If this is your first time reading this blog, please do go read my blog on how to know if you are called to the mission field (click here). As I said in that blog, our conviction that missions was the way for us, came long before the time we actually started the journey. And timing is very important, God’s timing is not our own, and He orchestrates things according to His sovereign plan.
Colin and I got married in 2015 and when we got married we knew that one day we would end up in ministry. However, it did not happen straight away. First I fell pregnant with Peter after we had been married for 7 months. Then, when he was a few months old, in October 2017, Colin’s dad was diagnosed with a brain tumour. He did well with chemo and radiation, but we knew he did not have many years left, and we did not want to go too far from him.
I fell pregnant with Tim in April 2018, and he was born 6 weeks premature that November. Less than 2 weeks after he was born, Shaun lost his battle with cancer and was called home. We knew that the timing was not right for us to go onto the mission field. Then, we decided the time was not right. We were settled in Pietermaritzburg; we bought a house, we loved our church, Peter was in a good school, we had fantastic friends. Surely, God would not call us now?
In March 2019, I went to Ethiopia to visit my sister. She is a missionary at a school there. I thought I was just going for a holiday and some sister quality time. However, being there started to stir the embers of my heart. The embers that had softly kept aglow for missions. Over the week the embers began to smoulder and glow stronger. I said to Colin that I thought we should start to pray about whether the time had come to pursue missions. His response was ‘I knew you were going to say that’.
At a time when we least expected it, the vision started to take shape. As we prayed and sought the counsel of others, the circumstances began to line up. And that is the funny thing about God’s timing – He is a God of order and logic and there is reason in what He does. So there are times when common sense can dictate what His timing is. However, He is the God of the universe and His time does not necessarily match ours. We need to constantly be asking, constantly be seeking, constantly be checking if the time has come for us to take a new path, a slightly different direction, or to leap out of the boat onto the path He has prepared for us.