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The call of God....
The call of God is often hard to explain and hardly ever understood by others. Why would He call me to be a missionary? Why would He visit me when I was just 8 years old in the middle of the night and change my life forever? I had no Pentecostal pedigree. At that time my father was an alcoholic just my simple but Godly mother took us to church. I knew nothing about missions at such a young tender age. Yet He called, I saw him; He held my hand and talked to me. He told me He called me to be a missionary and when I graduated from school to go to Brazil and work for Him. 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 some may condemn 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 did not mean 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 is so heavy that it never disappears. Maybe we could compare it with Jack London’s call of 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? Did the horrified soldiers care who answered the call that icy March afternoon in 1869 when Ida Lewis responded with haste to rescue the crying voices from the choppy waves at Lime Rock Lighthouse in Newport. One of the drowning men lost hope when he saw that it was a woman who came rowing out to save them. However, he was soon to change his mind after the job was successfully accomplished. She had fierce strength that wasn’t hers alone. Later, a newspaper recorded that she said that the Lord Almighty gave it to her when she needed it the most. (Women of the Lights, Candice Fleming, Albert Whitman & Co., Morton Grove, IL, 1996, 21.) Women can save lives just as men can.
So for the past 45 years I have been involved in winning souls.
Early this morning a preacher called and said, I was just thinking about you missionary and wanted to call you and thank you for bringing Jesus to us so many years ago. I was just looking over an old Bible study you gave me over 20 years ago and recopied it yesterday to give to someone….over and over have I recopied it to help others along the path….Thank you missionary for loving us.
Today really I am just an old woman….my steps are slow, my health is declining but I have never lost the wonder that He called me to be a missionary. If I had another life to give I would be a missionary!
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Facebook Janice LaVaun Taylor Alvear
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