Our Journey into Missions- part 3

(Read Part 1 and Part 2 here.)

Our story picks up about four years into our marriage, which was about two years ago. At this point, we had been trying to passionately pursue Christ for about a year. We had had a year of more changes than we ever thought possible. Our hearts were completely different and so were our desires. We wanted to please God and do His will instead of living for our own desires. However, we still hadn’t thought too seriously about missions. After all, there were plenty of people who needed Christ in our hometown, right?

At this time, we began reading the book Crazy Love by Francis Chan with our Sunday school class. This book challenged our thinking even further. How far were we willing to go for God and the spread of His gospel? Would we be willing to move if God asked us to? Would we be willing to pray along the lines of, "God, we will assume that you want us to go unless you call us to stay" (instead of the more common, "other way around" thinking that is prevalent in the Church today, when we just assume that God wants us to stay). At the same time we were reading that book and considering what we would be willing to do for God’s Kingdom, we were introduced to the videos “Ee Taow” and "Awayo."

These short films document missionary families who (with New Tribes Mission...an organization we had never heard of before) travelled to an unreached tribe, lived with them for years until they had learned their language, developed an alphabet for their language, translated the scriptures into their language, and then taught the gospel to the tribe in their language. Many people from these two tribes--who had never had a chance to hear the gospel before--were saved. Aaron and I had never seen anything like it before. We didn’t even know there were still unreached tribes. We had just never thought about it.

But now we knew that unreached tribes still existed. And that literally hundreds or thousands of people were dying and going to hell every day, never having heard the gospel in their language. And we both commented to each other something like, “If we weren’t going to have kids, that is definitely something we would like to do.” I didn't really think it would be even a possibility for us, though. At the time, we had just started the adoption process, and it seemed ridiculous to think about taking babies or kids to an unreached tribe in a jungle somewhere. God still had some molding to do in our thinking.

A couple months later (February of 2010 to be precise), it was a Friday night, and we went to my Grandpa and Grandma's house to have supper before Aaron and I went to Hope Church’s marriage retreat for the weekend. After supper, Nathan pulled Aaron aside and told him that he and Rachel were thinking seriously of going into tribal missions…and they wanted us to come along. Aaron was immediately interested, and he told Nathan that he wanted to talk to him more about it a different night. Aaron and I left for the hotel where our marriage retreat was being held, and I was totally oblivious to the conversation that Nathan and Aaron had just had. I was about to hear all about it, though, and have my weekend completely ruined…