The Backstory

My adult life, short as it has been, can best be told in terms of two separate pursuits that I’ve been interested in. One has been a constant and growing desire, which I believe to be given by God, to be on the international mission field. The other has been a fascination and an attraction for things mathematical or logic-driven. This manifested itself in a love for the more mathematical of sciences, as well as areas such as computer programming. Any decision of consequence that I’ve made can linked to one of these two.

The first interest started when my family moved to Africa when I was in fifth grade. Missionaries with BSF-TWO, we lived in Accra, Ghana for nearly four years. It was quite an experience, one that I’m sure will affect me for the rest of my days. We moved back to the US when I was going into ninth grade, and the next year my parents got a job working in the home office of SIM, in Charlotte, NC. As I matured spiritually through high school, I began to feel God turning my heart towards missions. This resulted in a trip to Ukraine after my junior year, and a commitment to pursue missions that I made to my church in my senior year. There was no single moment of epiphany, no sudden revelation. I just slowly realized that missions was what God wanted me to do.

As for the second interest, who knows when that started. Somewhere during my schooling I supposed I realized that not only did I like mathematics, science, computer programming and the like, I was actually rather good at it. To the degree that I could control my classes in high school I leaned in that direction and enjoyed all the advanced courses.

Come my senior year it was decision time: What to study in college? At this point I had already made a commitment to missions, so one might say that the logical decision would have been to study Bible, or international relations, or anything like that. Instead I chose something just a little different, Physics. I can’t provide a clear picture of my reasoning, if there was any, but I liked physics and I was good at it. Certainly I had been praying over it, and I felt that it was the right decision, though physics is not really very high on the list of majors for aspiring missionaries.

I went off to Clemson University to study physics, and had a very interesting four years. For those of us who grew up in church and in Christian families, the first few years away from home are often a proving ground for the faith, and they certainly were in my case. But those years were also characterized by uncertainty on my part as to what I thought God’s plan for me was. When I showed up I would happily tell people that I was interested in missions but studying physics, and always looked for their bewildered reactions. But for whatever reason, I started to lose some of that certainty and began to wonder if a career in science was really what I should be doing. Yet I spent most of my summers going on mission trips, and always felt my call to missions revived after them. The one summer where I didn’t go on a mission trip I applied to 7 summer physics internship programs and got rejected from them all. Ouch.

So I found myself in my senior year of undergraduate trying to decide what to study in graduate school. Going to grad school seemed to me to be a given as there’s not a whole lot that can be done with just a bachelor’s degree in physics. So going through the same sort of process that I had four years earlier, I decided to continue my education in biostatistics. I didn’t have much more of a reason to study statistics than I did physics, except that at least I knew statistics was directly applicable.

I spent the summer before I started grad school leading a trip to Honduras with Teen Missions. That trip was the beginning of the end for the uncertainty that I had been plagued by for the past 4 years. One of the activities that the teenagers undertake over the summer is reading missionary biographies. Since I had nothing better to do during this time, I picked a book to read at random from the stack. I have since come to doubt its inherent randomness. It was a biography of Henry Martyn, an Anglican missionary to Indian. He was educated young man, top of his class in mathematics at Cambridge. But after hearing of the missionary effort begun in India by William Carey and others, he subsequently resolved to become a missionary himself. Leaving everything else behind, he eventually made his was to India, where he was the first to translate the New Testament into Urdu and Persian before he died at age 31. His willingness to abandon everything, including his education, to follow what he believed to be his call inspires me yet today.

The following fall I started my graduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and over Christmas break went with my family to visit my brother and sister-in-law who were serving in Bolivia. For whatever reason, that trip was the final push I needed. Afterwards I committed that I would follow the missionary path wherever God led me. I didn’t care anymore if it had anything to do with what I had been, or was, studying. If I had to pick between the two, it was going to be missions.

But that being decided, I was decidedly clueless as to where that path was going. Going into my second year of grad school I needed to decide on a thesis topic. I didn’t have much of an idea of what to do, but since I had liked the survey class I decided that that was as good as anything. But as I was continuing my work on my Masters degree I started looking into mission possibilities. As biostatistics is a public health disciple at Chapel Hill, I thought I might apply to an international Christian relief organization. Consequently I put in for an internship with Samaritan’s Purse and was promptly turned down. I then applied to the Journeyman program though the International Mission Board, though I never really felt at peace about it. The IMB asked me to defer consideration until after the summer, so I start planning on leading a summer team to Uganda with Teen Missions after I graduated.

It was in this mindset that I had a chance conversation that changed everything. It was Easter Sunday, and I was with my family eating dinner with another missionary family. I was talking with the father of the host family, trying to explain how I was interested in missions, but studying statistics. When I mentioned that my thesis was in survey methodology he suggested I look into SIL and Wycliffe, as they did surveys related to linguistics. This sounded pretty good to me, so I went home, did some research online and sent an email to a recruiter asking for some more information.

Over the next week or so I became more and more convinced that this was something that God wanted me to pursue. I had the peace about it that I hadn’t felt with my application to the IMB. Moreover, there was a little seed of excitement that was starting to grow in me. Although I had resolved to give up anything, namely my academic interests, to follow where God wanted me, I began to wonder if God had really planned for me to use my schooling all along. What if all the seemingly mindless choices I had made, deciding what to study, what biography to read, what to do my thesis on, what if they had actually been carefully scripted? What if there had been an underlying plan all along? What if these two interests I had were always intended to be reconciled? It all seemed almost too much to hope for.

But as I continued to explore the possibility of working in sociolinguistic surveying I learned I would need some linguistic training. What seemed to me to be by far the most efficient and easiest place to get this was at an SIL summer program in British Columbia. But as I was already committed to leading with Teen Missions for the summer I decided that I would stay with them unless they called me up and said that there was a problem with me leading. To me, this was a decision to go to Uganda because Teen Missions tends to be short of male leaders, so I couldn’t imagine they would call me with an issue. I had decided all this on a Thursday night. Friday at lunch my phone rang. It was Teen Missions. There was a problem.

After picking my wits up off the floor, I asked for the weekend to pray about it. But I already knew what my answer was going to be. I hadn’t really asked for a fleece, but God sent one soaking wet to me anyway. The next day I applied to the Canada Institute of Linguistics Summer Program and was accepted, and that’s where I’m headed to take the sociolinguistic surveying track.

So that’s my story. I’ve now graduated and am getting ready to head up north. For years I’ve felt that the desires I had in my heart were diametrically opposed, irreconcilable. I’m looking forward to God proving me wrong.