A City Life For Me

When I was a teenager we had a lot of missionaries stay in our home. It was something that was very influential in my life at a critical time when I was considering my future direction. I believe the Lord used the influence of missionary families to reinforce His call on my own life to serve in the field of missions. As missionaries on deputation, we often rely on the generosity and goodness of others to help us down the road to the next stop. The Lord always places the right people across our path at the right time to take care of our needs. But just like the Lord, He so often doesn’t just give us the necessities – He gives us blessings in abundance upon what we actually need . Many times this comes in the form of gift baskets or “care packages” from our hostesses and often from the church at a mission’s conference. We have truly been blessed by many generous people this year. My kids love opening a “care package” and going through all of the goodies. Before we started traveling I did...

I don’t consider myself to be experienced at this missionary or deputation thing.  Maybe I should…we’ve been doing it for two years now.  I am always looking for a way to improve our packing or reduce what we take inside a church or streamline the process.  But I still feel like we have so much to learn! Yesterday we left our temporary home for most of the next six months.  We will pop back in for a day or two here and there as we have a couple of meetings in Upstate NY or New England.  It was definitely not the smoothest day of getting out of the house, but it was probably one of the more peaceful days!  Just to give you a glimpse into life as a missionary, or maybe I should just say life as a mom of five little people – on the road! We intended to leave at 5:00 a.m.  We had a 15 hour drive to get to Georgia.  While we were splitting it between two days, our conference starts on the second day.  We wanted to leave as little driving as po...

Read… Part 1: ADefinition , Part 2: The Mission Agency , Part 3: The Phone Calls , and Part 4: Traveling and Presenting Our Ministry   One of the hardest parts of deputation for me is living in the van.   Everything we need has to fit in there (glad we have a big one!), and stay organized.   I would add that my preference is for it to stay clean as well, but traveling in the snowy months, having four little kids, and all of the stuff in the van makes it difficult to clean out often.   It was hard to decide what we would need for three months, and what we could do without.   These are a few things we did to make our life on the road a little easier.   I packed four play outfits for the kids, and two church outfits.   Some weeks this is too much clothing; other weeks it is not enough.   We have two kids who still wet the bed sometimes, and two toddlers who are messy eaters.   This often makes for a lot of laundry! ...

Read… Part 1: ADefinition , Part 2: The Mission Agency , and Part 3: The Phone Calls   When Ben is booking meetings, he tries to schedule churches in a reasonable proximity to each other to minimize travel.   At the beginning we stayed in New England so we could travel there on the weekends and Ben could still work his job during the week.   Since February we have been in the Midwest, west, and Great Lakes states.     When it comes to lodging, many churches have a “Prophet’s Chamber” or guest house/apartment in their church.   This is helpful to us with small children because it leaves us free to set our own schedule and routine.   Other times a family in the church hosts us for the night(s) and provides our meals and lodging.   We usually have very good times of fellowship with our host families, and it allows us to get to know the church people much better.   However, it does limit our options with schedule and meals which...

Read… Part 1: ADefinition and Part 2: The MissionAgency This is how we go about scheduling meetings…     We start with a list of churches.   We currently have over 700 possibilities in our database (not including the ones who have already told us “no”).   We began with churches that we know personally, or have a personal connection to.   Having graduated from Bible College, we know friends serving the Lord all over the world.   Next we take the list of churches (sorted by state) from our Mission Board and begin to sift through them.   This list gets outdated very quickly as churches grow, merge, change pastors, move locations, etc.   So we look up each church on the internet to verify the information.   If they don’t have a website, we usually eliminate the church.   From the website we look at the church, the Pastor, where the Pastor graduated from, what kind of programs the church has, read the doctrinal statement, ...

Read Part 1: A Definition here. Many missionaries choose to use a Mission Board or a Mission Agency to assist them with their pre-field and on-field ministry.   There are many independent Baptist mission boards.   Some missionaries are simply sent by their local church.   Many “home missionaries” (those who are staying in the US) do not use a mission agency.   We chose to use Baptist World Mission as our sending agency.   They currently serve about 170 families (or 320 adult missionaries) around the world.   They assist our sending church and help us make decisions regarding our deputation and field of service, with the approval and guidance of our pastor.     There are several reasons to utilize the aid of a mission board.     1.   They help with paperwork and finances.   Our mission board handles our finances and files our social security taxes.   We send an expense report and they help...

  I have been posting a lot about our deputation travels and progress.   It recently occurred to me that I probably have quite a few followers who don’t really know what I’m talking about.   So I wanted to write a good, detailed explanation.   It will probably take several posts to give you a realistic idea about what deputation involves.   Deputation: noun – a group of people appointed to undertake a mission or take part in a formal process on behalf of a larger group.   That’s the dictionary definition.   We are essentially being “deputized” by our mission board and churches around the country to represent them in a particular field of service.   This phase of deputation comes prior to field ministry, and could also be called “pre-field” ministry.   We are independent Baptists by denomination.   However, as independent Baptists we believe that each church is autonomous, {you know -  independ...

We have just returned from one of our “bigger” or “extended” deputation trips thus far.  We were in three different conferences back to back, taking us from October 8th to October 19th.  I think the Lord is giving me “little” trips like this to practice packing, presenting, and parenting on the road so I know better how to do it when we leave in January for 4-5 months.  {Not yet looking forward to that time, but it’s growing on me}. There were some funny moments, hard-to-deal-with moments, and exhausting moments (like putting 4,000 miles on our van since October 1st, including round trip from MA to WI in three days).  But all of these make up some very Missionary Moments .  I thought you might want to laugh and experience them along with me. In Palmer, MA I gave my testimony for the first time without crying!  That’s a definite improvement!  I learned that our new van is easier to move around in, but it also takes the bumps a bit harder.  I h...

I’ve had this written in the flyleaf of my Bible since high school graduation.  I never would have guessed that 13 years later, God would have led me to serve alongside my husband in the largest city of our country, and one of the most influential cities in the world.  But here I am, and New York City has become home.  God has been so good along each step of the way.

We have had several meetings in Maine this month.  Last week we had to travel home on Monday so that Ben could finish a job he was doing in Brooklyn.  This week we decided to stay in Maine in between Sundays.  We had some accommodations in a prophets chamber during the week. But as we were leaving on Saturday morning, a college friend (who is a missionary in Siberia) emailed to say that she had seen we were in Maine, and that her parents would be glad to have us stay with them if we needed a place to stay.  The Lord answered an unspoken prayer to take care of our accommodations this week!    We have had a wonderful time in rural Maine.  The kids are experiencing parts of the "great outdoors" that they never knew existed in New York City!  We enjoyed a canoe ride (another little thing that the Lord worked out - Nolan has been asking to go on a boat!), a couple of picnics, a hike, foraging for wild raspberries, looking at the stars,...

Last week we embarked on what will surely be the first of many – a long road trip!  Our destination was Huntsville, Alabama for the annual meeting of Baptist World Mission.  We had applied to the mission board to be church planters to the Bronx in New York City.  After a two month application process, this trip was the final step in our appointment with BWM – a doctrinal review and in-person interview with the Board Members.  This post will be primarily about our trip, and perhaps I will share more about BWM in a later post. This journey of over 900 miles one way was supposed to be about 14 hours.  Add in a pre-schooler (who really did pretty well), a two year old (who did not quite attain to “pretty well” – actually, it was really rough), and infant twins, and you have the story of our journey. We started off mid-morning on Friday, October 11th.  We had been contacted by our hostess in Alabama that we could use her washer if we wanted to pack light....

I must confess that I have not been very consistent about praying for our missionaries.  I have tried several different “systems” to keep the prayer cards visible as a reminder, but nothing has succeeded.  Recently I re-purposed a little basket and set it on the bookshelf.  I nestled the basket on the bookshelf near the dining room table.  We started having Elaine pick a card before each evening meal’s prayer.  She is addicted!  Elaine wants to get a card at breakfast and lunch, too.  She never lets us forget. This morning I found Elaine “teaching” her baby doll to hold a prayer card in her hand.  She was so proud of herself!  And I’m glad that we finally found a system to help us consistently “hold the ropes” for those who are laboring at home and abroad in the Lord’s harvest fields!

My friend Kristi Colas is a missionary in Normandy, France.  This morning I received a special prayer request from Kristi, and I wanted to share it with you all so that you can take her to the Throne of Grace with me.  Here is what she wrote: “Hi to each of you who are faithful in praying for the furtherance of the Gospel here in Normandy, France! I wanted to send out a quick note to ask for you to redouble your labor of love over the next ten days especially , as we are in the midst of a major Gospel offensive. We have a team of five young people from a French Bible institute here helping us with several evangelistic outreaches, and the Lord has been giving us some amazing opportunities to share the Gospel and make new contacts. “Tonight (Thursday Nov. 19th) I am hosting a Bible study led by my pastor on the unique message of the Bible, which is my church’s first step towards planting a daughter church in my town on the outskirts of Rouen. Several of my dear unsaved fri...