I was seven years old when my parents purchased their first home. It was a foreclosed “fixer-upper.” Our family had moved from Washington a few years before. Taking a step of faith, my parents moved to Kentucky without a job or a place to live. God blessed them with jobs and gave us a few temporary places to stay, but they were eager to find a permanent home.
This house, while old and rundown, fit their budget. It sat on a large corner lot on Main Street in a tiny old coal mining town in Western Kentucky. My parents put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into repairing and updating the house and the surrounding property.
My brother and I quickly began exploring and found the creek that ran through the neighborhood. Soon, we learned how to catch crawdads and fish with our hands. While we were quite proud to say we had caught the critters, we were horrified when the neighborhood children joined us, caught some of their own critters, and proceeded to cook them in old tin cans before popping them in their mouths.
Summers in Kentucky can be brutally hot and humid. Main Street was a blacktop road, and the heat would cause black, sticky bubbles to rise all over its surface. For a youngster, riding our bikes over those sticky bubbles and hearing them pop under the tires was pure bliss!
Some days, when the sun went down, the neighborhood children would congregate in our big yard, and a neighborhood-wide game of hide-and-seek would begin. Anything within a block of our house was in bounds, and the telephone pole at the front of our driveway was home base.
As the months and years sped by, the neighborhood children began to congregate in our yard more and more frequently. Varieties of tag, football and other games commenced in the side lot that my parents had worked so hard to clear. As a child, I did not realize the significance of these gatherings, nor did I understand how safe our neighbors felt in our space. It is only in hindsight that I can see that my parents had, unknowingly, moved us into a mission field that was ripe with dysfunction, spiritual oppression and hearts that were desperate for hope.
Our home was not perfect; we had our struggles. However, God used our presence in that little coal-mining town to be a beacon of hope to our neighbors.
My first lesson in preaching the gospel without saying a word came while living in that town. Most of the neighborhood children used swear words profusely; my brother and I did not. One evening, a new youth joined the crowd at our house. He punctuated a sentence with an expletive. Immediately, one of our neighborhood friends turned on him, pointing a finger in his face and saying threateningly, “You don’t talk like that on this property!”
I have never forgotten that moment. We had never told our friends not to swear around us. We simply did not swear. It was not something we thought about; it was just our lifestyle. And it was so different than their home experiences that it impacted them as nothing else could.
I often think about my years spent in that rickety old house in a little coal mining town in Kentucky. Looking back, I can see how the Lord used that time to teach our family invaluable lessons that impact me to this day. Lessons such as:
• Spiritual change takes time.
• Living with people is the only way to mingle with them, to experience life as they experience it, and to walk alongside them in the struggles that naturally result from living without Christ.
• There are many times when we cannot see what influence we are having on others for Christ, but that does not mean that nothing is happening.
My family had no idea that we were entering a mission field when my parents moved us to that neighborhood. But my parents took on the challenge and, for more than fifteen years, served as ambassadors of Christ to our neighbors.
In contrast, AFM missionaries knowingly move to some of the most difficult mission fields around the world. We go because we know that living with the people provides a visible testimony of God’s hope and love, and nothing can substitute for this in-person witness.
Please, prayerfully consider how you can sacrificially give to support this work. Your gifts help to ensure that AFM and our missionaries have the support needed to share the gospel of Jesus Christ in person, in word and in deed.
