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I confess. I choked up over a piece of farmland yesterday.

This is not supposed to happen to a veteran missionary, fluid and experienced in entering and departing places and their cultures.

It happened on that short level stretch of Matterstown Road, where it evens out between the pull up from E’ville and the descent down to Killinger. I had just dropped Mom off at the hair salon to meet Junior after visiting with Dad in his nursing home. I was tooling home in the pickup to the day’s re-start at my desk when my eyes suddenly teared up and that lump formed in my throat.

I have often reached this stretch of the road on the bike. It runs across a ridge at the center of this lush agricultural valley, its slight superiority in altitude offering a commanding view of the rural glory that stretches from Berry’s Mountain—just over there—all the away along to the Mahantonga, beyond Shippy. No matter which direction I’m riding, the bike coasts along when it hits this quarter-mile plateau as though on its own power after the exhaustion of lung and leg that the climb from either end of it claims as its toll. I feel a bit, well, royal, as I coast along on this high mini-plain. I sit up in the saddle and survey our Valley, wondering how places like this one come to be and how many people pause to take in this view. Perhaps it was yesterday’s golden corn stubble that made the scene get to me as it did, glowing promisingly in air swept clean and clear by a cold rain, fields all but groaning for Spring and promising it fresh life when it finally appears. I wasn’t thinking about it. I was just driving.

 

Then it choked me up.
You see, this will soon be a memory. In fact, the next Baerly There … you read may well be written in Medellín, Colombia, a place with its own glories and groaning, a place that will in time become just as hard to place behind us as this place, this Valley, this view.
Missionaries are like this, far more often than not. We do not go because we do not like who and where we are. We go into an alien place at the expense of detachment from a familiar one. We leave.

There have, without doubt, been some who go because they disdain who and where they have been, who and where they come from. These are the dangerous ones, missionaries to be avoided. They damage everyone as they flail about in search of a place to belong.

Karen and I could stay, could be happy with never seeing another airplane except as one passes over some country road with memories nailed to every fencepost, barely visible from far below at its anonymous 30,000 feet. Oh, how we could stay.

Yet we have this great privilege of being called at a ripe age to a new place where what our Redeemer has baked into our healed and healing lives will become accessible to people who don’t know West Matterstown Road, never will, and need not. He’ll be there ahead of us—has been for uncountable ages—and will have work for us to do.

We are almost there. We are almost in Medellín, almost among a bodacious family of colleagues and emerging Colombian leaders with grace in their smiles and blisters on their hands, almost there in neighborhoods that will become familiar, will in time become ours.

It pulls us. You may hear from us next as we steal an hour from the quick pace of leadership and service in Colombia itself in order to pommel you with lines like these from that South American nation we are learning to love.

Medellín pulls us.

But no driving wind is at our back. Nobody’s pushing.
Straight talk on the financial challenge

 

Missionaries like us embrace the task of raising the funds that allow us to do the work to which we and the churches who endorse us believe God has called us.
This fund-raising labor is tough work, but it’s not ugly and it’s not charity. It’s part of the calling and, frankly, has a helpful weeding-out function built into it. You don’t get there if you don’t get through this.
A support requirement is given to us by the United World Mission in order to provide for a modest and sustainable lifestyle after due consideration of our responsibilities, our life stage, and any special needs the missionary might have. We are required to raise 100% of that support level. In our case, the number is a daunting one because of where we are in life and the reality that our new responsibilities require us to maintain two home bases (one in Colombia, one in Connecticut).

We are almost there, but we are not yet there.

Here’s reality:

People and churches who believe in us have already committed a stupendous amount of resources to our work. We need to raise another $1302/month in ongoing financial commitments in order to get across the goal line of our support requirement.

Let me break it down like this. We need …

  • 5 financials supporters who will sign on at $75/month.
  • 3 who will say ‘I’m in’ at $100/month.
  • 2 who will derive great satisfaction from pledging $150/month.
  • 1 who warms to the quirky notion of plunking down $327 of hard-earned, God-given cash each and every month.

But that’s not all.

Then we have travel and set-up costs which the United World Mission estimates at $25,600. Candidly, we have not begun to raise this money yet because the ongoing support is by a country mile the highest priority. But we’re now within a month and a little of our move to Colombia, so we need to make this additional need known to you.
It’s wild, isn’t it? Huge, actually.
Only God can do this, He who owns the famous ‘cattle on a thousand hills’.
Will He deploy you as one of his not-so-secret agents?
If so, click the button just below.
I’m in!
I promise you, soon these digital updates will migrate from the preliminary work of getting there to reports and stories about some of the most amazing people on the planet in the thriving nation called Colombia!
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