Educating for Service

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The grainy photo shows a smiling man with friendly brown eyes lying on a teal cot, an IV in his forearm. “He had stepped on a nail a month earlier. Hoping it would heal on its own, he had mashed up some leaves and spread it on the wound,” explains Noah Roberts, who grew up in Southeast Asia with missionary parents and served as a student missionary there. The man’s foot developed gangrene, so Noah transported him to the capital four hours away. Surgeons saved part of the man’s foot, and Noah spent the next two months visiting and praying with him as he recovered.

News spread about Noah’s kindness and how God had answered his prayers. “From then on, people who asked me to go to the clinic didn’t say that they wanted to get strong medicine, or that they wanted to be treated by American doctors. They said, ‘We want to go because we need God’s help.’”

Noah heard God’s call to serve this man and his village because generous AFM donors helped him study at a Seventh-day Adventist university, where missionary kids were encouraged to serve Jesus. That’s the impact of Adventist education. It changes lives.

My life was also changed by Adventist education. After serving with my family as a missionary in East Africa, I studied at an Adventist university. Upon graduating, I volunteered as an English teacher in South America, an opportunity made possible by one of my Spanish professors. Thanks to some university friends, I then served with an Adventist aid organization in East Africa. Today I work at Adventist Frontier Missions.

My studies at an Adventist university opened opportunities for me to serve. It’s doing the same for current missionary children. Thanks to your generous support, AFM subsidizes tuition for missionary children to study at Adventist academies and universities.
Would you consider supporting the AFM Children’s Education Fund so that our missionary kids can study at Adventist institutions? Your support will make a difference for missionary families, setting the course of their children’s lives. Through those lives guided to service, you’ll help make the world a little more like the Kingdom of God.

Because a missionary kid received an Adventist education, a man in Southeast Asia can walk today. I wonder if we’ll ever hear that man’s side of the story. Maybe on the New Earth. But perhaps we won’t have to wait that long. Maybe Noah can catch up with him along the banks of the Great River in Southeast Asia. How? Because the impact of Adventist education in Noah’s life continues! He and his wife are in training to return to Southeast Asia as AFM career missionaries.

Summarizing his student-missionary work, Noah says, “I don’t know what seeds were planted. I don’t know what the results will be. But I know it was a blessing for them and that they always welcomed prayer from then on.”

Will you help missionary kids like Noah plant seeds of blessing? Will you support the AFM Children’s Education Fund?

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