Co-workers has been 8 years in the making.
Back in 2012, my father was dying. He slept much of the time, so while he slept, I read. I had previously read The Ministry of Healing and knew the layout and purpose of the book. It started with a whole section on Jesus and His healing ministry. Which is as it should be for a book being written for sale to the general public.
Just on a whim, this time I decided to start reading from the last chapter, reasoning that if the front of the book was for the general public then maybe the back was for the Adventist medical missionary.
As I read chapter 43, A Higher Experience, I was challenged by the call that God had given me to walk and work with Him. I also kept hearing echoes of chapter 1, Our Example, so that is what I read next. Here in chapter 1 is what that Higher Experience looked like as Jesus lived it out. It was eye-opening, so I kept reading the book that way, a chapter from the back then one from the front.
As a result of that exciting experience, in 2016 I blogged my way through most of the book, starting in this back-and-front fashion. That is when I found how impressive chapter 9 is.
And that is how the emails in this series go. You will start with the last chapter, then read chapter 1, then finish the series with chapter 9, Teaching and Healing, the practical side of the higher experience.
In 2018 I was trying to find a simple stress relief method that I could teach to people with early dementia. Chronic stress is one of the risk factors for dementia, but the lifestyle change programmes that I looked at were promoting yoga and eastern meditation, and I wasn't so comfortable with that. Then I remembered what was said about meditating in The Ministry of Healing. On the basis of that paragraph on page 514, I built Meditating with Jesus. It seemed to relieve my stress and that of people who tried it, so to encourage people to meditate more frequently I went through the Gospels looking for stories of Jesus helping people. I turned these into daily readings for people to meditate on.
Think about this; if you just take stories of Jesus helping people from the Gospels, and read one a day, how many daily stories would you have? Enough for nearly 5 months. Around 140 stories! Jesus was always helping people (or encouraging us to help people).
But I needed at least 6 month's worth of stories so added some Desire of Ages stories too. By this stage I was hooked on daily meditation and decided to meditate through 2 months of The Ministry of Healing.
That was good! And I had another 2 month's worth of stories to add to the lists at Meditating with Jesus.
I had just finished putting these up on the Meditation and Stress website when I got involved in the SoZo health retreats here in North New South Wales and helped Camila put together a tool for assessing the spiritual gifts of the volunteer staff. As I did this I realised that there was something really powerful that Ministry of Healing could add to these assessments. I called that something, "Co-workers with Him".
My plan was to spend April 2020 on the Co-workers project. But then COVID-19 came along and April became one of the busiest and most exciting months in my life that resulted in the hydrotherapy protocol for COVID-19.
Once that was settled, I went back to just those 3 chapters (24 readings) from Ministry of Healing to see if my something-to-add hunch was correct. As I meditated through them again, I saw more clearly than ever, just what it is that God seems to want of us gospel-medical missionaries.
Then I developed the Workbook. The first time I put its contents together I ended up crying at how beautiful and wonderful our Saviour is, and at the privilege of being asked to work alongside Him. And at last I clearly understood what I am asked to do. Suddenly everything snapped into focus.
This project is to share this with you.
The readings you get are slightly modified versions of 2 pages from The Ministry of Healing.
The most obvious change is that there are sections of red text with a superscript number after them. Write this text into the workbook where that number appears.
The second change is one that comes over from the Meditating with Jesus readings. I replaced the Bible quotes with those of my favourite version, the Christian Standard Version. Just to make it easy for people with dementia and also because I never read the Bible quotes in Mrs White's writings. I always get my Bible and read it there, I seem to get more out of it that way.
The third change is using the name "Adam" to replace the many times Ellen White uses the words "man" or "men" to mean "all mankind" or "all humanity", not a just males.
This change is Biblical, 'adam is the Hebrew word translated as "man" or "men" throughout the Old Testament. It is also the word translated to the personal name "Adam", there is no difference in the Hebrew. Reading Genesis 1:26 and 27 with this in mind, turns Adam into a family name... our family name. This will become important later in the readings.
Just so you realise that it has a special meaning I used the Greek, Aδαμ, the New Testament rendering of Adam. You might find it a jarring and ungrammatical, but it made me think about what Ellen said more deeply than I had previously. I hope it does for you too.
This is where we literally fill in the blanks. Not every blank in the Workbook is completed when you finish the readings.
A lot of the ideas that come out in the Workbook Seminar have been vaguely floating around in my mind since 2012, or before.
Yes, SoZo is good. CHIP and DAARP, LLM and 5GY, and all the other acronyms, and even hydrotherapy, are nice things to do. Hey let's keep doing them! But I always felt there must be "something more". Decades of the same old thing... and Jesus hasn't come back.
2020 is the beginning of another generation. Maybe this is the "something more". Maybe not. In any case the Seminar is where you say, "I knew this stuff already, nothing here Bruce" or "You've been wasting my time." I want you to shout at me and argue, "Bruce, stop being so stupid, you are misinterpreting Ellen, you are quoting out of context, this is just silly."
I guess I'm after feedback, correction, and post-coronavirus connection.
But I do think I'm onto something. And this "Co-workers" is an early sign of new life for me. Because two smart women seem to agree with me.
Ellen tells me, "The monotony of our service for God needs to be broken up." (p 149)
The oldest poster still on my wall is a quote from Simone Weil (20th century French philosopher, talking about our fascination with evil) :
"Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.
Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating."
Since I started meditating with Jesus, my relationship with Him has grown much deeper. And since my first, personal Workbook Seminar, my experience has been anything but monotonous and boring, more like "always new, marvellous, intoxicating".
So please subscribe to the emails, (I've gone to lots of trouble) and join me at the Seminar where you can either join me on the adventure of a "higher experience", or talk me down from my mania. All you have to lose is 20 minutes a day thinking about Jesus, and a Sabbath afternoon of conversation.