[Sister Alvear]

. I’ve taught this throughout Brazil so that people could understand God’s complete plan of redemption. Now others, too, may come to acknowledge the truth that women are being used as valuable instruments in the hand of God. I cringe to think that some may think I am putting men down and building up the sisters but that is not true it is only that what this book will be about is about sisters. I really feel that many sisters have stepped in because there was no man to do the job yet at other times I feel that there are those that were called from their mother’s womb. I long for the day when men and women will shake hands in agreement, together walking in Christ one mind and one accord reaching out to a hurting and dying world.
I never really “heard the voice of the Lord” call me to go “preach”, but He did call me to be a missionary. One day I heard him call my name. He told me to go to the people of Brazil. What could the word “missionary” mean? The meaning of “missionary” has various meanings to various people. One dictionary says it is a group of envoys (representatives or messengers) to a foreign country.
Well for me, it has meant going into the cities, the villages, the jungles, and telling a pagan people about the life-changing story of Jesus Christ. It has meant being challenged by witch doctors and priests, being threatened by bandits, standing before cannibal Indians, working in a leper colony as well as speaking in public schools and universities of Brazil.
It meant going into places where male preachers had never been yet they speak evil of me for being willing to go. I had to wade across alligator-infested streams just to reach and baptize new converts. Being a missionary meant mixing mortar and laying bricks to build new churches. It meant performing weddings, burying the dead, and sometimes delivering babies.
It meant teaching new converts and preparing people for the ministry. It meant seeing a work be born and grow into maturity. It meant hours of radio programs. It meant long nights without sleep, traveling in the back lands, drinking contaminated water and eating all kinds of so called foods (some of which were indescribable). It meant sharing rooms with bats, rats, and all sorts of animals that crawled and flew at night.
It meant sitting in the conventions in the homeland and listening to men who made cutting remarks about women in the ministry. It meant being willing to go against the tide and obey a call that is stronger than meager earthly ties. It meant being different from the ordinary. It meant loving souls, no matter the circumstances. It meant taking in abandoned children or children whose mother was murdered, adopting them and loving them like my own. It meant traveling down the lonely road of not knowing where the next meal would come from, nor the money to pay for the food should it come our way.
Perhaps most prophets and prophetesses in the Bible had to travel down lonely roads themselves to obey God yet they could not understand why at that moment. I, too, am at a loss for words to describe the desolate anguish I had experienced at times. Equally difficult to explain is the call of God so strong in my heart. Maybe it’s all part of being a missionary. How can you describe a feeling to deep for words, a call to sacred to play with? This burden so heavy that it never disappears. Maybe we could compare it with Jack London’s call f the wild.
While the church leaders agree all must hear and obey to be saved, the clergy fuss about who tells the story. What difference does it make which gender pulls a burning person from the flame? Or what difference does it make that a man or woman, male or female, saves the drowning persons from a torrid river?