The Website of Miah and Michelle Collins

Hi everybody. This is Miah. I just wanted to share a couple of stories from the past few weeks. Also, we have some really exciting news to share, so be sure to read the whole post!

The best part of ministry for me is getting an extended opportunity to build relationships with the young people we work with and to watch God work in their lives in different ways. Over Easter weekend Michelle and I took 3 of our interns to Durban to spend some time with my folks. All the guys get the long weekend off and the local guys go home to be with their families. Unfortunately, those from other countries are not able to go home and so we try to find somewhere for them to go so that they are not stuck on the farm by themselves for 4 days. We took Ezekiel (Zimbabwe), Donel (Malawi) and Trokon (Liberia) with us to Durban. For Eze and Donel it was their first time to see the ocean. We went to the beach every day, checked out the new soccer stadium for the World Cup, and of course they were keen to go to every service that the Church was putting on for the weekend.

Besides the opportunity to just spend time with the guys, it was great to hear all the things they learned over the weekend in the car on the way back home. They were really excited about my family and how hospitable they were. Donel said to me one day “Your dad is very busy. He is always working.” – If you know my dad, I’m sure you enjoyed that! Trokon said “You parents treated us like we were their own children.” They also learned a lot from Grace Church where my parents work. Even for Michelle and myself, it was a spiritually refreshing weekend and an awesome way to cap off the Lent season.

This past weekend I decided to attend a men’s conference/spiritual phenomenon. It was started 7 years ago by a simple farmer who invited men to camp out on his farm for a weekend and talk about what God expects from them as men, husbands, fathers, and community leaders. That first year 240 men came. It grew exponentially and this year somewhere around 300 000 men showed up. It was quite a humbling experience to stand in the midst of that many men, all seeking answers from God. Thousands of men made first time commitments to follow Jesus over the weekend.

I took 3 “X-J’s” (what we call our graduated students) who I have mentored over the past couple of years along with me. It was such an amazing time with those guys. We talked about everything over the weekend including politics, ministry, what it means to be a man, fatherhood, marriage and dating, and reminiscing about what they learned from their time with J-Life. Only God knows, but I feel like it was my most impactful weekend of ministry this whole year.

We will be wrapping up our training next week and moving into the second phase of the year. We have a lot of exciting things coming up but I would like to share the most awesome one with you! I have already mentioned a trainee this year named Trokon who is from Liberia. We are partnering with a church planting organization called OMS to establish youth ministry training in Liberia and Michelle and I have been asked to lead the initiative there with Trokon. The goal of our time there will be to train a number of key young leaders from different denominations over 8 months who will be able to teach what they have learned to others in their circles and denominations. We will also help to establish Trokon as our J-Life leader and help him to coach those other leaders as they implement the training. The process that we will be using has already been implemented in Tanzania last year by a fellow staff member with really encouraging results.

As Michelle and I met with John and Trokon about this opportunity it seemed quite clear that this is where God is leading us. The church planting organization has already raised the money for me to make 4 trips to Liberia, 2 weeks for each trip, which I will make between July 2010 and January 2011. We will need to raise money for Michelle to come along for 2 of those trips (because I really need her to teach some of the courses!) We will need to raise about $4,000 to get Michelle there on the September and November trips.  This is mostly made up of flight costs. Traveling in Africa is not cheap! You can contact us or take a look at the “Donate” section of our blog to find out how to help us.

I have one more story: Henry is one of our students from Zambia. The other day he asked me (and I wish you could hear it with the accent) “Miah, when are we going back to that place with the moving stairs.”
“The mall? Do you mean the escalator?”
“Yes, I love those moving stairs.”
That is awesome stuff!

In other news, I now have 40 days until the Comrades Marathon. That’s the big 90km run that I have been training for. I ran a standard marathon last weekend and it went really well so I’m starting to feel confident about the big race. I’m really enjoying the running culture and getting to know people through the local club that Michelle and I run with. I’m hoping to finish the Comrades in around 9 hours and 30 minutes, but I’ll be happy with anything under 10 hours. And now that you all think I’m crazy…
Grace and peace
Miah

I have been really deeply praying about and considering studying psychology lately. This would mean that I would want to get at least a Master’s in psychology and this opens up a lot of questions like where would I study? What would I want to do with my degree? And of course, would I want to study from a Christian school or go back to a secular school?

Well, I think that I have made a decision for at least one of those questions.  I have decided that if I study psychology, I will apply to study psychology from a Christian perspective. This decision was not easy and I definitely prayed and thought through it meticulously. But I am excited about my decision and I do believe that it is what God is wanting for me in terms of graduate studies. Some of the thoughts of a man named David Prowlinson have helped me in this area. Here are some of my thoughts on the dilemma of studying psychology from a Christian perspective versus studying at a secular school:

God himself is man’s environment. It is not simply professing Christian people who live in relationship to God, every human being is living in relationship to God (whether conscious of this or not).

The whole movement of the human psyche is through God. Every expression of human anger is with respect to God because it is a demonstration of their worship or non-worship of God, or of their own pride and demands of the universe. The human heart is either facing God or turning towards idols, the human heart is active and not passive.

Therefore, we don’t just simply let the diagnosis of the human dilemma be defined autonomously and then bring in God later, but the human condition exists with respect to God, so we define the human dilemma in light of Him.

And if I believe that everyone living on this earth is radically dependent on and accountable to that God, I want to, and I have to counsel people in light of this.

I can integrate my studies in light of my faith myself, and I have done this and I enjoy this challenge. However, in counseling and psychology, I don’t want to reinvent the wheel when people I respect and look up to have already taken the integration of psychology and theology and formed their own ideas. It seems to me to only waste time to try and do this myself from scratch at a secular school. 

We also have something that the secular world would kill for, and that is the community element of the Church. This is something we cannot overlook when we counsel. I believe in the potential and the power of the community we can have (and were designed to have) in church. This is where real and transformational counseling should happen.

Our model is the only model that has joy at the end. We were created to worship God and to live in relationship with Him. We alone offer a life that has joy at the end of it. And there is no other model that can truly offer hope in the real sense of the word, a hope that is eternal and not temporarily serving a purpose.

Basically, my decision is summed up with the statement in bold above. I don’t want to learn something and then add God into it if I believe that followers of Christ have a viewpoint that people who do not know Jesus will constantly be trying to get at, but will only see from the outside. We who know our Creator and our purpose have a different springboard for the whole discussion of psychology. Others have common grace of being made in God’s likeness and discovering some of His truth as laws of science, but Christians have a deeper and I believe more accurate perspective. I will always want to study what secular psychologists are coming up with, but my focus will be in light of who Christ is. The Word is my measuring stick for the goodness and validity of other systems and models of counseling. We can and must use the laws of science (because everything is spiritual), but we do not stop there. For me, there will be many more steps and much more responsibility as a counselor.  I am not simply dealing with the mind, but also with the healing of the human soul.