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.
