Reasons & Enduring

With having said good-bye to friends this last week, I'm thinking of my own departure coming up in 5 months. This is my last term here until God directs otherwise. So I’m starting to do some clean-up around my desk, sorting some papers, and found some of my early prayer letters and a letter to the director regarding my future. Would you like to know why I have spent all these years here? Written 21 years ago, it's still my heart. Let me share part of it with you (written July 24, 1986):

The end of my short term is coming up in five months. I have had to do some serious consideration as to what I should do after this. Having been here already two years, having gone through the initial adjustments and struggles, having stated building relationships with the nationals, having a basis of the language, and having learned the work and my role as a nurse at G. H. I can’t see throwing all this away only to go somewhere else and start all over again. Through various things I have read in Scripture and books by Christian leaders, through what I have seen in the last two years of myself, and with lots of prayer, I have decided I would like to return for another term. It is difficult for me to say career. We take our life really one day at a time. I know my life is committed to the Lord, for His service, for life. As Eric Alexander said of Paul, he had two motives that formed his life and thinking: 1. for the praise of His glory, 2. for the sake of the Gentiles and a third one could be added –for life. II Timothy 2:10 also encourages me to continue here in this ministry. “For this reason I endure all things for the sake of those who are chosen that they also may obtain salvation which is in Christ Jesus and with it eternal glory.”