Missions Month – March 2008

This month, I will be highlighting missions.

Focusing on a Mission Organization or missionary or mission opportunity.

Please join me!

1. Post your own mission story and link back here in a comment.

2.  Comment on posts about your own mission experience.

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It is no secret that I have a heart for missions.  Long before I became a missionary teacher with New Tribes Mission, I loved hearing missionary stories.  My mother and grandmother taught CEF (Child Evangelism Fellowship).  I would listen intently to each missionary story as a young child, fascinated by the different cultures, languages, dress, foods, and intrigued by how God brought each missionary through hardships and overwhelming obstacles to win souls with the Good News of Jesus Christ.In fact, it was a missionary who led me to the Lord.  At the tender age of seven, I placed my faith in the finished work of Jesus on the cross.  I understood that my sin had separated me from God and that I needed a Saviour.  I agreed with God that I am a sinner and believed on the Lord Jesus Christ.  When I stand before God one day, and if He should ask me why I should be allowed to enter Heaven, I will say, “Because of Your Son, Jesus, dying on the cross for me.”As a teenager, my first job was working in the kitchen one summer at Pine Ridge Bible Camp in Cedar Springs, Michigan.  How I loved working at camp!  It was my first taste of missions.  I met different missionaries each week who worked all over the world.  My summers working at Pine Ridge profoundly influenced me.  God used my time in that kitchen and eventually as a counselor to plant that seed of missions in my heart.  Which He nurtured through the years.  Pine Ridge was not the only summer camp I had worked at during my high school/college years.  Pleasant Valley Bible Camp in East Jordan, Michigan, Camp Barakel near Grayling, Michigan, and there was one winter retreat my best friend Beth and I helped out in the kitchen at…oh, what was the name of that camp?!…Well, I’ll think of it!It was at my fellow counselors at Pleasant Valley Bible Camp who influenced me to attend New Tribes Bible Institute.  I vividly remember at the time I applied that I wasn’t remotely interested in tribal missions.  I just wanted to get more Bible.  I had already attented Grand Rapids Baptist College (now Cornerstone University), beginning my Elementary Education degree.  The Lord had other plans for me.

Many of my classmates at New Tribes Bible Institute had grown up on the mission field.  I made friends from Senegal, making their African tea.  Others from Parguay drinking their tededay.  Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and the list goes on.

After graduating from the two year Bible course, I worked for a year before heading to the next level of training with New Tribes…Missions Institute.  Where I received my cross-cultural training…and church planting course.  This was the practical side of missions.

My roommates were Kristen and Daniella.  Kristen was an MK (missionary kid) who had grown up in a remote tribal location in Venezuela.  Daniella was a young girl from Romania interested in tribal missions.  I had grown up in southwestern Michigan, not in a remote tribal location in a Spanish speaking country battling malaria, nor in a once communist country happy to eat cold veggies straight from the can.  Daniella would often tell me of what life was like during communism in Romania.   Kristen told of life in the tribe and informed us that monkeys are not really cute pets, but in fact quite dirty.

Before the year was up, I was sent to New Tribes Mission Headquarters to help out there, and soon was teaching 5th/6th grade.  In my four years of teaching, I have had students in my class from Boliva, Venezuela, and Brazil.  My classrooms have always been small.  I have taught grades 3rd/4th and 5th/6th, and have been involved with the high school and junior high, planning monthly activities and leading girls’ Bible studies.  I have also been on staff at New Tribes Bible Institute as a secretary, planning Days of Prayer, and student activities.

Today I am married, living in Australia with my Aussie husband.  Still looking to the Lord for where and how He will use me next.  I love teaching missionary kids and miss it very much.  As a newlyweds, my husband and I look with hearts full of hope to the Lord for children of our own.

Lead us Lord, we will follow!