Drinking the sand of loneliness in the desert made Jaime thirst even more for the living water of her Lord and Savior. She knew she’d die without it. How parched she grew from her longing for home! Yet when she needed to know she wasn’t alone, God always showed her He was there. So many times Jesus’ living water washed over her.
For example, one day Jaime was struggling through her quiet time. Her mind kept wandering back to how deserted she felt. Her Bible reading that day happened to be about Noah and the Flood. When Jaime came to the part where God set a rainbow in the heavens as a sign of His everlasting covenant, all she could think was,
I haven’t seen a rainbow in ages
. Living in the desert doesn’t exactly lend itself to that phenomenon!
Jaime found herself desiring that rainbow all day. She realized how often she’d taken God’s symbol of promise for granted in her home skies. Jaime’s heart ached for home and for rain.
Later that same day she was in a car with a group of Muslim friends, and drops of rain began to slowly beat on the hood. As they drove on, the rain picked up. Just when the rain had almost stopped, there, stretching across the sky, was the most glorious rainbow she’d ever seen. It touched the ground on both sides. Everyone in the car was ecstatic and yelling; several of them had never seen one. But Jaime sat in silence and the tears began to flow. Overwhelmed, she knew God loved her so much that in the desert He had sent her a rainbow.
How often do God’s people miss His messages of love and comfort? Though they find His voice in Scripture, nature also cries out not only His glory, but His amazing love. How tender yet magnificent is His love for His children. Yes, God wanted Jaime to give her all for Him; yes, He wanted her to lay down her life for Him. But when she was despondent, He comforted her. His presence and joy gave Jaime strength for the journey.
Journal Entry: 12.21.02
I can’t believe that after two years of studying Arabic in Jordan that it’s time for me to go home. I am going to board the plane today a completely different girl (or should I say woman) than I was.
Earlier this evening, I visited with more friends to say our good-byes. I don’t even know how to put into words how much I have grown to love these people. I am going to miss them so much! Dear God, my heart is breaking. Even Mohammad broke down and cried when I got ready to leave. I handed him a special “book.” I wrapped it so he couldn’t see what it was. I pray that he reads it.
Though Jaime is no longer overseas, her heart to share the gospel with people from other nations has never waned. A year ago, Virginia Commonwealth University didn’t have an international student ministry. But then God put Jaime in the right place at the right time to start one. Now there are ten in the group. On Ash Wednesday of 2004, no less than sixty international students went to see
The Passion of the Christ
movie with Jaime and the group!
Today Jaime prays, “Thank You, Lord, for preparing me for this work. I so understand their culture shock, homesickness, and frustration with the language barrier. It’s clear to me now why You allowed me to experience You so dramatically in my loneliness while on foreign soil. Let me be Your desert rainbow to those who are a long way from home.”
The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge.
There is no speech or language
where their voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun.
(Psalm
19:1-4
)
linda
A Surprising Linguist
L
inda gave her heart to Jesus when she was nearly five years old, and she’s been following His heart ever since—wherever that takes her. She lived overseas from age two to six. “My brother spent his first four birthdays in four different countries,” she says. She has vivid memories of other cultures:
~ Going on German
volksmarches,
in which she walked through pine forests using a walking stick.
~ Living in Liverpool, England, with its hazy rain.
~ Buying kilts in Scotland.
~ Playing in a bamboo playhouse a gardener built for her in Bangladesh.
Her most vivid memories come from Bangladesh, where her family skirted rice paddy borders to go to a local church. “I saw
dokans
(market stalls), people eating and spitting beetle-nut juice, and shacks of plastic and metal barely holding together,” Linda says. As much as she loved Bangladesh, though, Linda hated learning its language—Bengali. In fact, she ran away from the class, saying it was just too difficult.
For the most part, though, Linda loved her young life, experiencing many diverse cultures around the globe. But she dreaded leaving each place. “The hard part is the ripping feeling in your heart when you’re always saying good-bye,” she says. “The sorrow is never knowing when or if you will see a playmate again.”
When Linda’s family returned to the United States, they still embraced many cultures. “We used to joke that our house was IHOP—International House of People. Our guest book is full of unique names and languages, and my mom’s recipe box resembles the index of an international atlas.”
In high school, Linda organized a Teens For Life group, recruiting volunteers and teaching students about infanticide, abortion, and euthanasia. When the group focused on sexual purity, Linda stood in front of the student body and expressed her commitment to remain abstinent until marriage. “The hardest audiences were the students at my own high school,” she says. “I couldn’t just stand in front, speak, and then go home. I had to go to school with them every day.”
After high school, God spoke to Linda through her parents. One summer after college, a graphic design and writing firm in Manhattan offered her a job. Linda envisioned herself in the job, living in the big city and enjoying a three-month stint in sunny Manhattan. But her parents wanted her to spend one summer at home, since she’d been away two others on overseas trips. Linda turned to Proverbs, specifically chapters 4 and 5, which talk about the wisdom of parents. She chose to heed their advice, letting the Manhattan job go.
When Linda found a job at home, it was a clerical position, filing and stapling papers. Still, Linda says, “One year later, I could look back and see the faithfulness of God’s hand. My grandmother went home to heaven the next May, so the summer at home was the last time I could have spent with her.”
The following summer, Linda worked for Trans World Radio in their studios in Russia and the Ukraine—a job far better than the Manhattan position.
After graduating from Dallas Theological Seminary, Linda spent two weeks in the Middle East. “I prayed God would give me open eyes and ears to see and hear those who needed Jesus’ love,” she relates. “I never expected to be invited to spend the night in an ethnic village, very close to a tense political border. There were times when I wondered what might happen to me there, but Jesus was right beside me. He provided three distinct times when I could tell the villagers about my belief in Jesus.”
Linda’s next life adventure will be Bible translation in Asia. She will train nationals to translate the Bible into what she calls their “heart language—a language that someone has spoken since he was a child, the language he laughs, cries, and prays in.” She believes native believers are best equipped to translate the Bible since they are experts in their own language and culture.
Linda will spend time learning a national language as well as other minority languages. Veteran translators will mentor her. Once she completes both phases of training, she’ll venture out to a culture that is yet to have a Bible translated into words they can read and understand.
Linda spends her training days in Asia learning about the culture, something her parents taught her to do from an early age. She lives in a high-rise apartment with no oven and no elevator. Just crossing the busy street has its own cultural and safety issues. “I must envision a host of winged guardians each time I pass the four-lane highway to get to the next bus stop,” she says. “To cross the road, you must inch your way out of traffic, waiting for a cluster of pedestrians to form. Once your pedestrian cluster is large enough, you all move out—forcing the traffic to slow down.
Voila!
You, the angels, and the other pedestrians have crossed the street! Riding a bike requires the same trust.”
One day in the country, Linda was invited by a local family to have some tea. The father offered Linda and her friends seating on handmade bamboo stools. He boiled the water as a courtesy for the visitors—to kill the bacteria—and offered it to them in rice bowls. The man’s wife roasted sunflower seeds for the guests. In a letter back to the States, Linda described what happened next. The father “brought out a book. We were amazed! That book was the [New Testament] in their minority language. It seems that we had stumbled upon relatives, who had been part of the BIG family for twenty years!”
From Germany to Bangladesh, from England to the Middle East, from the United States to Asia, Linda has seen God’s kingdom expanded. And now she’s in the midst of expanding it further by God’s grace, in a region unfriendly to Christianity.
Linda smiles, remembering God’s paradoxes. “The irony and beauty of God’s ultimate purpose is clear when I think about how I ran away from my Bengali language class saying, ‘It’s too hard.’ I didn’t study Bengali after that. Now, God uses me as a full-time linguist.”
Linda has learned that with God anyone can find a way.
Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.
(Philippians
2:3-4
)
holly davis
Reluctant Missionary
W
hen she was in Bible school, Holly used to tell her friends she would “rather throw up a thousand times than be a missionary.” She imagined that if she even considered overseas missions, God would send her to the jungles of Africa. “I was sure that I would have to invent a language and weave my own clothes out of grass, because I could never walk around naked!” she laughs today.
Holly had other plans for her life. She had known ever since she committed her life to Christ when she was thirteen that she wanted to work with teenagers and young adults. She believed that God’s plan was for her to get married and live in suburban America, leading the senior-high girls’ ministry in a large church.
At first, Holly’s expectation seemed accurate. She began studying at Moody Bible Institute to train for her calling. In her sophomore year, she met a fellow student, and they felt an instant connection. Stephen graduated and moved across the country to work in Christian radio, but he often returned to visit Holly, and the couple began to talk about how soon she could finish her degree so that they could get married.
The summer before her junior year, Holly arranged to work as a nanny near where Stephen lived, so that they could spend more time together. But shortly before Holly arrived, Stephen went through a series of emotionally painful situations with his job that led him to question almost everything in his life. “He was a wreck,” Holly says, looking back. “After many late nights of conversations, Stephen told me that I could find someone better, and he walked out the door.”
Holly felt as if her life had flipped upside down, and that God had wiped away any possibility for her to become who He created her to be. She returned to school depressed and angry. She considered taking a semester off, but she was afraid that if she left, she would never go back.
Yet even in her pain, Holly believed God must have had a bigger plan for her life, that all of her suffering and all of her college work must be for some greater purpose.
She did try to make one change to her life in acknowledgement of the hurt she suffered. Every student was required to study a foreign language, and Holly had chosen German because it was Stephen’s native language. Determined to put all thoughts of her former love behind her, she marched to the registrar’s office to change her language to French. But she discovered that the only available French class took place early in the morning, and German was offered in the middle of the day. She decided to take the more practical route and stayed with German.
As Holly continued through the first difficult year after her broken relationship, a missionary came to Holly’s youth ministry class to talk about the need for youth leaders on U.S. military bases around the world. Holly’s heart began to race. Was this what God wanted her to do with her German? Was this a way to serve Him? Working with American kids in Germany didn’t sound like the wilderness of Africa.
In January 1999, Holly boarded a plane bound for Stuttgart, Germany, where she served as a youth missions intern for four months. Although it was not a lifelong commitment, Holly calls it her “first leap of faith for God. I came back a changed woman, with a bigger worldview and a slight passion for missions.”
Yet Holly clung to the idea that she was not called to overseas work. She settled into another internship, this time with a church in Minnesota. Her life seemed to be moving toward the suburban church position she had always dreamed about when a permanent position for a senior-high girls’ youth director opened up in a nearby town.
Holly says, “I believe we all have two choices in our lives that we constantly make: to grow closer to God or to stay where we are with Him.” That Christmas, as she pondered the new job opportunity, Holly faced a crossroad. She could take the easy route and accept the job in the United States. Or . . . When Holly was honest with herself, she knew something had changed. The church job didn’t sound appealing anymore. Holly was dreaming about Europe. Although she tried to put aside her doubts and secret longings, God would not let it go.