her vows when she was only sixteen years old.
Even though she hadn’t planned for a life of seclusion, poverty, and chastity, Katherine submitted herself to the rigorous routine of sixteenth-century life in the convent. She received the education of a teacher, learning some Latin at a time when many women could not even read in their native tongue. She learned to cook and garden and sew. She said her prayers and attended church services each day.
When Katherine was in her early twenties, the preaching of a man named Martin Luther began to penetrate the convent walls. Luther was a former monk himself and had left the monastery when he came to believe through his personal study of God’s Word that men were saved by faith through grace alone, and not by works of penance or good deeds or service to the church. His preaching in sixteenth-century Germany was causing quite a stir. The German church was still under the authority of the Roman Catholic pope, and Luther’s words stirred not only those within the church, but the common men and women of Germany as well.
When Katherine and her friends began to consider his words, they appealed to Luther for help in leaving the convent. Many had not come to the service of the church under their own free will and felt it was holding them prisoner. Luther even wrote a letter to several nuns about their plight: “Dear sisters . . . You are correct that there are two reasons for which life at the convent and vows may be forsaken: The one is where men’s laws and life within the order are being forced, where there is no free choice, where it is put upon the conscience as a burden. In such cases it is time to run away, leaving the convent and all it entails behind.”1
So, on Easter eve in 1523, Katherine and eleven other nuns escaped from the convent at Nimbschen, hidden in the wagon of a merchant named Leonard Koppe. Three of the nuns were returned to the homes of their families. The other nine were taken to Wittenburg, where Luther himself hoped to find them all homes, husbands, or positions of some sort. In the end, all were provided for but one. Her name was Katherine von Bora.
Two years after her escape, Katherine was living still with a family in Wittenburg as a domestic servant. She had fallen in love with a young man who promised to marry her, but his parents objected to her status as a former nun. She was brokenhearted. Luther proposed another arranged marriage for her, but she refused the man he suggested. She wasn’t trying to be difficult, although Luther may have thought so. He found her somewhat arrogant when in fact she was embarrassed by her awkward position.
Still, when a friend of Luther’s came to visit, she hinted to him that Luther might be an acceptable husband to her—partly because it seemed so unlikely, and Luther’s age (almost sixteen ye
ars her senior) suggested he might never marry.
When Luther heard her words, he did not take Katherine’s suggestion seriously but spoke of it to his parents when he went home to visit. Instead of laughing about it, his father seized upon the idea. His son was not getting any younger, and the elder Luther hinted that he might like to have some grandchildren!
What started as a kind of jest became more and more attractive to Luther. By marrying Katherine, he could give her the status she needed, give testimony to his own faith, spite the pope, and give his father comfort in his old age.
So the former monk, Luther, took as his wife the former nun, Katherine, on the thirteenth of June 1525. To Leonard Koppe, the man who smuggled his wife-to-be out of the convent, Luther wrote this letter of invitation: “I am going to get married. God likes to work miracles and to make a fool of the world. You must come to the wedding.” He did.
Some serve God by remaining single for life. Others serve God by marrying. Martin and Katherine made a life together that impacted many lives for God. They moved into a rundown Augustinian cloister in Wittenburg, which Katherine made into a home. Luther never cared for money and did not manage it well. Katherine did, and she kept their household supplied and her husband fortified. They had six children and took in several nieces and nephews. Students at the nearby university boarded with them, and there were often thirty or more people living together under their roof.
Katherine ably ran their home, and Luther preached, wrote, and taught the Bible at the university and in the church. Luther spoke of his wife often and with great affection; he called her “my rib” and just as often “my lord Katie.” With Katherine, Luther saw marriage as a school for character, saying that he learned more about grace from it than from all his studies, books, and sermons. He paid her perhaps the highest tribute when he called Paul’s letter to the Galatians about freedom “my Katherine von Bora.”
Sister Freaks Page 5