Today, as I am writing, it is January 19th, an unforgettable day for me. Seventy years ago, January 19, 1953, I became a follower of Jesus Christ. I was a week away from my 11th birthday and it became the day of my new birth, a day that made an eternal difference.
Twenty-nine years later on January 19, 1982, my youngest sister, Susanne, took her own life at the age of 31 by a gunshot to her head. For most of that year I felt like I was hearing people from underwater drowning in an internal sea of tears.
I begin my memoir with that year not because of what happened in January but because of a meeting in December where I met the man who was to introduce me to Joe Ann Shelton five years later. I will pick up here with the third paragraph of chapter one.
I was teaching at Houston Baptist University in Houston, Texas. What I do remember is an incident in December of 1982 that led to my meeting someone very significant to my story who was part of God’s plan that resulted in the two of us, Joe Ann and me, being in Slovakia in 1997.
Prior to meeting him, one of my students told me that since she was twelve years old she felt called to be a missionary. I asked her what she had done to clarify her sense of calling. She looked at me with a puzzled expression and asked, “What do you mean?”
Following the conversation that ensued, I thought about her and other students who needed to have some way to determine over the years whether they were truly called and suitable for a career in missions. As my thoughts evolved, I put together a proposal for a summer missonary internship program designed to help university students explore their call to missions. It would require them to work under the supervision of a Southern Baptist ethnic pastor in one of the 19 different language churches in Houston for the summer, live with an ethnic family, and study the language with a native speaker. These requirements would be part of four courses established for the internship program for which they would gain twelve hours of credit.
To get approval from the university to conduct the program and obtain supporters like the Women’s Missionary Union in Texas and in the Houston area, as well as others, I put the proposal together in a slideshow outlining the components and began meeting with potential supporters. The last person I met with that December was Dr. Bill O’Brien, the Executive Vice President of the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (now the International Mission Board). He was speaking at a youth conference in Dallas and I went there specifically to meet him and share the program idea with him.
All went well and people were able to catch the vision and back it. The program was launched in the summer of 1983 with 14 students who worked in Chinese, Korean, Laotian, and Spanish congregations. It successrfully clarified for some students that a career in missions was their calling and for others that it was not. A flim was made to document the program and Bill O’Brien came to speak at the graduation ceremony in August.
In the spring of 1984, I interacted with Bill one more time when I took the film to be shown to a group at the Foreign Mission Board headquarters in Richmond, Virginia.
I did not see him again until December at a mission banquet in Houston right after I had resigned from Houston Baptist University. A week later I had a call from the Foreign Mission Board asking me to interview for a position. After three interviews, I accepted a position in the Medical Services Department as the coordinator of short-term medical volunteers and began my new job on March 1st of 1985.
I tell that story not only because of meeting Bill O’Brien who would later introduce me to Joe Ann but also because when we went to Slovakia we created an internship program for students who graduated from Calvary Schools in Holland where I had been the principal. Our first two interns came in the summer of 1998. One of them, Jeannette Wolters, married Ben Gerth and went to Tanzania as a missionary. The other, Vanessa Lake, came back to spend 15 months with us after graduating from Moody Bible Institute before going on to the International Baptist Theological Seminary in Prague.