Called to be Single?
Are you called to be single or are you called to be married but just haven't found the right person yet? How do you seek God's plan for your life in the relationship department and how do you cope with the plan when it unfolds? Our guest article this month is written by Fiona Cooper, a missionary in South America. Fiona focuses on the topic of singleness on the mission field and explores whether, for her, it's a calling or just a situation she finds herself in. There is also a new feature; you can now leave a comment after reading the article.
To read the article, go to www.oscar.org.uk/oscaractive/articles/cooper.htm
Low Airfares for Mission Workers
How do you find the cheapest airfare? If you're Web savvy you probably search online through every flight portal website you can find, looking for the best deal with the least stopovers and travel time. If you're not so Web savvy, you might like someone else to do that for you. Why not let OSCAR help and try both? Firstly, use our Flights page as the starting point for your online flight search. We have many of the popular (and some of the little known) flight search facilities linked from that page. One that comes highly recommended by one OSCAR user is skyscanner. Secondly, use our Travel Agents page to link to Mission, Christian & Charity travel agents in the UK and around the world. Many of these provide special airfares for mission and humanitarian workers. A little shortcut hint ... rather than trawl through all their websites filling in form after form, why not put together an email with your requested journey and times and email it to each of the agents on the Travel Agents page. That way they do all the hard work for you and you can think about more important things like 'What to take'.
For our Flight page, go to www.oscar.org.uk/service/logistics/travel/flights.htm
For our Travel Agents page, go to www.oscar.org.uk/service/logistics/travel/travelagents.htm
For our 'What to Take' page, go to www.oscar.org.uk/service/logistics/shipping/take.htm
Thirsty?
Where do you get your spiritual nourishment? Many mission workers often find life on the field a spiritually dry experience. Often the lack of good devotional material is one major factor of this. OSCAR's Pastoral and Spiritual section is designed to help encourage and nurture you through your mission experience. The Resources page has a host of online devotionals that you can access from anywhere in the world. Two new services recently launched are: 1/ Deovox, a FREE audio devotional and bible study resource produced by Damaris in the UK; and 2/ Easybibles, easy to read parts of the Bible at different reading levels in many languages ... a useful resource when leading bible studies in different languages.
For more info, see www.oscar.org.uk/service/pastoral/resources.htm
Prayer Requests by SMS
Technology provides many ways by which prayer requests can be sent quickly and directly to those who can pray. One of the quickest, suggested by OSCAR user Sarah Harris, is to use one of the Internet SMS (text message) services to send urgent prayer requests to the mobile phones of praying friends immediately, without having to wait for them to check their email.
For more info about SMS, see www.oscar.org.uk/service/communications/telephone.htm#SMS
For other services and advice on praying for mission workers, see www.oscar.org.uk/supporter/roles/pray.htm
Froggybank
Statistics show that online shopping is growing at 9% each year and in 2007, 15 pence in every shopping pound was spent online. If this included you, why not use your spending power to raise funds for mission? It doesn't have to cost you a penny more. OSCAR has set up various affiliate schemes where you can shop as you normally do, but OSCAR receives a contribution from the retailers. One of the most recently launched services to offer this facility is froggybank! Why not hop onto their website and see how it works?
For more info, see www.froggybank.co.uk/oscar
For our other affiliate schemes, see www.oscar.org.uk/about/affiliate.htm