Christmas greetings from Africa

 

“Krismasi Njema” and “Heri ya mwaka mpya” 

("Merry Christmas" and "Happy New Year!" in Swahili).

 

I’ll be taking a break until January. 

Have a special Christmas season, 

and may God tenderly bless you and yours now and in the New Year.

When God asks you to give Him those you most cherish

 

July 11, 1993, at seven minutes after five in the morning, Dave and I drove out of Port Angeles. My mother stood beside our car with her arm around Karen, only twenty-one years of age, and together they waved goodbye. Tears streaked down their faces. I choked on my own sobs. How could I survive four years without seeing them? (from Chapter 2, Grandma’s Letters from Africa)

Recently I told you about my mother’s strong—even desperate—objection to Dave and me leaving our kids and our home and moving to Africa. (Click on You’ll need a Kleenex: When parents don’t want their kids to go to the mission field.)

 

During the application process for working with Wycliffe Bible Translators, my mother went through an intense time of wrestling with her own will, her daughter and son-in-law’s will, and God’s will.

 

Somehow, within the months of wrestling and begging and weeping and soul-searching, my mother recognized she had to let God have her daughter.

 

You see, when she was pregnant with me, her doctor feared she’d miscarry so for months she prayed, “Lord, if You let my baby live, I’ll dedicate her to You.”

 

And He let me live.

 

And later He would ask my mother to follow up on her promise to Him about me.

 

That time had come.

 

That was in 1993. Fast-forward to 2014 when, after my mother died, I found the following in her Bible: a photo of the driveway scene I wrote about in Chapter 2, above, and paper-clipped to it was this William Cowper poem in her own handwriting. (See photo below.)

 

O Lord, my best desire fulfill

And help me to resign

Life, health, and comfort to Thy will.

And make Thy pleasure mine.

 

Why should I shrink at Thy command

Whose love forbids my fears?

Or tremble at the gracious hand

That wipes away my tears?

 

No, rather let me freely yield

What most I prize to Thee

Who never has a good withheld

Or wilt withhold from me. (William Cowper)

 

My heart broke and bled when I grasped the message—my mother was offering me up to God so that Dave and I could serve Him, despite the severe pain she and Matt and Karen had already suffered—and would suffer even more in the coming years. “Let me freely yield what most I prize to Thee,” she had written. Discovering that in her Bible after she died was a very emotional experience for me.

 

And I was puzzled by her handwriting—it had gotten sloppy toward the end. That surprised me because her handwriting had always been so perfect. It took me a couple of years to realize why her handwriting got shaky: It was because she was crying when she wrote. No doubt tears streamed down her cheeks and her hand trembled.

 

I’ll never know the magnitude of my mother’s heartaches and the costs she paid. But God bless her for the sacrifices she made—for me throughout my life, and for Him. I choose to believe that He also brought her blessings and joys as a result of her sacrifices, her yielding to His will.

 

P.S. You really don’t want to miss You’ll need a Kleenex: When parents don’t want their kids to go to the mission field.)

 

Reaching out to grab the impossible

 

Moving to Africa and leaving my kids, Matt and Karen, hurt more than anything I’d ever experienced.

 

Everything within me cried out that my children still needed their parents. I recognized they didn’t need us the way they did when they were little, but I believed they needed our behind-the-scenes support to transition out of the world of college and into the world of professionals.

 

However, my husband, Dave, didn’t understand my thinking. He pointed out that by the time we’d leave, Matt and Karen would have graduated from college, and that Matt didn’t need us because he had already married Jill.

 

Yes, Matt and Jill had each other, their own support system, but Karen was alone, and by the time we’d leave for Africa, she’d be only weeks out of college and transitioning into her professional career. It would be a crucial time in her life. My heart cried out: “We need to help her settle into a new job in a different town and a different state!”

 

I also knew that if joining Wycliffe was not God’s plan for us, He had power enough to prevent it. I gave Him every opportunity to show us green lights and send us to Africa or red lights and keep us home. In the meantime, I kept taking the next step, and the next, all the while watching for God’s answer.

 

He gave us only green lights. He gave us only open doors.

 

I had my answer.

 

I could almost hear God whisper, “Now, about your children—don’t you know I love them even more than you do? You can trust Me with them.”

 

Knowing God’s answer didn’t take away the pain, but my heart melted when He asked me to believe He loved Matt and Karen even more than I loved them.

 

I could do only two things: trust Him to manage their consequences because of our move to Africa, and then turn and take an extreme, and blind, leap of faith.

 

"Christ wants not nibblers of the possible,” wrote C.T. Studd, “but grabbers of the impossible."

 

God was asking me to be a grabber

of what seemed utterly impossible.

Unthinkable.

 

And so it was that on July 3, 1993, we moved out of our home of fourteen years. We could call no other place “home” as much as that one. Karen and I shed tears when we pulled the door closed for the last time on our empty house.

 

Dave and I were on our way to Nairobi, Kenya.

 

You’ll need a Kleenex: When parents don’t want their kids to go to the mission field

My mother hated the idea that her son-in-law wanted to take her daughter to Africa.

 

She was adamant. Persistent. Heartsick.

 

Although I never admitted it to her, I understood her opposition. I didn’t like the idea, either, but at the same time I felt I shouldn’t let her interfere with the decision Dave and I needed to make ourselves.

 

It was a painful time.

 

I believe God created mothers to have a special bond with their children—after all, most of us believe our kids are among the most precious gifts God could ever give us. That’s where my mother was coming from.

 

I also believe God created mothers to try in every possible way to protect their kids from anything negative or painful or scary or uncertain. That, too, was where my mother was coming from.

 

And yet. . . . And yet. . . . There’s more than that to the parent-child relationship.

 

Parents need to prepare their children for adulthood and then. . . . they need to loosen their tight grip on the kids.

 

Parents can’t fight their adult kids’ battles. They need to free them to wrestle with life and faith in the best way they know how—and hopefully that’s with God alongside them.

 

At such times, the battle parents can and should fight is this: to pray unceasingly.

 

Many years ago, Amy Carmichael asked herself if she could let go of a loved one, allowing him to endure pain or loss even as God the Father did, noting that God’s love for His Son “caused Him to give that beloved One to suffering for the salvation of a lost world.”

 

She continues, “What do we know of such love? What do I know of it? Am I prepared to give one whom I love to pain or loss, as the Father gave, if only others may be blessed? This, nothing less, was what the love wherewith the Father loved the Son caused Him to do. It is this love and no other that our Lord prayed should be in us. [John 17:26: I have made You known to them, and will continue to make You known in order that the love You have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.]” (Edges of His Ways, 1955)

 

What sacrificial love Amy Carmichael offered up!

 

Lloyd John Ogilvie wrote that “the special calling of mothers is to prepare their children for service and then give them away to follow [God].” (God’s Best for My Life)

 

And my mother knew so well that she had to let God have her daughter. You see, when she was pregnant with me, her doctor feared she’d miscarry so for months she prayed, “Lord, if You let my baby live, I’ll dedicate her to You.” And He let me live. And later He would also ask my mother to follow up on her promise to Him about me.

 

Lloyd John Ogilvie was very instrumental in my mother’s life, and she introduced me to several of his daily devotionals. I’m certain she read a passage in Ogilvie’s Quiet Moments With God in which he penned a prayer asking God to give him “an attitude of fortitude.”

 

And I’m sure she knew from experience what he wrote: “Lord, You have all authority in heaven and on earth. I submit my life to Your authority. Fill my mind with clear convictions that You are in charge of my life and those about whom I am concerned. I surrender myself and them to You.”

 

Ogilvie continued, “Now Lord, may this commitment result in a new, positive attitude that exudes joy and hope about what You are going to do today and in the future. I leave the results completely in Your hands.” (Quiet Moments With God)

 

And so it was that a year before Dave and I left for Africa, I received a gift from my mother—a very precious gift indeed. (See photo below. Don’t miss it! But get a Kleenex first.)

 

It was a frame containing 1 Samuel 1:27, 28, beautifully lettered: “For this child I prayed, and the Lord has given me my petition which I asked of Him—So I have dedicated her to the Lord; as long as she lives, she is dedicated to the Lord. . . .”

 

Taped to the back of the frame was a photocopy of another Lloyd Ogilvie devotional along with, and—this is the most special part of all—she wrote her promise to God and to me, in her beautiful handwriting:

 

“Today I reaffirm this promise to God and to my lovely Linda! My heart and prayers will always be with you.

 

With humility, love and gratitude,

 

Mom

June 23, 1992”

 

God bless her for that! God bless her! I know it hurt terribly, but she did the right thing.

 

And from then on, she was a huge supporter of Dave and me and of the ministries in Africa we would soon begin.

 

Looking for a closed door

 

I’m excited to introduce you to my friend, Leanna. Last week I told you we met around a lunch table when she was on her way to Zaire (now called Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC), to teach at a school for missionaries’ kids (MKs).

 

Zaire was not a safe place then. It was in chaos financially—and in every other way, too. It was an un-developing country.

 

“She must be one strong young lady,” I said to myself.

 

I couldn’t imagine what kind of faith she had—faith to leave her home and family and travel alone to a mission school in a remote, challenging place, where she knew no one.

 

I told myself Leanna must have embraced a passion, a faith so intense that it dimmed any thoughts of fear, that it wiped out the pain of leaving home.

 

But I was wrong. 

 

Leanna knew fear. She felt pain. But she left home and moved to Zaire anyway. 

 

And I was right. Leanna was and is one strong lady, a lady with the kind of faith I can barely imagine.

 

Here’s Leanna’s story in her own words.

 

“And what about you?” That was the question I felt the Lord was asking one day during my first year of teaching. It was missions week, and I had just finished showing my second graders a video about children in another part of the world.

 

Following the video, I talked to them about how they could be missionaries as adults, or even to their neighbors while they were still children.

 

That’s when that disturbing question came to my mind, “And what about you?” 

 

The question was immediately followed by the recollection that, as a child, I had often said I was going to be a missionary when I grew up. 

 

I tried to argue. This had to just be my own strange idea, just a childhood memory. 

 

I couldn’t do missions in a far-away land, not timid and shy me! The idea would surely go away! 

 

It didn’t go away. The call to missions seemed to pop up just often enough to prevent me from forgetting, or escaping.

 

Then I remembered a missionary’s message I had heard as a teen. The speaker had said that every Christian young person should move toward missions and allow the Lord to close the doors.

 

While I don’t completely endorse that concept, I decided that it would be a way to settle the issue. 

 

Surely, the Lord would close the door to this silly notion. He didn’t.

 

I talked to my pastor. He thought missions would be a good fit. To my disappointment, he didn’t discourage me. 

 

I explored several missions and finally settled on one to which I would apply. Ah-ha! The application process. Certainly, I would be weeded out in that process. I wasn’t.

 

The time came to indicate an interest in a particular school where I would teach in Africa. It was a school belonging to another mission, one with which my doctrinal beliefs differed in some areas. They could easily say, “No, thank you.” They didn’t. 

 

Maybe I wouldn’t be able to raise enough financial support to go! The Lord provided.

 

Finally, more than four years after having the initial idea, I was on my way to Africa. The doors hadn’t closed! 

 

Now, 30 years after trying to shake off that disturbing question, it seems that there has been a place for me in missions. 

 

It hasn’t been easy,

and I’ve been an imperfect missionary.

Still, God has answered the question. 

 

Maybe He is still asking someone else,

“And what about you?”

 

When you have to do it afraid

 

Maybe you have prayed, “Thy will be done,” and really meant it.

 

Or maybe you’ve prayed, “Lord, send me.”

 

Or maybe, like Moses, you’ve wailed, “Oh, Lord, please send someone else” (Exodus 4:13).

 

If you’re like me, you jot down important thoughts—sermon notes, quotations, Bible verses, big questions, big answers, the stuff you want to long remember—and tuck them into your Bible.

 

Two old Bibles I’ve been using since the mid-1980s are so full of such notes that neither one can come even close to closing flat (see the picture below).

 

If you and I take time to look over those old notes, sometimes they can be life-changing. They can make a profound difference in the direction our lives take.

 

For example, last week I told you that not long after I published Grandma’s Letters from Africa, I was thumbing through the Bible I used during the era my husband and I were applying to Wycliffe Bible Translators.  

 

In that Bible, I found an old yellow sticky-note with questions I’d asked myself about the radical demands of discipleship Jesus spoke of in Matthew 8:22. I’d written, “Do you consider yourself a disciple? What radical demands is God making of you? Are you carrying them out? Are you willing to meet His radical demands?”

 

Let me introduce you to Leanna, a dear young lady I met in August 1995. She’s one of those rare, choice saints who take such questions seriously.

 

She was (and still is) beautiful inside and out—a gentle soul. Shy. Soft-spoken.

 

My husband, Dave, and I visited with Leanna while the three of us ate together around an office lunch table in Nairobi, Kenya. To my surprise, she was on her way to Zaire (now called Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC) to teach at a school for missionaries’ kids (MKs).

 

People had been talking a lot about Zaire. It no longer qualified as a “developing country.” It was an un-developing country. 

 

Currency was devaluing at an alarming rate. People piled stacks of paper money on a counter to pay for a restaurant meal. It took a wheel barrel to transport monthly rent to the landlord.

 

Decreasing numbers of telephone lines worked. Hundreds—even thousands—of kilometers of road surfaces were turning into bumpy, dusty tracks (or muddy, depending on the season).

 

Teachers and law enforcement personnel hadn’t received paychecks for months on end.

 

Zaire was not a stable country in which to live and work. (And little did we know then that conditions would worsen, many thousands of people would die, and Leanna and colleagues would have to be evacuated.)

 

I thought of all those things, and more, while I watched Leanna across the lunch table on that day in Nairobi. “She must be one strong young lady,” I said to myself.

 

I couldn’t imagine what kind of faith she had—faith to leave her home in Oregon, leave friends, family, and her country, and travel all alone to a mission school in a remote, challenging place, where she knew no one.

 

I told myself Leanna must have embraced a passion, a faith so intense that it dimmed any thoughts of fear, that it wiped out the pain of leaving home.

 

But I was wrong. 

 

Leanna knew fear. She felt pain. But she left home and moved to Zaire anyway. 

 

And I was right. Leanna was and is one strong lady, a lady with the kind of faith I can barely imagine.

 

Elizabeth Elliot spoke of a person like Leanna when she said, 

 

"Sometimes when we are called to obey, 

the fear does not subside 

and we are expected to move against fear. 

One must choose to do it afraid."

 

Looking across the lunch table at Leanna that day, I never could have guessed she’d looked for a closed door to keep her at home in Oregon.

 

Come back next week 

so I can introduce you to this amazing woman.

 

The space between “Lord, please send someone else” and the willingness that smiles and says, “Here I am, send me!”

 

Not long after I published Grandma’s Letters from Africa, I was thumbing through the Bible I used during the era my husband and I were applying to Wycliffe Bible Translators.  

 

In that Bible, I found an old yellow sticky-note with questions I’d asked myself about the radical demands of discipleship Jesus spoke of in Matthew 8:22. I’d written, “Do you consider yourself a disciple? What radical demands is God making of you? Are you carrying them out? Are you willing to meet His radical demands?”

 

A few years earlier, I had started praying in a new way. Instead of asking God to help me do His will, I asked Him to make me willing to do His will.

 

There’s a difference.

 

I prayed according to Philippians 2:13, “It is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purposes” (NIV).

 

In other words, God first helps me want to please Him. Although I play a role in becoming willing, I don’t have to work it up all on my own. And then, He helps me to do it!—to carry out His “good purposes.”

 

I’m so glad that verse is in the Bible because countless times I've been unwilling. Like Moses, I’ve wailed, “Oh, Lord, please send someone else” (Exodus 4:13).

 

By the time our Boeing 747 lifted off U.S. soil, I was probably at 9.5 (on a willingness scale of 1 to 10). I was not at a perfect 10—I was scared (willingness does not eliminate fear) and I hated to leave my kids (willingness does not erase a mother’s longing to stay connected to her kids), but I was willing enough to set out.

 

How did that happen? Looking back now, I realize my heart held a tender little spot inside—sort of like a Hostess Cup Cake with a soft, sweet blob inside.

 

Or like hard candy with a gooey glob in the middle.

 

Or like one of those chocolate confections that you bite into, and everything is moving in slow motion, and soft music is playing, and behold! The rich, creamy center oozes out. (Oh, I’m certain that in heaven, chocolate will have no calories!)

 

But wait—I’m getting off the subject. That tender little spot in my heart occupied the space between (a) my unwillingness and (b) the sweet willingness that smiles and says, “Here I am, send me!” (Isaiah 6:8). That soft, gooey little place protected and nurtured my willingness to be made willing.

 

God met me there. With His gentle hands, He took hold of my heart—both the hard part and the tender, gooey part hidden in the middle—and everything started to change.

 

My heart didn’t change in an instant.

It didn’t change in a day, or even a week.

The process took time.

 

To paraphrase Donald Miller, it was as if God, the Master Storyteller, said, “Look, I wrote you into My story and I want you to enjoy your place in it.”

 

To put Beth Moore’s words in God’s mouth, it was as if He said to me, “You have a God-thing called destiny, and I’m inviting you to fulfill it with courage and perseverance.” (Esther)

 

And I’m so glad He did! He knew I’d have missed a thousand mindboggling blessings if I had not been willing to move to Africa.

 

What about you? What radical demands has God made of you in the past? Did you wrestled with God, unwilling at first to do a particular thing for Him, only to find out later that you would have missed blessings you now cherish?

 

Or, maybe today is God making radical demands of you. Are you willing to meet them? Or, maybe today God is still waiting for your answer, waiting for you to say, “Here I am. Send me.” How will you answer?

 

The “flarings of a scared but burning heart”

I’ve been telling you that I seemed to hear God asking me to place Him—not my children and my relationship with them—in first place in my life.

 

I admitted to you that my words couldn’t capture the utter rawness, the unspeakable ravages of dying to oneself in order to die to one’s children, even when we do it because God is asking that of us. (Click here to read “I could say ‘Yes’ to God, or I could say ‘No’”.)

 

“Letting something precious go is . . . unbearable,” writes Chuck Swindoll. “The  parting cannot happen without inward bleeding.” (Good Morning, Lord . . . Can We Talk?)

 

In Chapter 2 of Grandma’s Letters from Africa, I wrote:

 

This month-long process left me emotionally spent but, afterward, I could fill out the application to Wycliffe Bible Translators.

 

I filled it out because I knew that if joining Wycliffe was not God’s plan for us, He had power enough to prevent it.

 

I gave Him every opportunity to show us green lights and send us to Africa or red lights and keep us home.

 

In the meantime, I kept taking the next step, and the next, all the while watching for God’s answer.

 

In the end, He gave us only green lights:

 

Wycliffe found no problems with our applications.

 

Next, we passed our phone interviews.

 

And we spent a month at a Wycliffe facility in the lovely mountains and forests of Idyllwild, California: training, testing, and interviewing—and we passed all those requirements, too.

 

I had my answer.

 

In giving me that answer, God responded to my earlier protestations about not wanting to dismantle our home or leave my family or move away from beautiful Port Angeles, Washington. He addressed my worries about giving up a steady income and health insurance.

 

I could almost hear God whisper, “It’s okay to dismantle your home. Give family heirlooms to your children or put them in storage, and throw out the junk.

 

“You worry about your parents, but your brothers and I will care for them.

 

“You feel bad about leaving your friends, but true friendships will endure, and I will introduce you to new friends in Africa.

 

“You don’t want to leave the beauty of Port Angeles, but wait until you see Africa’s splendor.

 

“Let go of your tight grip on your paycheck and health insurance. Find a better security in Me.”

 

Then God seemed to say, “Now, about your children—don’t you know I love them even more than you do? You can trust Me with them.”

 

Knowing God’s answer didn’t take away the pain, but my heart melted when He asked me to believe He loved my Matt and my Karen even more than I did.

 

It was a “Stop—take off your sandals” moment.

A burning bush moment.

A standing-on-holy-ground moment. 

(Exodus 3:1-5)

 

Jenilee Goodwin writes, “When God speaks, he is inviting you into his story. He’s about to do something in you, in your family, in your work, in your country, in your life. He is looking for those who are listening, those who are saying, ‘Here I am.’

 

Jennilee continues: “His eyes are seeking those who are willing to hear what He’s saying and participate in the greater story.”

 

“I wondered if this was how beginnings were made,” writes Sue Monk Kid, “—in the momentary flarings of a scared but burning heart.” (When the Heart Waits)

 

I could do only two things:

Trust God to manage my kids’ consequences

because of our move to Africa,

and then turn and take an extreme,

and blind, leap of faith. 

(from Chapter 2, Grandma’s Letters from Africa)