How It All Began...

It was 1998. I owned a ‘headshop’ and just became a radically converted Christian. In my little store, where I sold pipes and papers and incense, I would listen to Christian radio and tell Bible stories to my unsuspecting customers. "Would you like screens with that...and have you heard about the woman at the well?" It was here that I first learned what a 'missionary' was. On a local radio station I heard about people smuggling Bibles into China. 

Freshly afire with a new love for Jesus, my heart was now completely stoked. Missions!  I wanted to tell everyone about the Good News! I knew then that God would use me for missions work.  I was a gypsy; adaptable, multi-talented, multi-faceted. I was tenacious and passionate.  Lining my trench coat with a 100 New Testaments and crossing dangerous borders was right up my alley. 

A few weeks later, when a friend invited me on a missions trip to Haiti, I immediately said yes! All I had to do, he said, was come up with my share of the gas money for the twin-engine plane out of Miami. No problem; I still sold drug paraphernalia and business was good. I had my mission field! But my friend’s pastor, who knew me since my teens, pulled me aside. This would be a difficult trip, he warned. It’s all men, it’s to a dangerous part of the island, you’re a new believer and a woman with more zeal than wisdom. Do...not...go. 

Somehow I submitted to his counsel, and I pulled out. Sure enough, the men who went faced some pretty serious spiritual warfare and vodoun attacks that brought them back white as ghosts. Someday, I thought, I will make it down to Haiti. In the meantime, I sold my head shop and moved in with a pastor and his wife who discipled me, trained me in the Word of God laid a solid foundation in me. This pastor’s wife, a director of a women’s inner-city Rescue Mission, agreed about my call:

“You’re well suited for missions. You do not succumb to the trappings of western culture. You’re flexible, resourceful. You can bend, adapt. Besides, you are CALLED... AND, you like food that tastes like it’s been harvested off the bottom of a boat!”

My first real mission field, however, was not overseas. I ended up buying a house in the inner-city of Albany, in a ghetto known as West Hill, full of gangs, prostitution, drugs. In my first two weeks there, a drive by shooting occurred in front of my house. Three months later, a young man was shot in the chest in my backyard. Every morning, I swept garbage and crack bags off my sidewalk. I also planted perennials. I planted flowers. I grew tomatoes. I chased drug dealers off my street. I taught the neighborhood children how to water the trees I planted. I did prayers walks in the morning . If I walked in the evening, I was commonly mistaken as a crack head or prostitute, typically the only reason a white woman would be in the neighborhood. “Hey, baby, how much?” My reply to the unsuspecting johns was something like,  “Jesus loved you soooo much that he died on the cross for you. Repent and be saved!”

During my walks I would find little barrettes, ones the little neighborhood girls wore in their plated hair. Each time I found a barrette lying on the street or sidewalk, I would say a prayer for the girl who had lost it. I saved those barrettes I found. I kept them in a large jar. Several hundred prayers of protection from the dangers of the ghetto, health for minds, emotions, bodies and a saving knowledge of Jesus’ love. 

Years went by in the ghetto. The Mayor of Albany thanked me for the transformation that occurred on my block since moving in. Things had in fact had quieted down, the streets were less mean. A group of friends and I started a Bible Club and lunch program for the local children. Now they proudly kept the streets clean, though the crack bags had long since disappeared. The only real trouble I had was how to keep the city squirrels from digging up my tulip bulbs and eating my tomatoes.  

This is when the man who invited me on the missions trip to Haiti years before came back into my life. He had made several trips to Haiti since I saw him last.  We began courting. He was a buffalo and hay farmer by trade, hardworking, handsome and strong. We planted a garden together. I created an irrigation system that impressed him so much, he dreamed of homesteading in Haiti together. I dreamed of a dozen adopted Haitian babies climbing all over me as we shared our love of farming and Jesus with the nationals.

After a couple of years serving in a little country church together, we woke up from our dreaming, amiably split and I was off to Bible college to study missions. He visited me in college on his way down to another Haiti trip. I loaded him up with balloons and bubbles and candy for the children. I studied hard in school and ended up traveling to several other countries - Turkey, Ukraine, Mexico, Hungary - on short term trips. I also helped plant a few churches here in the states. And then I married a missionary, or so I thought. This man, whom I met at one of our church plants, had spent ten years on the foreign field. But after we married, the only traveling he did was outside our marriage. 

Our separation brought me to Florida. It was the most difficult season of my life. My divorce and the Haiti earthquake happened somewhere around the same time. I barely remember either;  too much pain and destruction. I felt just as decimated as the images on the television. Nothing left to do but trust in God’s faithfulness and keep pressing on...so that’s what I did.

A couple years later, the dust had settled, and I began to rebuild my life. I had a new career, was knitting in to a fabulous new church, making new friends, learning how to enjoy my life again. I was on Facebook one day, and it ‘suggested’ a friend to me because we had a mutual friend and both read one of my favorite books. Why not? I thought, and friend-ed him. He ended up being a missionary to Haiti. I realized God was letting me know I was ready to get back into missions work again. It was time. 

This new ‘virtual’ friend ended up being a fantastic person of God who encouraged me, prayed for me and spurred me on, exactly what I needed. I went to several missions fairs and conferences to further stir myself up. I also went to see Roland and Heidi Baker (whom I had met years before in the ghetto) so they could pray for me. Within weeks, the doors to missions starting flinging wide open. God was making it clear that now WAS the time. So here I was, a few hundred miles from Haiti, in a new church with a huge heart for missions. My 14 year wait to get to Haiti was coming to an end....