My Lightning Bolts

As Derek and I have been taking steps toward overseas missions in the past year, I've thought that at some point we should begin a blog to keep people interested in our ministry up to date.  I'm not sure whether it would be better to do that on a separate site.  I feel like that would make it too complicated for me, though, so for now I'm thinking I'll take the easier route.  Maybe I'll change the color scheme...

We've been preparing the past month or so for our church's missions conference, and I've been learning about several missionary "greats" in the process: Gladys Alward, Samuel Morris, John Patton, and Amy Carmichael.  In hearing these people's stories, I am fascinated to learn not only how God used them in remote parts of the world, but about how God brought them into that ministry.

As a little girl I had read about missionaries (more on that later) and occasionally a missionary family would visit our church and speak about their ministry or show slides with pictures of their everyday lives overseas.  And I always assumed that God had sent them a lightning bolt, or grown them from different stock than the rest of us.  How else would one come to be a missionary?  Occasionally you hear the story about the grandmother who prays everyday that her grandson will become a missionary, and so that, I supposed, could do it as well.  In my life I don't think it was any of these things, though.

When I was in 2nd or 3rd grade my mother bought a series of historical fiction books for me to read.  I hated reading for the most part at that point in my life, and viewed it as a task to check off so that I could get on to the more exciting things in life.  Like Barbie dolls.  But these books, the "Trailblazer Series" they were called, opened a new chapter in my relationship to books.  I loved them.  They presented mystery, suspense, and adventure, and I could always understand what was going on!  On top of all of that, they were about missionaries.  I'm sure I patted myself on the back for that to some degree. 

Parents, if you do not want your children to fly to a foreign country some day as a missionary, don't allow them to read the books in the Trailblazer Series.  Yes, they are historical fiction in that they are told through the eyes of a usually fictitious child, but the stories hold pretty true to fact with regard to the child's interaction with the missionary featured in each book.  These books created in me a fascination with missionary work and tangible nature of God's work in the lives of His children who walk by faith.  These books set the platform, I believe, for my desire to become a missionary.

The event that solidified in my mind the desire to become a missionary, was my father's participation in a short term mission trip when I was around 11 years old.  That's right, it wasn't I who went on the missions trip - it was my father.  Parents, if you don't want your children to be interested in missionary work, don't go on a short term missions trip.  In taking that trip, my father showed me that people like us could be involved in missionary work.  It's not just people in books, or people who speak at conferences, or preach.  It's people like us too. 

When my father came back from that trip he told us about how there were so many groups of people who wanted to hear the gospel, and even wrote letters pleading for a missionary to be sent to them.  He told us stories about whole tribes of people who had come to know Jesus, casting aside the fear and darkness they had lived in for centuries, because a missionary family was willing to go and tell them.  I admit that at that point the idea of foreign missions was definitely a big glamorized in my mind, and I saw it as a fun adventure as well as incredibly important work that must be done.  But this is how God chose to put the desire in my heart.

There were obviously many other things along the way that God has used to point me in the direction He has for me, as he has done for Derek as well, but these were the first things.  These were my lightning bolts: some children's books and a trip my dad took.  You never know what the Holy Spirit will use in your life, or in the life of your children.