from Mission Friends to the mission field

When my family joined First Baptist Nashville in the summer of 1994, one of the first leadership roles I assumed was that of a Mission Friends teacher. (Mission Friends is the WMU* missions education organization for preschoolers.) I have taught preschoolers, children, teenagers, and adults in various settings in churches through the years, but being a Mission Friends teacher for five years was one of my all-time favorite church experiences. I loved introducing the preschoolers to different cultures, telling them stories about how missionaries were sharing the love of Christ with people around the world, and helping them to see how they could likewise help others in Jesus' name.

While I was in Wales last week on a mission trip with thirteen students from the Class of 2009 at First Baptist Nashville, I thought back to my Mission Friends days, since that was when I first got to know some of these recent high school graduates. When they were kindergartners, Paul managed to secure a bunch of boxes with handles, so each week in Mission Friends the kids put the new artwork they had created into their respective "suitcases." Each child also had "passport" that year - a little booklet full of blank pages - and every week after we learned about the place where our featured missionaries lived, each child would glue a sticker that I had created to commemorate our "visit" into his/her personal passport.

With those memories in mind, it was moving to watch these same students rolling their bulging suitcases through airports and showing their passports to customs officials. As I observed these teenagers sitting attentively in the presence of missionaries, asking them astute questions about their sense of God's call and probing them for stories about the joys and challenges of serving on the mission field, I recalled the days when they were squirming preschoolers sitting in a semicircle in front of me, listening to missionary stories. I watched with pride as these recent high school graduates made connections with Welsh children in a chapel, in four primary schools and a secondary school, at a castle, and on a neighborhood playground. My Mission Friends had become missionaries themselves. Thanks be to God.

*Woman's Missionary Union