By Erin Kranz, SF International Support Services, U.S.
Changing the lives of young people and their families around the world for Christ through sports is an exciting thing, and we get a lot of inquiries about how people can get involved. Sometimes that looks like taking a short-term trip with us to Camp Langano or going on one of our vision trips to Africa or Asia; other times it looks like joining our prayer team or donating to a project or to a national leader’s salary. But sometimes it goes a step beyond those things, and God really tugs at our heartstrings saying, “There. That’s where I want you to serve me full-time.”
If this is you, I’m assuming you’ve already read up on our Vision & Mission, so let me tell you a bit more about our ministry. We are a ministry of SIM, and all positions with Sports Friends are unsalaried missionary positions. Serving with us will require you to partner with churches, family, friends, and others who will stand with you both prayerfully and financially in your ministry. This can be a scary and daunting task, but God has been faithful to many of us in this journey, and He will be to you as well.
Maybe you’re thinking, “I want to serve, but I don’t think of myself as ‘missionary material.’” Or, “Wait, I won’t get paid?” As part of the international SF communications team, I thought I’d be the first to go ahead and share my [condensed] story of how God brought me here and I learned to put my fears to rest.
Even at a young age, God began opening my eyes to unique and creative types of missions. I grew up in a Christian home and went on my first missions trip when I was 10 to Kentucky as a clown performing at another church. I went on many other missions trips after that and began to feel that maybe God was calling me to full-time ministry, but I couldn’t shake the feeling, “I don’t wear long skirts all the time. I don’t have the whole Bible memorized. I’m not a missionary!”
Fast-forward to college. I’d fallen in love with storytelling and photography and decided to major in Photojournalism, but I knew from the get-go that I didn’t want to ultimately work in the world of newspapers. I shared my heart with a friend who used to work for SIM, and after applying there was told of an opening for a Media Specialist with Sports Friends. After several conversations with them, I really believed this is where God wanted me to go and signed to join the team.
Hooray! End of story, right? Hardly. You see whenever we are on the path to go after God’s will for our lives, the devil is close behind with a bunch of lies to make us doubt. I’m not the most outgoing person, and the giant of fundraising particularly loomed before me. The devil wanted me to think that I could never do it, but God wanted me to use it as an opportunity to learn to rely on Him.
I remember my worst week during the fundraising process. I got engaged and married during this time also, so it took me a full year to complete my RDM. I worked several random jobs during the interim to make ends meet, including the unglamorous and humbling job of delivering the Yellow Pages. Between having to package them myself and deliver them at the doorstep in a rural area where everyone had their own quarter-mile private driveways, I probably put in about 30 hours of work for $96. On the second to last day of my route, a Monday, I was backing out of someone’s driveway and managed to hit a tree, somehow completely tearing the right side of my back bumper off and jamming something else into the tire so I couldn’t even drive away. I remember bursting into tears and thinking, “Really, God? REALLY!? Here I am trying to follow your will, and this is what I get? I graduated from one of the best universities in the country, and here I am stuck delivering papers so that one day I can make NO MONEY and beg others to make up my salary. Is this really what you had planned for me?”
I’m not going to lie – that was a rough week filled with lots of questioning. Would I ever be able to raise the money? Why had God allowed this to happen when I was trying to serve Him? Was I even supposed to do this? But then Friday came around, and my mother called saying she had news. A lawyer had contacted her because my grandfather apparently had another back account that no one had known about, and the lawyer was here to provide them with the funds. We cried together as she told me that we would be receiving a grand total of $18,000 and that she felt God telling her to put it towards my ministry!
Just when I felt like God had left me, He turned around and gave me the biggest financial gift I could’ve imagined! He scooped me up in His arms and said, “Trust me. I’ve got this. In fact, I’ve been planning for it for a long time.” Because the thing was, my grandfather had died more than 10 years before that day, and right in the week that I needed it most we finally found out about it. Who knows when he even created that account!
It took lots more hard work and trusting, but eventually I did get there, and God has taught me a lot and worked through me in some wonderful ways during my time here, including helping start this blog and traveling to three different continents to gather photos and video footage to tell the awesome stories of how God is working through sports ministry around the world. All that to say, whatever your fears, concerns, or feelings of insignificance, God’s got you. If His plan is for you to serve in full-time ministry, He will provide. If that service is with us, fantastic! If elsewhere, that’s great also. To see a full list of current opportunities to serve with us, check out our website here: https://sports-friends.org/go/
“being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” – Phil. 1:6