A summer highlight for me was last week’s “Field of Dreams” ballgame. Growing up in the south suburbs, I became a White Sox fan, geography determining destiny. Well, there were some Cub fans around, but we won’t talk about that. As a kid, the last Sox appearance in the World Series was 1919, which they lost because eight players took bribes, good Chicago style. In 1921 the new commissioner of baseball, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, banned the eight Sox for life, including the great “Shoeless” Joe Jackson. In the movie, Ray Kinsella hears a voice in his cornfield, “If you build it, he will come.” He built the field, and Shoeless Joe and the others came out of the corn to play.
On the other side of Iowa, outside Mapleton, there’s another open patch surrounded by corn fields. Dilapidated farm buildings were renovated and they come, thousands a year come. Old and young… amazing, in our aging churches the young as well as the old come to Mission Central to learn about mission work around the world. The old barn is filled with fascinating artifacts from mission fields far away. Photographs with miracle stories surround the fellowship hall. As unlikely as a major league game in Iowa, in the middle of corn fields is a hub of missions, the field of a true dream.
“It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be lifted up above the hills, and all the nations shall flow to it, and many peoples shall come, and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths’” (Isaiah 2:2-3).
“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” – these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:9-10). In Iowa or in your congregation, if we build mission, they will come. God gives the increase (1 Corinthians 3:6).
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