MOVING FORWARD WITH GOD’S DIRECTION
I knew God had called me to mission field but Dianna was not on the same page, to be honest, she was not even in the same book. We had been to a revival at a friend’s church when God reminded me of his call on my life but I basically said to God, “I’m willing but Dianna’s not.” I didn’t realize He was talking to her at the same time. in the kitchen that night I told her we needed to talk, she said, “yes, we need to get in touch with World Missions so inquired with the World Mission Department of the Church of the Nazarene. The initial application was online, so we completed it prayed together over it and sent it in. We waited patiently; to be honest we waited impatiently for a response. I was shocked that in just two weeks we had heard back by mail which included a huge formal application. You would have thought we were applying to be astronauts or something like that at the size of the application. We completed it as soon as possible and to our amazement within a couple of weeks we received an invitation to come to Kansas City for a weeklong interview. We looked at each other and realized this was about to get serious. When we arrived, we first met Mrs. Gibson, who was responsible for all the correspondence we were receiving and was the candidate secretary. She told me the reason she was trying to hurry everything up was because of my age. You see I was thirty-four and the cut off age for an appointment as a new career missionary was thirty-five. Things have changed now but this was 1984.
We met with a lot of different people from the World Mission Department throughout that week and at the end of the week were told basically, along with probably twenty-five other candidates, you don’t have to call us back if you will be moving forward in the process we will contact you. We had gotten to know the other candidates, and both laughed within ourselves that there was no chance with all the highly educated and sharp people that were there would we hear from them. So, we went back to our church in Dallas and just dug in. A couple of months went by and one day I went to the mailbox and there was an envelope from World Missions. I decided not to open it until Dianna got home so we could open it together. When we did it was an invitation for the second phase of the interview process to be held in February. We both broke down in tears realizing God was doing something way beyond us. You see all the other candidates were higher educated, connected with a long heritage in the church, some even were missionary kids and here we were both first generation Nazarenes. We just released it to God and trusted him to do the directing.
