Check below this week's devotional for news about Marketplace Moments move to its new location at Desired Haven Ministries, Inc.!

"You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you," declares the LORD, "and will bring you back from captivity." -Jeremiah 29:13-14

    Rupert L. McCanon is your hero.  You just don't realize it yet.

     He's not your hero because he was a World War I soldier; though it certainly took great courage to be a doughboy in the first war to end all wars.  And though he served as a Methodist circuit pastor, and then volunteered to be a chaplain to the depression-era CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) camps in the Dakotas and Montana, that isn't why he's your hero, either.  But you'd love him if you heard his stories, I promise.

     You also would admire the way he served his country in World War II, this time as a chaplain serving in some of the most dangerous places of the Pacific front.  Listening to the ways he found to bring God to his job would just make your jaw drop, but that isn't why he's your hero, either. 

    One day, Chaplain McCanon, relates, he was playing his accordion for wounded soldiers in the hospital on Henderson Field at Guadalcanal.  "Beer Barrel Polka" was a favorite of the patients, and the chaplain delighted in the irony as he played to the crowd.  Among the patients was a wounded native of the island, who for three days had been speechless, a look of utter terror and despair on his face as he struggled to understand what these strangers meant to do to his body.  Somebody asked for the chaplain to play "What a Friend We Have in Jesus."  As he squeezed out the first few bars, a broken voice starting singing in English; it was the silent native, his face no longer fearful, his body no longer taut and tense.  Chaplain McCanon moved to his bedside as they finished their duet.  He tried to bridge the language gap by asking his singing partner for his name.  Writes the chaplain in his book: "[.] he answered me with great dignity and without fear: 'Me Christian'". ***

      It always delighted the chaplain when he discovered God had been there before him.  It comforted him to know God would be sure to find those who wanted to find Him, even in distant places.

     Chaplain McCanon found ways to see God at work in every place he went.  In the dark days of trench warfare or Depression-riddled America; in celebrity-laced Hollywood or blood-draped Guadalcanal; in the faces and words and lives and scenes of everyday living, McCanon looked for God, because he knew, just knew, no matter how dark the circumstance or how dire the struggle, God would be at work. 

     Because he knew, and because an army of other believers like him also knew, Chaplain McCanon, or the people in your life who lived the way the chaplain did, led you to the Savior. Not by pointing to themselves and celebrating their work or words; but by pointing to God and celebrating His work and words.

     When your coworkers or your customers or your friends or your family members follow your gaze to see where your focus is, to whom does it point them?

     Life is not, nor will it ever be, about what we can get from it.  It isn't about ambition or winning or succeeding or leading or even transforming things.  It's about discovering God every place we are, and then working right there, helping others discover God is found outside the church as well as in it.  It is in those public places that our private lives bear the most effective testimonies; as we labor shoulder-to-shoulder with Omnipotence while an army of witnesses see what it means to be in the Service and Shadow of the Almighty.

     Chaplain McGanon, or others like him, found God in the strangest of places, and served Him where they found Him.  It is because of their faithfulness in the generation now passed that you and I found God, too.

     Will you pass it on? 

--Randy Kilgore

Desired Haven Ministries, Inc.

rkkcak@aol.com

***From a self-published manuscript of Chaplain McCanon: Sometimes We Laugh-Sometimes We Cry or Tell it to the Chaplain. Vantage Press, 1969.

What is Desired Haven Ministries? 

     In the next two weeks, we'll begin the six-week process of transferring Marketplace Moments devotional location to a new initiative, Desired Haven Ministries, Inc.  Desired Haven Ministries is the 501(c)3 flagship for three ministry branches targeting Christians who work, along with their families.  Under the DHM banner will be Made to Matter, an organization specifically focused on reaching workers at every level of employment with tools and resources that help them discover, understand and give testimony to the great love of God as they engage in their labors.  In August of 2008, Discovery House Publishers, the publishers of Oswald Chambers' My Utmost for His Highest and the devotional publication Our Daily Bread will release a new book by Randy Kilgore entitled Made to Matter, one of several eventual outreaches of this branch of DHM.  The website will also introduce new work/faith writers to the broad audience of readers presently reading Marketplace Moments.  A second branch, designed to equip Christians to make their faith matter in the midst of busy schedules, will also launch in the coming weeks under the title of Ten Minute Christians.  Longtime subscribers will recognize the connection to the North Platte Canteen devotional, where Nebraska residents dramatically impacted the lives of soldiers heading off to war in ten-minute encounters.  Desired Haven Ministries, Made to Matter and Ten Minute Christians will eventually feature over 300 indexed articles and devotionals for workers, forums and other interactive tools, plus the release of sixty Bible studies aimed at working Christians.  Boston area residents will also have the chance to participate in one of three regular Bible studies, one each in downtown, North Shore and Western metropolitan Boston.  The flagship operation, Desired Haven Ministries, uses Psalm 107 as its guide for evangelistic activities aimed at workers in the storms of life, when they're most apt to discover and respond to "the great love of God." 

For more information on these new ministries, write to us at ckdhm1@aol.com.  Or,watch for the launch of our new website, posted here at Marketplace Moments.