What is your testimony?
I grew up in a Christian family and attended church from a young age, but everything I learned was head knowledge and not heart knowledge. When I was nine years old, my great-grandfather passed away. This was my first experience with the reality of death and left me asking a lot of questions. My great-grandmother came to live with my family, and I spent a lot of time with her. She was very intentional about reading the Bible with me and praying for me. I saw something different in her about the way she was living her Christian life. She was genuine in her desire and joy to spend time with the Lord each day. Later that year, I realized that I needed to make a decision to follow Jesus for myself and have my own relationship with Him that wasn’t based on my family or on their beliefs. I prayed with my grandmother and accepted Christ.
How did you hear about Ethnos?
Before coming to Ethnos, I completed my degree in Child and Family Studies. During my third year, I had the flexibility to take a semester off. I had briefly heard about Ethnos and some of the support roles that they had for teachers around the world, so I began looking into this. Through a series of events that only the Lord could have orchestrated, I was able to serve in Papua New Guinea for seven months in a school for missionary kids. This experience changed my entire life and my eyes were opened to the need for more people to go and share the Gospel with unreached people groups. I had no idea that there were still so many people who did not have the Bible accessible to them in their own language. God stirred my heart to come to Ethnos instead of continuing with teacher’s college and to be involved in church planting ministry overseas.
What is something you have learned here so far?
Something I have learned so far is how the Bible is a meta-narrative, one story that is all interconnected. I used to see the stories in the Bible as being disconnected from each other, and I never really saw the big picture. I am learning how everything from Adam and Eve, to Noah and the Flood, to Moses and the Israelites is all part of God’s plan to one day bring salvation to the world through His Son. It is so important to start from the very beginning and to have a solid foundation when you are presenting the Gospel for the first time. Starting with Jesus is like starting to read a book from the middle–you have no idea what is going on!