A lot has happened in the last three years!
We came back from the Dominican Republic in late 2022, when Caribbean Mountain Academy closed. I started as a bi-vocational pastor at a nearby rural church at the beginning of 2023. My second job was as a parts-delivery driver for O'Reilly Auto Parts. In the fall of 2023, I took a third part-time job as administrative assistant for our local chapter of Child Evangelism Fellowship. That worked into a full-time position the following spring, so I resigned from my O'Reilly job, but continued at the church.
I already knew bi-vocation was not my thing. I would rather live as simply as possible so as to be single-focused. It didn't take long before I was looking for alternatives, where I could have only one job—and my heart was to shepherd and disciple people. We also wanted to stay close to Rachel's mom while the Lord kept her here. No other doors opened.
In the fall of last year, I heard of a missions conference in Florida that sounded like an Urbana-style conference. I thought it would be great to take George and Micah there to expose them to lots of different mission agencies. Alas, it was nowhere near as large as I expected. But John Piper was speaking, and it was great time of fellowship with two of my boys.
Everyone needs to go to a larger-scale missions conference than our churches put on! You'll be pushed in very good ways. As the keynote speaker, they put John Piper off till the last day. There were many challenging and encouraging messages, but something Piper said really cut me to the heart—me, a veteran missionary who thought his days on the field were done. "There's never a convenient time to go to the field." That has rung in my ears to this day.
Rachel's mom, Charlene, gets few visitors; if we leave, Rachel won't be able to visit her either! Barb, who prayed us into our present home, will lose the help and fellowship she prayed for. If we leave, will whatever momentum we're seeing at the church be lost? George will lose access to Kirkwood's dual-enrollment programs. "There's never a convenient time to go to the field."
Something I heard early on, when first gearing up for the mission field: "Don't do something that others can do; do what no one else is doing." Relatively speaking, there are many people who can visit Charlene, help Barb, or pastor a rural church. There are many other ways George can learn what he needs for his future service. But a fraction of Believers are leaving home to advance the Gospel in the truly needy parts of the world. We have that passion, we have that experience, we still have that abandon.
That started me thinking, What if George and I started taking short trips abroad? We know people in China, of course, and India and the Dominican Republic and Africa. They're asking for help, for training, for discipleship. Why are they asking us? Isn't anyone else helping them? There are so many more pastors and believers crying out for help than missionaries available to serve them! We in American have plenty of Christians and Christian leaders to meet the need worldwide—thousands of times over1! If I fill a ministry slot here, I'm keeping another Christian from doing what they can. If I go there, I'm freeing up space for another believer to step up, to grow, and I'm filling a need that apparently no one else is. Win-win!
Maybe you saw our attempt to raise money to go to India. Well, we had also already agreed to visit a couple of our Chinese disciple-daughters at a strange school in Bosnia. While nailing down arrangements, the student life director offered to pay our plane tickets and asked if we could stay maybe a month, or two, or three.... No, we're just coming for a visit! We're glad to do some teaching while there, but obviously we have other responsibilities back here. "There's never a convenient time to go to the field."
You can read more about that trip here.
The following months have been a bit of a roller-coaster. We canceled the India trip. We heard from the Bosnia school's principal that they wouldn't be able to bring us on with all the turmoil. So we started thinking again: Short trips. A month or two or three. The school may not be able to bring us on formally, but we could go back on support—after all, a number of our supporters never stopped giving to us, even after almost three years back home! Would they follow us into a new, crazy venture? We could go to Bosnia, then come back and serve a bit here, then go to the Dominican and help at Tim's school. Or India. Or China. Or Africa! Bopping back and forth, serving wherever we could help.
We're ready to return to the field!
1 https://www.thetravelingteam.org/stats: scroll down to the Money and Missions section and see the "Practical Observations" (back to text)
