For the past few weeks I have been going through the process of getting my mind around the idea that God has called my family to India. I have the usual thoughts that I am sure others before me have had…”I don’t think I can do this… What about our kids? … We have just adopted a now 20 month old… What about our families? … and a biggie for me… food… How am I going to feed my family? I am sure you noticed all of the questions are focusing on ME!!!

As a mother, feeding my family is a very important issue to me, and I felt I needed an answer before I could be at peace. I must confess I have even gone as far as looking up online “peanut butter in India.” Can peanut butter be found locally in Indian villages and cities? After an untold amount of time researching…I found the answer: yes. I am sure this is very funny to those of you already on the field, but for me it was an important part of my pre-missions-field-planning process. Then…just as soon as the thought came…it went. Who cares about peanut butter?

As I write, I sit at my computer crying for the people of India. I weep for the lost and those hurting. I weep because so many will not hear about Jesus before they die. My heart is heavy because I want to go now. I want to embark on the journey in which God has beckoned my family of six to travel. God has called my family for His glory. I have a love for the people which only God can place in within a heart. I can not get away from the images that are running through my mind. I think about India constantly. I am praying for others already there and those preparing to go. I am praying for the lost and hurting, the hungry and dying, the forgotten and lonely. I love India and feel as if this distant land is already becoming my home. Yet, I have not left. Only a supernatural God could place these emotions and dreams and passions in my heart.

I am thankful that my heart is heavy for the things which concern God’s heart. I could be worried over the things for which I have no control. What I eat and drink will be fine? In God’s Word I find my comfort for He says:

25 Therefore, I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?
Matthew 6:25

I am sure that over the next year and a half–or however long it takes to begin the next chapter in our life-stories–I will have other “me” thoughts. Today, however, I weep because my heart is so full of love for India. I want to be there. I want to go now. It seems like this process that has just begun is going to take forever. Will we ever get the paperwork filled out? Will the funds take forever to raise? Will we ever get have every box checked? I know that everything has a purpose. I know that during this “waiting” time God is preparing me for the next journey in my life. I am thankful that today peanut butter is not important–food is not important–shelter is not important. Today…only Jesus is important and the purposes He has called us to accomplish.

Today especially…the people of India are important.

Peanut butter…not important. Jesus… important.

Jesus is the hope for the nations.

We arrived home from our time in the states–Christmas and the World Missions Summit–on Wednesday evening.  Within 2 hours we received a phone call that there was a fight at the Home of Hope (an aftercare  ministry to victims of forced prostitution).  Andy left to try to deal with the situation.  One woman punched the other woman in the nose in the midst of the fight.

I’ve spent the last 2 days dealing with this.  As a staff we’ve asked “what do we do now?”  How do we keep the other women and staff in the home safe from a woman who is violent?  It seems I should find easy answers, but there are none.

Both women come from a life of abuse.  One takes the abuse she suffered growing up in the state orphanage system & as a victim of trafficking and turns it on others. The other gets emotionally lost when she is abused and turns to cutting.  How can she trust?  Why is the home not safe?  What can she do?

We live with hope and expectation that God will work in both lives, but can we run the risk of another black eye or something worse? I don’t know that we can.  It is too much to ask of anyone.  It is too much to ask of the staff that live with these women. And yet, if the one woman goes, her children, who we’ve grown to love deeply, leave also.

As I’ve faced this situation I’ve thought about the hope we have that God will work in their lives and change them.  I pray for miraculous deliverance.  I think about the woman we lost a few weeks ago and now losing   another and we’ll be down to just one.  Have we already failed?

The one who hit was gone from the home most of the day.  She doesn’t want to comply with anything.  She won’t promise she won’t be physically violent again.   She’s looking for a new place to live.

But we sat with the other woman and for the first time she’s begun to open up about the abuse she has suffered.  Her 3 year old daughter doesn’t have any teeth–they were knocked out by someone so she has already lived in abuse.  Then she began to talk about her sister, brother and a nephew (all teenagers) are living in a basement of an apartment building in the city along with a pack of dogs.  This is not a beautiful basement, it is a place no one lives except dogs and rats. There is no heat.  It is wet.  She wanted to know how we could help them.  We called another ministry that ministers to kids who are abused and on the streets, and they will have a place for these teens by Monday.

We look at the abuse in the lives of these women.  The sad state of their lives.  They’ve never known family.  And it is enough to make me cry.  I want to break down in tears for the lives that are so broken. They have children that they don’t know how to raise and without God’s grace in their lives, these children will grow into the same people as their mothers.

God reminded me today that even if we end up with just one woman and her child in the next week, we have not failed because WE STARTED.  We built the home.  We brought them in.  We have started to touch these lives.  We started to bring hope and healing in the lives of the broken.  We exist because God has called us to reach out to the broken hearted. There are still other women who need God’s help.   We are connected to other good ministries that can take and help children or teens.  God reminded me that I can still have hope for a new life for these women and children that are in the home.

The ministry is the Lord’s.   He knows each woman and child by name.  I think of the verse that says that he cares when a sparrow falls to the ground and he cares so much more for us.  His care, sorrow and pain are given freely to all of these women and their children.  The abused and the abuser.  The one who has found a home, the one who is looking for home or the one living in an apartment basement.   I can know that God is working.  We are his hands extended and if we continue to love and care for the women we have succeeded.

Ministry is never easy.  It would be so much easier if all would just wrap up quickly.  If people would see their need for the Savior.  If all would be instantly healed.  If lives would change dramatically.  If every person we told about Christ came to Him immediately.  But ministry and missions is not that way.  It is not an easy place, it is not about quick results, but it is the place that God has called me.  And that is a great place to be.  It is the only place to be.

I chose this life because he called and I chose to answer.

Nancy Raatz serving Him in Moldova Eurasia Northwest

When I was just a little girl I remember hearing stories about India in Sunday School. Then again at summer camps, missionaries would tell their stories. It was then that God began to speak in a still, small voice and tell me that one day I would go to India. I didn’t even know where India was. I just knew that I was suppose to be willing to go. Then in college I met a wonderful man and fell in love, and no longer did I want to go to India. Instead my husband and I enjoyed many years of ministry here in the US and enjoyed our two precious children.

Then God rocked our world on a trip to Southern Asia. After seeing the incredible needs of the people there, the beggar children, people sleeping on the street, and multitudes of spiritually lost people, our lives were never the same. That same voice that I had heard as a child returned. Not just to me but even more to my husband. Now he was ready to go, but I on the other hand couldn’t help but think of my two small children. Could they survive? Did I really want them to have to give up everything, especially their grandparents, aunts and uncles? It was easier to say “Yes” to God when I did not have a lot to sacrifice. But that still small voice saying “Go” got louder and louder with each passing day. God would awake my husband in the night and say, “It’s time!”

So, we decided to go on a short trip to India to speak at a conference. When I stepped off the plane, God whispered to me “Welcome Home.” A few days later, I asked my husband how he felt being in India, without knowing what God had whispered to me, he said, “Perfectly at home.” We then started the greatest faith journey of our lives. We told our 12-year old son and 9-year old daughter we felt God wanted our family to go live half way around the world to India. We sold our home, left a great job, and said goodbye to our comfortable life.

One year later our plane landed again in India. Even as the plane was landing I prayed, “Oh God, I hope we have done the right thing. Then He spoke again, but this time it wasn’t His still small voice, but my daughter’s. She looked out the window of the plane at a land she had never seen and said, “Look mom! We’re home!”

Our family now realizes that it doesn’t matter how much we sacrifice, the greatest joy in life is being in God’s will. Even if it is on the other side of the world, when we are where He wants us we are perfectly at home!

We left for Moldova, a country in Europe, but still very two-thirds world, with a not quite 2 year old, a not quite 4 year old and a good solid 7 year old–all daughters.   Medical systems in Moldova are not of the standards we know in the West and I wondered what would happen if something went wrong.  I didn’t trust the medical system.  I had to trust God.

We were in Moldova maybe 6 months when Lauren, then 2 years old, climbed up on her sister’s bunk bed.  I knew what she’d done when she came tumbling down, landing on the hard cement floors on her arms,  and she began to scream.  I scooped her in my arms as I watched her arms turn red.  Andy wasn’t home and wouldn’t be that night.  I didn’t know what to do except pray.   I called a good friend to pray also.  For about 10 minutes I held Lauren my arms as she screamed in pain and I cried out to God.  Suddenly Lauren stopped crying, jumped off my lap and said, “I’m fine.”  That was it.

God showed me that night how he is with me always, even to the ends of the earth.  He is with us each step of the way.  It is not easy to go into missions with children and trust that they will be fine.  But God continues to teach me what it is to trust him.  He cares for my children more than I do.

There are many stories of learning to trust God to care for me, care for my children, care for our ministry and each one is a baby step toward really learning the true hand and true nature of God.

A man that I have known for about a year came up to me recently and asked me a question. This is a man who has grown up as a Muslim. He is also someone to whom I gave a Bible about six months ago. He recently asked me, “If I wanted to become a follower of Jesus like you, would I have to tell anyone, or could I keep it hidden?

I answered, “You wouldn’t have to tell anyone, but you won’t keep it hidden. A light on a hill cannot be kept hidden. Everyone will eventually know.” He left.

The next day he came to me again, “Now that I have decided to leave Islam and become a follower of Jesus, will you help me learn how to do everything? I need to know as much as possible so that when I tell my wife and my kids and my father, I can answer their questions and help them understand.” I said, “Yes.”

A week later he asked me if the international church in town, the one that I attend, had meetings in Arabic. I said that the government wouldn’t let us, so no. We had been talking about how churches work in various parts of the world, so he asked me if I would then be willing to help start a new church with him, in his house, just as soon as his family came into the family. I said, “Yes.”

In the past month he has memorized more than 15 scriptures. We have spent two and three hours at a time meeting together and discussing what the Bible teaches about prayer, fasting, giving, love and a large number of other things. I gave him a Bible that I smuggled into the country. After reading it, he told me, “If everyone in my country had a copy of this book, this would be a different place–Jesus is so amazing, everyone would want to follow him.”

I am definitely not a tourist.