Transformed, Transforming.

By Loren Horst

God is on a mission to change the world. Everyone knows the world needs it. Humanity has a propensity of messing things up and we all have done our share. Sin, we call it, and it ripples out into all of our relationships, human institutions, and even affects creation.

God’s mission to change the world focuses on changing people. Transformation, we call it, and it too ripples out into human lives and relationships. God is doing this transformation by giving his son Jesus into the lives of people and then inviting these persons so changed to join him in his continuing task. Transformed people become transforming people.

The people listed and shown on these pages have joined a great company of people who have experienced God’s transformation and desire to share it and see it grow. Some of us are giving a short period of time and others their entire lifetime. All of us at Virginia Mennonite Missions share in common the desire to be instruments of God’s transformation.

Then, an interesting thing happens. Transformation turns around and continues to change us! Thinking we were the ones changing others, we discover that we are the ones being changed! Thinking we are taking the gospel to others we discover we are actually receiving the gospel. We are wounded healers, broken vessels, and incomplete creations.

It seems to me it has always been so. Transformation is not something to be enjoyed for its own sake, but to be shared for the good of others. Then in sharing, we too receive. The Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi says it well.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Transformed. Transforming. We can never be involved in one without the other.