We weren’t looking for this. People hear a story like ours and assume somebody went looking. Nobody went looking.
In December of 2016 an email came in, and it wasn’t even about me.
I was a chemistry professor. I had been teaching at a small Christian university in Indiana since 2000, and for the last few of those I’d been Dean of the School of Science and Engineering. At that time, with my job, I would get a lot of emails, most of them asking for a decision or advice. Some of them asked about my network. A struggling student needs a tutor, do I know somebody? An employer wants to know if I can think of an alumnus who’s looking. This was one of those, forwarded to me by a chemistry colleague, Scott. Scott asked, “Know of anyone?”
Scott had been roommates in college with a man named Mark who taught at Rift Valley Academy in Kijabe, Kenya. He’s the principal there now. RVA is a K-12 boarding school that teaches the children of African missionaries, and they needed somebody to teach high school chemistry for their third term, three months.
Scott wasn’t asking me for anything in particular. Scott was thinking of our graduates. Young chemistry alumni, a year or two out, no mortgage, no children, the sort of person who can vanish to East Africa for three months without dismantling a household. He wanted names, to see if I remembered anybody he may have overlooked.
I wasn’t being asked to go. Nobody in that email thread had me in mind for one second.
I read it once, and a sentence arrived in my head, fully formed. I can still hear it.
I know how to teach chemistry. I think we’re supposed to do that.
Not “we could look into that.” Not “I wonder.” I sat at my desk and knew, in the way you know things you can’t defend, that we were supposed to go.
I think it was the Holy Spirit.
God doesn’t usually talk to me. He nudges me.
What happened at my desk that day was still a nudge. It was a strong one, but I began to push it to the side. This is crazy. We can’t go to Kenya. But the nudge was still strong enough that when I got home that evening, I pulled out my phone in our dining room and read that email to my wife, Amy. I fully expected her to put an end to this impulse of mine. She would agree that it would be crazy for us to try to go to Kenya for three months. And, I knew the idea of doing mission work in Africa was not on her short list of how she would want to spend a summer.
When Amy and I were dating and starting to talk about getting married, she told me she was in for anything. If I wanted to teach, she was in. If I wanted to pastor a church, she was in. Whatever it turned out to be, she would go.
Just not African missionaries.
She had settled that a long time before she met me. As a girl she had told God she would follow Him anywhere He wanted her to go. Anywhere at all. Just not Africa.
She has never known why. Maybe it was just the farthest away a kid in Michigan could imagine. Maybe it was the lions.
At the time it was a throwaway line. It barely registered with me. I was a chemistry student with no intention of being a missionary anywhere, least of all Africa, and I’m not sure I thought about it again for twenty years.
And then, as I read that email, those early conversations with Amy came straight back to me, and I wondered why I was even reading it to her. Almost reluctantly, I was about to see if my wife thought we should go to Africa.
I didn’t get to finish reading the entire text on my screen when she interrupted me and said:
I think we’re supposed to do that. Those were the exact words that popped into my head earlier: I think we’re supposed to do that.
She told me afterward what happened to her while I was talking. Her heart skipped. It hit her all at once and she was scared to death of it.
And she said yes anyway, immediately, without sleeping on it.
Even in her fear, she reached for the same sentence I had reached for at my desk, about a continent she had spent her whole life telling God she didn’t want to go to.
That’s usually how it comes for us. One of us gets something we can’t shake, and then the other one has it too, and at that point we stop arguing and start packing.
