His Story

Unashamedly, two of my greatest heroes are my mom and dad.  Especially when I consider their lives and faithfulness.  Everytime I read it I think of them:

Psalm 92:14, "They will still bear fruit in old age; they will stay fresh and green, proclaiming, "The Lord is upright; He is my Rock, and there is no wickedness in Him."

100 bed Hoa Khan Children's Hospital

My mama, she packed two babies on her hips and daddy held the other one, three children two and under, and they boarded a plane for war-torn Vietnam.  Right at the wrong time.  Who wanted to go to Vietnam in 1969? My daddy did, and not without his woman at his side,     to help heal little 

bodies in the name of Christ.  

 

And they stayed for five years, me being born after four and heading back again for one more until God delivered them just in the nick of time.  And my mama, she calls those her "skinny years," the stress of war and uncertainty taking a toll.  And they tell stories of sleeping in their bed with flak jackets on top of us all when the shooting got close, and children coming in with no limbs, the sad product of land mines.  And even though God did get us out three days before Da Nang fell to the North Vietnamese, my daddy still tears up when he talks about those children they had to leave behind in their hospital beds.  My whole life I have heard stories of God's faithfulness and I watched it lived out in my home.  Surely I am a steward of such a past and such a family.

Back to Vietnam after my birth

Headed to Taiwan in 1976

And that doesn't even include the incredible stories of the family I married into, with Dave's grandparents being sustained in a Japanese civilian concentration camp in China while they were

missionaries, his other grandma growing up as a missionary kid in Korea.   And parents who left comfortable small-town Montana to head to the bustling city of Hong Kong.  And all of that to say, we don't go overseas just because that's what our families do, but we have to decide what to do with the abundance that has been poured out on us.  How can we use these small, wispy vapors of lives to the best of our abilities?  How can we pour out what has been poured in, particularly in terms of the people who have discipled us extensively and the examples of Godly Christians that we have been privileged to learn from?

1. Faith of our fathers, we will strive
   To win all nations unto thee;
   And through the truth that comes from God,
   We all shall then be truly free.
2. Faith of our fathers, holy faith!
   We will be true to thee till death.