From the time we were little children, we grew up listening to mission stories. Feeling God’s call individually, we went as student missionaries with AFM to separate projects in Papua New Guinea. A year later we got married, knowing that God was calling us to overseas mission service. God used a short stint in Zimbabwe at an AIDS orphanage to ready us for six years of service at a school for poor and orphaned children near Kolkata, India. We grew to love the children as our own. Our favorite part of the day was when we could sit with one or more of the children, helping them with homework and talking with them about anything on their minds. These precious times allowed us to share our love for Christ in a more personal way.
When David and Edie Hicks were first accepted by AFM to go to the Ama, they were asked if they had any friends who might be willing to join their mission team. They immediately thought of us and sent us an email asking us to prayerfully consider joining them.
We asked God to direct us. Did He want us to stay at our orphan school in India, or did He want us to go to PNG? Over time, it became abundantly clear that God was calling us to the Ama people.
When we told the orphan children about our departure, we showed them a memorial video of John Lello and explained that we were going where he had been. Many times the children had seen missionaries leave to go back to live in America, but this was the first time they were seeing missionaries leave to go to a harder, more remote location in order to spread the Gospel. They could see we really believed in what we had been teaching them about God, and that we were willing to follow His leading wherever He was sending us.
The Ama people live in a remote area of northwestern PNG. To reach them is costly and time-consuming. But does this make them of less value in the eyes of the One who gave everything so that they might have eternal life? For the last 50 years, the Ama have been asking for a missionary to come to them. Like Paul in Acts 16, we have heard their cry, “Come over to Papua New Guinea and help us.” We want to help them get to know their loving Savior personally and enable them to share the love of Jesus with people from neighboring tribes. Our goal is to coach and enable a Gospel movement that transcends human barriers of language and culture.

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