“You ever eat squirrel?” Chase, my evangelistic series attendee, asked me as we drove along.

“Nope,” I said.

“They is real good breaded and fried. I just strip the skin off, put ‘em in flour. They fry up real good.” Chase gave me a smile that was missing all the top teeth.

“Squirrel gravy is better,” said his girlfriend Heidi from the back seat.

“I don’t know how to make squirrel gravy,” Chase retorted, “so I just eats them the way I know how.”

I swallowed a chuckle, amazed at where my cross-cultural American mission trip had taken me.

In September 2017, I drove to West Virginia to hold a 12-night evangelistic campaign. Yes, this was outside the norm for AFM, but it was right on target for reaching lost people. Upon arriving, I found myself deep in a very challenging mission field. That week I read a national news report about the “happiest places to live in America.” West Virginia came in dead last at 50th place.

What I write here is certainly not to stereotype the state of West Virginia and its wonderful people, but to relay the experiences I had there and hopefully to raise awareness of needs close to home.

As a soul-winning trainer for tentmakers, my 20 days in West Virginia were in some respects a laboratory and refresher course for me as I got involved at a hands-on level with people needing the gospel and life transformation. I saw a number of victories including six baptisms, one person who quit smoking, and several lives shifted in a new direction. It also left me with a profound realization that while the “remnant church” has been readying for the end of the world, Satan has been preparing his own last-day crowd. While we are interested in character development, he has been working on character destruction and is quite handily accomplishing his aims. How is our last-day church to meet the needs of modern sinners? Their baggage is heavy, and their problems are dark.

Four things made a lasting impression on me:

1) Drugs and prayer. One night a woman named Bridgette came into my meeting. She was a faded beauty worn out from fighting her meth addiction. She sat on the front row and prayed the whole time. Her sleeveless dress revealed cuts on her wrist, needle holes in her forearms, and other scars on her neck and legs. When I visited with her, she told me she so badly wanted to be free from alcohol and drugs. After the meeting, we had a circle of prayer around her. She needed a miracle. During my short stay in the West Virginia mountains, I heard from about a half dozen people with drug addictions. I have been trained to help people stop smoking, trained in scripture, trained to counsel. But chemical addiction—this was a challenge I didn’t know how to address.

2) Demons and pain. One day I met a young woman with “Do not litter” tattooed on her forehead. On her right cheek, tattooed sideways, were the words Love and Peace. Her face and lips were pierced in about 15 places. I asked about her story, and she opened up readily. She told how she had been kidnapped and made a slave in Oregon. For four years she was abused. She would cry out to “planet earth” for help. But in her words, “earth was mean” and gave her no help. She intermingled the horror story of her slavery and eventual escape with the horror story of a supernatural reality that had stalked her from Oregon to West Virginia. She said that “faceless monsters” would appear and disappear around her, threatening and often attacking her. I spoke of Jesus, and she said, “I have heard of Him but don’t know much about Him.”
Our time together was cut short, but I hastily gave her a children’s book with stories on the life of Jesus. My last glimpse was of her pondering the pages with pictures of Jesus. What will become of this modern Mary Magdalene? How I longed to be part of her victory story.

3) Ghosts and Freedom. Chase told me that he had used a Ouija board in his teens. He had spoken with “several dead people.” In addition to this, his father would often tell them stories about the previous owner of their house who had hung herself in the kitchen. They would often hear things moving around in the house, and a cold wind would blow through.

These are the types of problems Jesus is good at solving. I was happy to bring Christ into such situations and push those demons out. We prayed in each room of Chase’s haunted house and prayed for new life for Chase. Though he is 30 years old, he is illiterate, so I loaded an audio Bible app into his smartphone, and he began listening eagerly. The app read verse by verse, highlighting the words as it went. I hoped it would help Chase learn to read.

Chase went through my stop-smoking plan but hasn’t quit yet. He has been smoking since he was five. He likes preaching in bars. “What are they going to do to me?” he grins. “Knock my teeth out? I don’t have no teeth!” He thanked me for giving him new material to preach to his neighbors.

4) Bible Truth and Joy. Night after night I taught the gospel. There is no joy quite like helping people connect the dots of forgiveness, salvation and adoption into the family of God. One family—a man named Dalton, his sweet girlfriend and their three children—were so earnest. Dalton made his living as a tattooist. “If only my friends could hear what you are talking about,” he said, “it would blow their minds!” I suggested that we hold a seminar in his tattoo parlor. He loved the idea. The local district pastor also liked the idea and is going to follow up with his own mini evangelistic meeting in Dalton’s tattoo shop! Taking a deep drag from his cigarette, Dalton said passionately, “Saturday Sabbath. Incredible! Wait till the guys learn about this! I can’t wait!”
Neither can I, Dalton!

There are whole counties in the United States that have no Seventh-day Adventist presence. Find where they are at www.GoTential.org/no-sda-usa.html. Perhaps you can think of a way to impact a county on this list.

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