Our Journey into Missions- part 5

(Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 here.)


After Nathan and Rachel left that evening, I just broke down and cried. Looking back, I know that the reason I was so upset is I was so convicted about fighting the Lord’s will so much. But at the time, all I could think about was how I was not made to be a missionary (anyone who knows me at all knows I'm not exactly the out-doorsy, athletic type :)...), how I couldn’t imagine leaving my parents, and about how we may never have kids if we would go overseas. (At the time, we were still in the early stages of the adoption process, and I thought I was unable to get pregnant.) All I could think about were the snakes, and crocodiles, and insects, and disease. So I cried. And cried and cried. Aaron tried to comfort me, but at the same time, he already knew that we should go, so he wasn’t going to say something like, “Don’t worry, we don’t have to go.” And since he wasn’t saying that, I knew that he thought we should go, and that scared me even more.

So Aaron finally fell asleep that night, and I just kept crying. I think I fell asleep too about 2:00 am, and I had to get up at 4:00 am to go to work to teach (I did all of my lesson planning and prep in the mornings). When I woke up at 4:00 am, I immediately knew that something was wrong, because my eyes were so puffy and swollen from crying. Then it all came rushing back to me—the reason I was upset. But…somehow…I wasn’t really upset anymore. I remember walking to the bathroom, getting in the shower, and thinking, “It’s going to be ok. Even if we go. The Lord is faithful.”

I believe 100% that God worked a miracle in my heart in those two hours that I was sleeping. Because I went to bed scared to death and totally broken, and I woke up with a kind of peace that I had never experienced before.

I went to school to teach that day, and throughout the day, I kept finding myself smiling. It was the strangest peace I was experiencing…I still didn’t want to be a missionary. I didn’t want to live overseas. But I knew that I wanted to be obedient to God. And I knew that obedience to God probably did mean going somewhere. Because the Great Commission isn't just for a few of Christ's followers...it's for all of them. And I knew that I could trust God. And I knew that He is indeed worthy of me surrendering my life to Him.

On my way home from work, even though I did have a peace about at least considering going into tribal missions, the only one thought that still made me upset was how in the world Aaron and I would tell my parents that we were thinking about being missionaries, too. Rachel and Nathan had already told them that they were seriously considering it, and my parents had taken in pretty hard. (I could write an entire blogpost just about how God has changed their hearts about missions, too, since then!)


But God was about to show me that I didn’t need to worry about that. My cell phone rang on my way home from work, and it was my mom. We chatted for a minute about random things, and then with no prompting from me at all, my mom said, “So I bet you and Aaron will want to go to the mission field with Rachel and Nathan, huh.” Just the fact that she brought it up, and that she had already thought it was a possibility, was like God telling me, “See? I even have this part of the situation under control.”

I told my mom, that yes, we were considering it, and I was just so thankful that she brought it up first and I didn’t have to be the one to “break the news.”

Aaron got home from work and I told him about my day—how I had complete peace about pursuing this whole tribal missions thing. He was pretty amazed, since he had experienced firsthand how upset I had been the night before. We decided that we definitely needed to move forward and check out this “New Tribes Mission place” that Nathan and Rachel had told us about.


(Just one last post tomorrow...sorry about the lack of pictures again today!)