I found myself alone on my closet floor sobbing and crying out to God. It felt like promises were at risk of not being true. My faith being tried like few times before. Passages my mind had absorbed through a lifetime of studying the scriptures flashed before my mind:
“I have been young, and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging for bread. He is ever lending generously, and his children become a blessing.” Psalm 37:25-26
“But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?... But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” Matthew 6:30 &33
“for those who honor Me I will honor,” 2 Samuel 2:30
“The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and His ears toward their cry.” Psalm 34:15
“Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you, and therefore He exalts Himself to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for Him.” Isaiah 30:18
In the morning, I felt led to look back at my notes from my times with the Lord over the past six months, a practice I have regularly found the Lord uses to speak truth fitting to my particular moment of need. These things stood out:
From a February entry:
“Individuals who are disciples and friends of Jesus who have learned to work shoulder to shoulder with their Lord stand in this world as a point of contact between heaven and earth…. The disciple stands as an envoy or a receiver by which the kingdom of God is conveyed into every quarter of human affairs.” (Hearing God by Dallas Willard p. 191)
From my devotional time recently:
“But He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” 2 Corinthians 12:9-10
and the notion that Paul spelled out a lot of his weaknesses and hardships to the Christian world of His day and ours. He did not shy away from casting Himself not only on God but on the body of Christ for His spiritual and physical sustenance.
This is so counter to our US culture which values independence, autonomy, self-sufficiency, and avoidance of struggle, but perhaps it’s part of God’s plan for the body of Christ?
From my prayer time with dear friends last week:
“The best thing that we have to offer is our relationship with God”
From January:
God IS communication—constant expression. Communication is always spiritual with spiritual ramifications.
From a text message I received from a dear sister last week:
“Context matters…. We cannot isolate a text…. Tracing the flow of thought between chapters and paragraphs is important for understanding individual verses”
If God IS communication—constant expression—then context matters not only in the Bible, but in my life as well. As I ponder God’s narrative for my life at this point and time, I think I must consider not only my own wants, needs, and experience, but my impact on my context and their impact on me. I am part of a collective body—a spiritual organism meant to feel and grow and move as one. My narrative is not mine alone. This too is completely counter-cultural in America today.
I keep thinking about the testimonies of God’s providence that I have read about from Hudson Taylor and George Müller. And I wonder if one of the reasons God allows His children to come so close to tasting lack of provision is for the sake of provoking the world to watch and observe and marvel with us at His provision. Like a call to attention—perhaps for those in the current context or perhaps for a future audience (people like me reading Christian biographies).
So many saints have been urged forward in their walk with the Lord through the testimonies of these men who unabashedly opened their lives of weakness, poverty, and terrestrial foolishness to the watching world.
Transparency is something I’ve pondered at great length through different seasons of my walk with the Lord. I used to think that greater transparency would involve prideful boasting in my own victories. In recent years, however, I’ve come to see that there is often greater pride at play in withholding of my journey with the Lord than in revealing it. I am what I am thanks to the merciful work of the Lord in my life. If I keep some of my journey to myself, it must only be out of love for those who might stumble because of my words.
And so… in response to what seems to be the Lord’s clear leading, I am pulling back the curtain on our wilderness wanderings of late. May it edify, inform, encourage, unify, and spur on the body of Christ.
A Dream is Born
When Derek and I moved to Peru in 2015 we were delighted to begin a lifetime of missionary service with our King for the growth of His kingdom around the world. We didn’t know how things would go and we knew there would be difficulties along the way, but God had affirmed our calling over and over again. We continue to be immensely grateful for the six years that He gave us to build up the body of Christ in Peru. But when He made it clear to us a little over a year ago that our time in Peru was ending it came as a disorienting surprise. We never expected this kind of shift in direction.
Letting Go of the Dream
That realization did not come easily. I BEGGED God to change circumstances, change people, change me, anything for the sake of continuing the work that I had seen Him doing through us and our teammates in Cusco for years. I walked the streets of Cusco with hands held out to the Lord, weeping as I worshiped, rebuked the enemy, interceded for the church in Cusco, and implored God to intervene and bring about my dream for the city. And yet, His gentle, authoritative answer was not one of acquiescence, but rather reassurance that He was with me and would continue to be with me whatever comes. This was when I started to let the dream die.
For a couple months we prayed and sought the Lord, and received advise from wise counselors, and waited. We sought to be considerate and caring in the way we shared the news of our transition with others, and especially to be intentional in our relationships in Cusco, as our days were now limited. And the Lord blessed. We felt more and more affirmed and hopeful and encouraged about the church in Cusco and their ability to carry on without us. All the while I wondered if any day God might present us with a job offer somewhere else, a clear direction for our future enabling us to rest secure in His provision for 2022. This didn’t happen, however.
Seeking a New Dream
We found ourselves thinking about the passions and longings that God had placed on our hearts for the US church in the past couple of years. As we wondered about what God was calling us to next, we sought to “listen to our lives,” as Frederick Buechner prescribes, for clues as to the narrative God was unfolding.
Our time in Peru had grown our own love for the Lord and passion for His kingdom, and born in us a longing to share that passion with others. We had truly delighted in our opportunities to share these things with various US churches virtually during 2020, and we sensed a growing love and burden for the US church in our own hearts. Additionally, working with missionaries around the world to develop onboarding training for MTW missionaries had made us increasingly burdened by the need for discipleship and spiritual formation in the US church. So many missionary teams expressed a discouragement about missionaries arriving on their fields without robust spiritual habits to sustain them and never having been truly discipled themselves.
A quote by Dallas Willard, which I only recently came across, describes well the burden growing in our hearts for spiritual formation in the US church,
The primary mission field for the great commission today is made up of the churches in Europe and North America. That is where the great disparity is most visible, and from where it threatens to spread to the rest of the world… The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heart-breaking needs, is whether those who, by profession or culture, are identified as ‘Christian’ will become disciples—students, apprentices, practitioners—of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from Him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.
In addition to this increasing burden for spiritual formation in the US church, Derek sensed a growing longing for more training in Biblical knowledge and ministry. His love for church ministry had only deepened during our time in Peru while His sense of preparedness to lead and preach and teach had diminished. He had been enjoying long-distance seminary courses for some time, but he dreamed of attending classes in-person with other students and professors who could spur Him on in his growth.
A Provisional Direction
A friend encouraged us to think about taking a role with MTW in the US for a season while Derek attended seminary. We talked with MTW’s mobilization department about our desire to invest in the US church, raise prayer for missions, and strengthen the bridge between the global mission field and the body of Christ in the US, and a job description was drawn up. We weren’t sure exactly how that job would look, whether it would be a good fit long-term, or whether our supporters would choose to continue partnering with us in this new calling, but for the moment it seemed like a clear leading of the Lord.
As much as our hearts clamored for clarity regarding our future, we sought to be present and laser-focused on our present. If we were going to exit well, our friends and ministry partners needed us to love them tenderly through our transition. Shifting out thoughts toward making plans for our next steps could easily absorb much of our time and attention compromising our potential impact during our final days and months with the people of Cusco. So, we laid our future in God’s hands.
Dear friends of ours shared their prayer that our transition would be characterized by backing our way out of the field with our eyes fully on the people of Cusco, and trusting the Lord to catch us on the other end when we finally arrived in the US. This became our plan, though we wrestled weekly with the desire for clarity and assurance regarding our future. Would our supporters continue to partner with us in the US? Would we be able to manage seminary, homeschooling, mobilization ministry, the high cost of living in the United States, and the rapid pace of life there? Would the Lord provide vehicles? A home? Income? Community for us and our children?
A Long Transition
In many ways our move back to the US felt like an even bigger step of faith than our move to Peru had been six years earlier. And settling our family in the US has certainly proved to be much rockier for us than settling in Peru was.
Our family went from living our entire lives within about a 2-mile radius in Cusco and hardly ever entered a vehicle to traveling constantly around the US (Christmas travel, then travel for mission conferences, then work travel, not to mention the commute time that one has to calculate into their schedule on a daily basis just for basic grocery shopping and whatnot). Because of our conviction to focus all of our attention in Cusco while we were there, when we arrived in the US we had to immediately turn our attention to basic necessities here—phones, vehicles, doctor appointments, housing, schooling for the kids (even homeschoolers have requirements in the US), Christmas presents and activities (we arrived in December), …the to-do list felt endless and daunting.
We felt like the Lord was calling us to put down some roots in Birmingham, and so we immediately began looking for a home to purchase. The early months of 2022 for us were characterized largely by house showings, putting together church presentations, writing seminary papers, and homeschooling during the weekdays, and then speaking at various missions conferences and receiving house rejection notices on the weekends. Almost every week we made a house offer and prayed that maybe this house would be the one that would allow our family to finally settle and find some normalcy. We had hoped to be settled somewhere by the time our mobilization job began in April. But that was not Gods’ plan.
The Lord’s Kindness
He did provide for us, however. I think I tucked my children into bed in 10+ different beds in the first few months of our transition, but they always had a bed. Now that we finally have a home Skye still doesn’t quite understand and continues to express great surprise every time we go anywhere in the car and then return to the SAME HOUSE. “This house again??” she says, “I like this house.”
As stressful and unsettling as our initial months in the US were, the Lord was kind to send us regular reminders of His tenderness toward us.
- In February we found out that our shipping container from Peru would be significantly more expensive than the quote we had been given in Peru. Within 24 hours of discovering this news, however, we received an unexpected sizeable tax return which was almost the exact amount that we now needed for the container fees.
- He held off our shipping container from Peru for months beyond when we expected it to arrive so that it did not arrive until the week that we were able to move into a missionary house with plenty of space to house it. Had it arrived just a week earlier, we would have had no place to house our things.
- Right when I was hitting a low-place the Lord provided a completely paid-for couples getaway for Derek and I to the beach.
- When we returned from the beach the children started asking when they could go to the beach. We told them that we really couldn’t afford a family beach trip, but within the week a work trip to Panama City Beach popped up and so the kids and I were able to go to the beach for a couple days while Derek did mobilization work in town.
- Right at the last possible moment when our missionary house availability came to a close, the Lord provided a house for us to call our own. A week later and we would have signed for a rental assuming that was God’s plan for the time being. Clearly He had set apart this house in McCalla for us!
- Aside from Livingroom sofas and a dining table we had no furniture whatsoever for our new house, but the Lord has provided abundantly for our needs from the most unexpected places. People have given us beds, night stands, desks, dressers, mirrors, wall art, chairs, a printer, a grill, a lawn mower…. And when we moved into the house we discovered that the previous owners had left us a small treasure trove of tools and gardening supplies. In addition various people and churches have repeatedly surprised us with financial gifts to help us settle in our house.
Where We Find Ourselves Now
Truly, the Lord’s kindness to our family has been overwhelming. He’s provided for our needs every step of the way. And yet, since our return to the US our financial support has steadily dropped, and last month we saw a significant decrease in giving toward our support account. When we accepted this position with MTW, we recognized that if the Lord wanted us to do it, He would have to provide for us, and if the support didn’t come in, that would be a clear sign that He had other plans for us. It seems that we have reached that place. We don’t know if we will have sufficient income next month, and we aren’t sure if we should pursue a different means of income.
Additionally, all of our constant travel the past 6 months has been unsettling for our family and made it difficult to gain a healthy rhythm of life. We have felt scattered and disconnected, and we long to be able to set our focus in one place and go deep with a narrower community of people. We haven’t lost our passion for global missions and the desire to raise up strong senders and goers, but we’re weary.
Next month we had planned to do a week of missionary debriefing at Mission Training International in Colorado, a program that helps missionary families process their time on the field, and tend to their personal well-being after transition back home. We felt confident that this would be a needed step for our family, and so plane tickets were purchased and the initial deposit was made months ago. However, we now find ourselves unable to pay the balance due to attend the program.
Our Plea
So, we are doing what saints throughout time have done when they found themselves between a rock and a hard place. We’re crying out to God for provision and direction, and we’re offering our journey before the body of Christ, inviting you to walk with us and seek the Lord with us.. We declare with the desperate man in Mark 9:24, “I believe! Help my unbelief!” We believe He will make a way for our family and be faithful to His promises to never leave or forsake us, and we pray for faith to humbly trust our Father in this season. Would you pray with us?
