If you're faced with a critical decision about what to do with your life, this blog post is for you

You already know I didn’t have a good attitude about the thought of moving to Africa. I wanted to keep a tight grip on the life I had.

Especially I hated the thought of leaving my young adult kids.

And I didn’t want to let go of my material possessions.

And I didn’t want to leave the lovely town I lived in, Port Angeles, Washington. (If you missed that post, click on But I don’t WANT to leave Port Angeles.)

But for some reason I can’t fully explain—who can find adequate words to tell how God works in our hearts?—eventually I was open to being persuaded by Him to change my mind and go.

You know how that happens—it has happened to you: God often uses other people and their stories to grab hold of our hearts and make us want to turn and go another direction.

I wish I’d had Elisa Morgan’s book and Kay Warren’s book back then but, alas, they hadn’t written those books yet.

But if you are currently faced with a radical, life-changing decision about what to do with your life, those two books and this blog post are for you.

If you read Elisa Morgan’s She Did What She Could: Five Words of Jesus That Will Change Your Life, as well as Kay Warren’s Dangerous Surrender: What Happens When You Say Yes to God, they could inspire you like they did me:

Those two books got me all fired up. All that info went “boin-n-n-ng!” inside my heart, all crashing together, clanging inside my mind and spirit.

To begin with, Kay Warren admits that she sometimes held her fingers over her eyes when she didn’t want to see what was in front of her.

Me, too. How about you?

How many times do I look for a split-second—

• at the dying child on my TV screen,
• at the huddled masses at our border, yearning to be free,
• at the homeless person asking for a job,
• at the dying refugee propped against a downtown Nairobi building,

and then quickly turn away, as if trying to hold my fingers over my eyes, as if the person’s plight would not really exist if I didn’t look.

But you and I both know that turning away or covering our eyes doesn’t work.

I saw. From that moment on, I knew.

Ever since I moved to Africa and saw what I saw there, I’ve been talking to myself:

Now that I know about 

• rape as a weapon of war in Democratic Republic of Congo,
• children sold into slavery and prostitution,
• the crippling effects of illiteracy,
• the hopelessness of widespread corruption,
• AIDS orphans,
• the incomprehensible suffering of hundreds of thousands around the world,

Now that I know. . .

. . . am I not responsible to do something?

Maybe you are asking the same question Joan Anderson asks:

“What am I meant to do now?

What really matters?

Who am I?”

Joan Anderson,

The Road Back to Yourself: The Second Journey

Elisa Morgan points out Jesus’ words in Mark 14:3,

“She did what she could.”

And then Elisa asks, because God asks,

“What is my ‘what’?” And, “What is your ‘what’?”