Holly clings to a verse she discovered four years ago, when she was wounded by her broken relationship and uncertain of her future calling: “Does the LORD delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices / as much as in obeying the voice of the LORD? / To obey is better than sacrifice” (1 Sam. 15:22). Holly’s obedience to God’s call in her life has certainly caused her to sacrifice, but in the end, she knows her joy is far richer than anything she may have lost. She is a reluctant missionary no more.
Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all.
(Philippians 4:4-5)
4
anne savage
Heart for the World
Nineteen-year-old Anne Savage met Jesus when she was young but truly internalized and personalized her relationship with Him more recently, as a teenager. That’s when she started going on missions trips. She’s been on one every summer since sixth grade. In North America, she’s been to Missouri, Minnesota, and Mexico. In 2001, she went on her first overseas mission trip to Caracas, Venezuela. Focus on the Family’s teen girl magazine Brio conducts an annual overseas trip and on a whim, Anne applied.
The trip was life-transforming: “For the first time in my life I was exposed to a new culture that needed God just as much as I did.”
Anne remembers meeting an older woman after performing an evangelistic street play. “After the play, I felt drawn to her. She was adamant that she didn’t need a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. She was fine with her Sunday-to-Sunday ritual of going to mass. I felt frustrated and defeated that I could not share God’s love with her. Then it hit me that I needed to show God’s love to her.”
Through the interpreter, Anne asked the woman if she could give her a hug. She nodded. Anne wrapped her arms around the woman, who began to cry. “It was awesome to see that such a simple action was all she needed, and all it cost me was to cross the ocean and give her a hug!”
Another summer, Anne went to China—this time with Family Life Ministry’s Hope for Orphans trip, where she helped with annual physicals for a large orphanage. She remembers her nerves as the plane began its descent. She was well aware of the laws preventing her from sharing her faith. But God comforted her. A small video screen in the cabin showed the passengers the illuminated runway. “All of a sudden, this huge, bright cross came into view on the screen. I kept looking, amazed that this would be so bright and tall for all to see. As we came closer, I realized that it was the runway lights, but it was a reminder to me that God was in control.” She says seeing the illuminated runway cross was like hearing God say, “Anne, you are in My hands. I will protect you.”
“From then on, I was so excited, I wasn’t worried at all,” she says. “We had several opportunities to share our faith. God truly worked in all our lives as well as in those who interacted with us.” She especially remembers the orphans. “It was incredible to see all these little children looking at us with smiling faces. The language barrier didn’t matter.”
Being in a country where Christianity is discouraged and illegal, Anne sensed the Lord in a new way. “This was the first time I felt as if my faith was a huge factor in my life.”
She’s also seen God’s protection and guidance in Normal, Illinois, where she lives with her family. The Savage family planted a church in 2000. “In three and a half years, we are busting at the seams of our building,” she says. “It is so awesome to see such passionate people coming together and worshiping God.”
For the past two years, Anne has been the church’s vacation Bible school director, a job she started when she was seventeen. Even then, her desire was to see God touch not only the children, but also the leaders. “As we prayed prior to the event each night, everyone was focused on the kids. But at the end of the night, our prayer time was focused on each other. There were men and women crying, and God mended their broken hearts. I was blown away that God would use this event for little kids to touch the lives of the adults.”
Just as God used a children’s venue to touch children and adults alike, He used the face of a young Russian boy to change Anne’s family forever. One day, someone handed Anne’s mom a picture of Kolya, asking if she knew someone who could adopt him. Kolya’s best friend, who came from the same orphanage, had been adopted by a family one mile from the Savages’ home. When Kolya’s friend could speak English, the first thing she said to her adopted family was “You need to find a home for my friend.”
After much prayer and discussion, the Savage family decided to adopt Kolya, who shares an uncanny resemblance to the boys in their family. The whole family helped in the fund-raising efforts to adopt the boy. Anne pioneered “Cooking for Kolya”; she cooked freezer meals and desserts and sold them to friends, family members, even teachers. She raised over a thousand dollars.
The journey to adopt Kolya was a faith-stretching time. Yet God provided through grants, gifts from strangers, and donations. “It became our motto that God owned cattle on a thousand hills. He only needed to sell a few cows to make this happen! We definitely saw the blessings of those cows.”
Now, Anne is the eldest of five and is attending Taylor University. She has a yearning to take Jesus to Europe, particularly France. She loves singing worship songs to Jesus, experiencing His tangible presence.
The future? “My heart is to be involved in mission work. There is so much pain and emptiness out there. I have come to realize, though, that whatever plans I have, God is going to radicalize them! I cannot even fathom the amazing plans God has for me.”
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
(Romans 12:1-2)
5
niki mcdonnall
No Regrets
When Niki attended fifth-grade camp, she declared she wanted to be a missionary when she grew up. Her future husband, David McDonnall, made the same decision his fifth-grade year.
At Texas A&M, Niki served on a ministry team at Central Baptist Church that coordinated outreach to more than five hundred students. She led freshman Bible studies. Although a student, she was fully committed to working in her church and reaching out to nonbelievers. Still, she was burdened by her fifth-grade dream of becoming a missionary.
She fulfilled that dream by becoming a Journeyman missionary with the IMB (International Mission Board), a Southern Baptist missionary agency whose Journeyman program encourages young men and women to become missionaries. It sent her to the Middle East. She met David, also a Journeyman missionary, on a crowded Bethlehem Square in Israel amid the cacophony and mayhem of New Year’s Eve celebrations.
Initially, neither wanted to serve in the Middle East, but independently they fell in love with the Middle Eastern people and each other. Both became fluent in Arabic.
Stateside, two years later, David gave Niki a cookie cake with a frosted “I love you. Will you marry me?” written in Arabic. She said yes.
The couple enrolled in Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. While there, they were asked to lead a group of seminary students on a humanitarian aid trip for three weeks one summer to northern Iraq. Along with their dozen-member team, they celebrated their first wedding anniversary on Iraqi soil. Then they returned to Texas.
Because of the couple’s fluency in the language and their hearts for Arab people, they were asked to suspend seminary and go to postwar Iraq full-time. Niki weighed her fears and consulted her pastor. In the end, she decided to place her trust in God despite Iraq’s security issues. Showing the Iraqi people God’s tangible love trumped her own fears for safety.
Amid the fury of almost daily terrorist acts against Americans, Niki and David relocated to Iraq to coordinate humanitarian aid for the Iraqi people. Letters home never indicated that she feared danger. Instead, Niki highlighted the work they were doing: int
eracting with the Iraqi people, delivering food and supplies, rebuilding war-torn schools, and locating water.
One afternoon, Niki, her husband, and three other missionaries spent time with several Iraqis who were subsisting in abject poverty. “We had a great day with them. They had been so welcoming. They were so eager for our help,” Niki says. They concluded their time there by deciding to secure a site for a water purification plant for the desperate people they met.
On their way back, a car pulled alongside their vehicle. Within moments the car was sprayed with bullets from automatic weaponry and rocket-powered grenades. After the assailants fled the ambush, David called his supervisor in Jordan on a satellite phone. “We’ve all been shot,” he said.
The five were transported to a nearby U.S. battlefield hospital. Niki remembers seeing David across the room; his injuries seemed minor. They spoke to each other.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you too,” she mouthed.
“We’re going to make it through this,” he said. They were the last words she heard David speak before she succumbed to a drug-induced coma. Later, David died aboard an army helicopter. Four U.S. Army surgeons spent six hours trying to keep him alive. But Niki didn’t know.
She woke up eight days later in a Texas hospital. Still hazy, the first person she asked for was David. Her family evaded her questions until finally she asked if he was mad at her. Then her family circled her hospital bed. Her father told her David had died the day after the car attack.
Now the lone survivor of the March 15, 2004, ambush, Niki faces life as an injured widow. She’s recovering from over twenty gunshot and shrapnel wounds. Her list of bullet wounds is long. A bullet splintered her lower left leg, carving a hole so large the doctors thought they’d have to amputate. Amazingly, the leg was saved and the prognosis is that she will walk just months after the attack. She’s hobbled from crutches to cane and will someday walk without assistance.
She lost three fingers on her left hand, leaving her with a middle finger and a thumb. It’s been a difficult adjustment to make. “It’s weird, but I keep forgetting those fingers aren’t there. For twenty-six years I had them. So I reach to hold something, and it falls out of my hand. And I remember.”
She also notes, “I’ve got several graze wounds on the back of my head. Another quarter inch and it would have been my life.”
According to surgeons, one bullet entered her nose but then defied the laws of physics by exiting without hitting sinuses or brain tissue, her nose still intact. No reconstructive surgery, miraculously, is needed.
Despite the extensive injuries, Niki lives with hope and a desire to serve the Lord wherever He takes her. Her heart for the Iraqi people is evident, and she longs to see others willing to spend themselves for the sake of Jesus and His love for the Middle East. “We need to keep going to these places—to hard places, to sometimes violent places,” she said. “They need help.”
In the midst of a strong desire to see others go, Niki grieves the loss of her three friends and her husband. “In my humanness, I definitely wish my husband had survived. I wish my friends had survived,” she said. “But do I regret doing what we were supposed to do? I don’t regret that at all. It was very clear that this is what we were meant to do.”
Niki worries that people will lose courage because of her ordeal, forsaking overseas missionary service in war-ravaged countries. She longs for others to see past the violence to needy people. She wishes the evening news showed the humanity of people in other countries, not just the violent acts of a few.
She’s often asked if she will go back to Iraq. “Eventually,” she said. “Maybe.” Niki admits, “It has been a hard road. There are still days I pray, ‘Why?’ I miss my husband.”
Yet she has sensed God’s presence even in her grief. “God has been so faithful. His mercies are new each morning. And that sense of His nearness has never left.”
Still recovering, Niki wants to serve Christ wherever He leads her. “I’m not going tomorrow. But if God said, ‘I want you to go back,’ I’m not going to tell Him no.” She points to her scarred body. “Not because of this.”
I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present, nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
(Romans 8:38-39)
WEEK EIGHT JOURNAL
• Besides Jesus, whom do you depend on most to fill your loneliness?
• What would your life look like if you could depend on Jesus for your “living water”?
• How do you see God using you in the lives of others?
• What people has God placed in your life? Are any of them lonely or outcasts or from foreign countries and need your ministry?
• What Bible verse or passage of Scripture has been most meaningful to you this week? Why?
week nine
1
yelena pytkina
God Can Meet My Needs
Yelena agreed to go to the new church only because she wanted to learn English. Born in the Russian city of Ulan-Ude in eastern Siberia, eighteen-year-old Yelena dreamed of attending a Russian university, where students must all pass a written and oral English exam. Quite a few Americans were in the church, Yelena knew, and she thought she could practice her English with them.
“I never thought that I [would] start going to that church and become a Christian,” Yelena remembers. “But God knew how to draw me to Him.”
This small, missionary-staffed church was nothing like the traditional Russian Orthodox Churches Yelena had attended in the past. A budding musician, Yelena was most affected by the music. She had never heard praise and worship music and was both shocked and excited when the English-speaking church used a guitar and backup instruments to praise God.
Yelena became friends with the American missionaries, who not only shared their music and taught her English but also introduced her to new ideas about God. Yelena learned how God loved her so much that he sent His own Son as a personal sacrifice just for her. She discovered she could have a personal relationship with God, and that He wanted to have a personal relationship with her. Yelena had never felt the presence of God as clearly as she did in that church.
When her new friends invited her to a home group to learn more about the Bible, Yelena accepted eagerly. That night, she says, “The Holy Spirit touched me in such a way that I felt Him. I felt as if I was held by someone, but there was no one hugging or even touching me. I was wrapped in God’s love and warmth.”
At first, Yelena’s parents were opposed to their daughter’s new passion for Jesus Christ. They were concerned that the foreign church Yelena had joined was a cult, and they prevented her from attending more home groups. Although she struggled with their decision, Yelena obeyed her parents’ wishes. She continued to grow as a Christian by attending the Sunday services, and burdened by the knowledge that her parents did not share her faith in Christ, Yelena prayed every night that her mother would become a Christian.
Although she knew that she should pray for her father’s salvation as well, Yelena couldn’t at first. Like many men in that region, Yelena’s father suffered from alcoholism. He had been cold, distant, and sometimes violent throughout Yelena’s childhood. “I was scared of my dad,” she says. “I couldn’t talk to him. I couldn’t trust him. There were sad moments in my life when I would cry, and there was no one in my family to support me.”
But as Yelena continued to grow as a Christian, God continued to move her toward forgiveness. Reading her Bible one day, Yelena came to Matthew 5:44, where Jesus instructed His followers to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
Who are my enemies? Yelena asked herself. She knew the answer: Jesus was telling her to forgive her father.
It took time and a lot of prayer, but eventually Yelena was able to let go of the pain of her childhood,
and she began praying for her father. Two years later, Yelena’s father and mother began attending her church.
With her family’s blessing, Yelena answered God’s call to full-time ministry. When she was twenty-four, she packed her belongings and made the four-day train journey from Siberia to Moscow, Russia’s capital city, to join the Youth With A Mission team. Today, she leads worship, serves as a translator and secretary, and disciples new Christians from around the world.
Being a Russian missionary is not easy. Yelena does not receive a salary for the work she does with YWAM; like most others, she relies on private support. But the Russian economy is struggling, and many people have a hard time feeding their families, much less supporting missionaries. With most of the Christians in Russia being new believers (the former communist regime did not allow Christian churches to evangelize for many years), Russian families do not have a history or real understanding of tithing or giving. They assume that someone else—the government or foreign supporters—will pay to build back the Russian church that was neglected for so long.
But this is often not the case. Many pastors work full-time jobs in addition to their ministries, and most Russian missionaries do not receive support from overseas sponsors. Yelena knows that she could make a salary elsewhere, but she also knows that she is where God wants her to be. She is content to depend entirely on God to meet her needs. “God never lets me down in terms of provision of food and clothes. He is always faithful in these little things,” she says with confidence.
God has been faithful not only to meet Yelena’s financial needs, but He also protects her physically. The city of Moscow can be dangerous. Because of the economic instability and a growing drug problem, violent crime is common; Moscow streets are not considered safe after dark. Yet Yelena and her fellow missionaries often must walk home late at night after evening church services or meetings.
Sister Freaks Page 15