Kenya, 2007. I can’t name the exact moment that I became a missionary. This has been a long process for our family. But if I had to pick a time and place, I would say that Kenya in 2007 was where we caught the “bug.”

We had a series of presentations that included a children’s story, a health message and a sermon. On one particular night, rain poured down, and the power went out. That meant also no sound, no images, and about a hundred drenched people in the audience. That’s why, in the middle of his sermon, Cristian stopped and asked everybody to bow their heads for a prayer. He prayed something along these lines: “God, please stop the rain so we can go ahead with our meeting. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.” That very second, the rain stopped, and we continued as if nothing had happened. At the end of the sermon, our translator gave Cristian a friendly hug and said, “You had some courage up there to pray like that in front of so many people. What if the rain hadn’t stopped?”

“I don’t know,” Cristian answered. “I never thought of that!”

It’s almost funny when I remember this, but then I remember the trusting partnership we had with God back then, simply because everything we were supposed to do was basically impossible. Here and now, it is so easy to become self-sufficient, forgetful, skeptical and anxious. We plan, we calculate, we work, we estimate and we tend to forget that Somebody else is in charge. Right now, when we are contemplating once again the impossible tasks ahead of us in our new mission project, I pray that we will rely on that trusting faith once again. I pray that when the devil presses us with the question, “What if this doesn’t work?” I’ll be able to simply answer, “I don’t know. I never thought of that.”

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