His leading

 

How God took a couple of single seekers and showed them His call.

 

Chris: I grew up in a loving catholic family. Church had always been important. Up through the years, I don’t remember missing mass many Sundays. I believed in God from a really early age. I went to catechism and did my sacraments, up through being confirmed catholic.


By the time confirmation came around, though, I’d started questioning all the things I was supposed to be confirming. I started wondering why everybody prayed to saints instead of straight to God, I figured He couldn’t be too busy to hear me, He’s GOD! I also wondered why I was supposed to have a priest forgive me; that seemed like God’s job too. Those and other questions in mind, I got up the courage to tell my mom about my questioning. It was actually a short conversation. She told me that she’d had questions too, but that she’d come back to Catholicism as the only right way to believe and that I’d have time during college to search out what I believed and would probably in the end find what she had found. So I went through with confirmation.


It’s beautiful to see God’s working looking back. During confirmation class there was a missionary nun that had come and told our confirmation class about her work among natives in the Andes of South America. Something in me desired that. God was planting a seed.


Amy: I also up in a Christian home with a loving family (also Catholic). We went to church every week and said grace together before supper and I can remember my mom teaching me to pray when I was little. Though there was very little talk of God outside of church, my parents taught e to value Godly principles. Looking back, I can see how blessed I was to grow up with a loving family that is still in tact today.


Yet there was something missing. All through my school years, as early as first grade up through high school graduation, people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I never had the slightest clue. They would tell me, “Oh, don’t worry about it; you’ve got plenty of time to figure it out;” but something in me longed for direction and purpose.


Chris: Well, time went on, I was in high school and was actually a pretty good student. I was “friends” with just about everybody and nobody all at once. I was in high math classes and shop classes at the same time and got along with everybody, but didn’t have any close friends, just a lot of acquaintances.


Between work and college, I was able to find people that I felt more comfortable around and began to drink occasionally. As things usually do, they progressed and I began to party just about every weekend. Then I was introduced to marijuana. I had begun to smoke cigarettes while drinking and this wasn’t a far step, so I tried it and liked it. That too started occasionally, but progressed to a point that for a short while I was getting stoned every night after school and would drink on the weekends. My parents didn’t really know most of what was going on, they’d caught me drunk a couple times, but that was the extent of it.


Amy: It didn’t take long to make new friends at the community college I attended after high school. I had always been a good student up to this point, always completing my homework and doing my best, but now I couldn’t resist spending some of that study time going to all the social gatherings that were happening. At first it was movies and restaurants. Then I started getting invited to parties. I wasn’t really interested in drinking, but I craved social interaction and acceptance. Eventually I started going to bars to be with my friends. Though at this point I wasn’t drinking at these gatherings, my grades began to suffer. My priorities had changed. I started skipping class to play cards and hang out with my friends, and eventually I did start drinking after a great deal of peer pressure. As all of this happened, I subconsciously lost interest in God and church until I stopped going to church altogether.


Chris: After a few years of this sort of lifestyle, I met a girl on a music trip with the college band I was in. No, it wasn’t my wife Amy, though I had met Amy earlier at the same college. This girl turned out to be a Seventh Day Adventist.


We hung out together a lot and spent a bit of time with friends too. Amy is one of the friends that we hung out with a bit. After Amy and I spent quite a few Friday nights resisting her parents’ invitations, we started attending the bible studies her family held. I started going to be with her, I kept going, well, to be with her, but also because I was truly interested in all of the amazing things that we were learning in the Bible. I moved to a different college after getting my 2-year degree and continued to drive from UW Stout back to Dodge Center, MN weekends to go to those studies and see her.


Our relationship was on again off again for a long time, but mostly on, so with my newfound interest in the bible, I began attending church with her, her family, and Amy, and Amy and I would go even when she wasn’t around. Amy and I even earned a reputation of being each others’ sidekick, though we were strictly friends.


Amy: I never questioned what I had learned about God growing up until a spring break trip to Florida one year. One evening my friend Jason invited me to sit down with him on the sidewalk in front of his hotel room and he started asking me what I believed about God and why. I found that I didn’t have answers to a lot of his questions, and I didn’t even know some of the doctrines and beliefs of the church I had grown up in! Up until then I had evaluated my Christian experience based on the idea that I had not committed any “serious” sins. I didn’t really think it through, but subconsciously I was confident that I wasn’t going to wind up in hell, I would at least make it to purgatory. But this conversation made me question whether what I had believed all my life was really true or not. I never knew before that what I had been taught in church did not agree with the Bible or that it is possible to have a personal relationship with the God we serve.


It was also about this time that I started spending time with Chris and several other people, that seemed to have more of the priorities and values that I used to have. We began hanging out together outside of school (mostly rollerblading), and it was also about this time that Chris and I started attending Bible studies at the Mosier’s home. I had never been shown so clearly how the Bible fits together like a huge puzzle, each piece giving meaning to the next. It all made such perfect sense, and I was so hooked that I rarely missed a Bible study at the Mosier home even after I moved an hour further away to attend a technical school.


Chris: I was also slowly being convicted about my bad habits and quit smoking marijuana figuring that it was illegal anyway. After a while I began to see that I had been hiding in drinking and getting high and that if this was the life God had given me I needed to start living it and not hiding from it. So I quit drinking too. Cigarettes were a different story. I tried to quit on my own, but could only get down to one or two a day. I tried “giving it to God” and wasn’t successful in that either until one day in November of’98. I don’t know what changed, but I’d been praying a long time about quitting and God just up and answered. AMEN! He works in mysterious ways.


Amy: That December the Mosier’s invited Chris and me to go with them to Go ‘99, a mission conference at Andrews University in Michigan. That seemed like a neat way to spend Christmas break so we went. I really had no idea what to expect. Growing up I could remember a priest who worked as a missionary in another country coming to our church a couple of times, but I didn’t remember what he said he did.


The conference was more than I had anticipated. There were group meetings a few times a day that everyone attended where, among other things, we heard testimonies from experienced missionaries. That may have been what impacted me the most – hearing about the sacrifices people make to share God’s word with those who have never heard and how God works through them to save souls from sin and death. During the day there were many different sessions to choose from, covering topics like: how to share the gospel in a different culture, family life in the mission field, spiritual warfare, maintaining spiritual health, etc., with many of the speakers sharing from personal experience in the mission field. It was exciting to be surrounded by so many people who all had the same desire to share the Good News. I remember thinking that I might do that one day too.


Chris: By this time I’d already been in college 5 ½ years. I’d switched majors 4 times and was at least 2 years from any four year degree. I was ready for a change. I went to Go ‘99 wondering if there might be anything mission related in aviation, I’d never heard of mission aviation up until that point! It had been a dream of mine to become a pilot, but in high school I was told that aviation was a really competitive industry and that I’d be better suited for something else. Well, at Go ‘99 I learned about an organization called Adventist World Aviation (AWA). I prayed about it and was certain that God was leading me into mission service.


He’d also been at work back at UW Stout. The land lord of the house I was living in had found out that there were 3 people living there when only two of us were on the lease. He made sure that we understood the house was zoned for only two non related people and somebody had to leave. I signed over my lease to the girl that was living there and I was out.


I dropped all of my classes and moved to my mom’s in Janesville, WI to work at the nearby airport. All I did was working toward mission aviation. I was learning to flying and fueling planes at the Rock Co. airport in Janesville, WI and met a dear friend in the man that was the pastor of the Seventh Day Adventist churches in the Janesville area. I also got accepted to the Aviation Maintenance program in Winona, MN during this time.


A year went by and after more study and love from the Mosier family and many other dear saints in the church family there, Amy and I were baptized, November 6, 1999 in the Zumbro River at Oxbow Park. I think the water was in the mid to high thirties. You don’t feel much more alive than you do coming out of that.


Amy: In May of 2000, the Mosier family accepted a call to the mission field and moved to Tanzania, Africa. This put a stop to our Bible studies, but it was inspiring to watch them live what they believed. I was able to visit them in Africa in 2001 and I found out firsthand what culture shock is. It was an eye-opener to see the poverty and hopelessness that many people face. They don’t have much for options or opportunities, and they sometimes make harmful compromises in order to provide for their families. It was also interesting to note the sacrifices people are willing to make to learn about God and His Word. Some would walk several hours each way to come to evangelistic meetings day after day. What a contrast to the priorities I had known all my life.


Another thing I learned while I was there is that life as a missionary is surprisingly uneventful most of the time. They still do all the things “normal” people do: cook meals, wash clothes, buy stuff, etc., but since they are working for God, they look for every opportunity to love their neighbors and share the Good News, and they go out of their way to do so. It finally dawned on me that the “Great Commission” isn’t necessarily about traveling to some far off country to work for God; it’s about being a living testimony of God’s love wherever you are.

 

continued on "Us"...

 

 

His Leading • Us • To Peru