My first missionary moment

I like to write e-mail. It's very cathartic for me to sit down and compose a good, long, funny, newsy e-mail to a friend. I think it's how extroverts journal. Introverts can sit down and write themselves a long letter in a cute little blank notebook and keep it all privately tucked away, but extroverts need to know somebody is going to read it if they really want to think and process and motivate themselves to write. So, in college I wrote my parents a lot of e-mails. I was in college in Michigan and they were in Washington, and since this was in the pre-cell phone days (I used a calling card on a landline to call home!), we only talked on the phone once a week. That meant that I wrote long e-mails six days a week, and my mom saved them. She printed off just about every single e-mail I wrote for four years. When I  moved back to the States in 2014, she gave me a giant folder of all of my college e-mails to her.

What do you do with a huge stack of printed e-mail? Being as I'm not a saver, I figured out a way to use them. Since they are only printed on one side, I have Zarya and Jerod use the reverse sides for coloring pages. I read the e-mails, and then hand them out for scribbling with crayons. It's kind of entertaining, kind of pitiful (did I really have to write so many details about what we did at swim practice??), and a good trip down memory lane, at the pace of reading two e-mails every few days. At this rate the kids will still be coloring on my college e-mails long after they are both old enough to read the letters themselves!

I found a particularly interesting one the other day. I wrote it while preparing to go on my first-ever missions trip. I was headed to the Philippines to visit a Bible translation project. It turned out to be a completely life-changing trip that altered the course of everything afterwards, although at the time I was rather unaware of what was to come. The evening I wrote this, March 31, 2001, I had been at the home of the local Wycliffe Bible Translators recruiters, Ed and Linda Speyers. They had been in Suriname for over twenty years, and had just returned to the States the year before I met them. They are fascinating, passionate people, and I was hooked from our first conversation on, it appears. Here's what I wrote as an 18-year-old:

"After [meeting with the Speyers] I had this retreat-like 'I want to be a Wycliffe missionary for the rest of my life' high. For about 15 entire minutes I was considering changing my major to linguistics (which would require transferring schools) and doing all that, then I became practical Michelle once again. But it occurred to me that my greatest fear (besides snakes) has always been that God would want me to be a missionary, and here I was having a little fantasy about doing just that."

I think this really was the first time ever in my life I even considered being a missionary, and about two months later, I found myself seriously considering it as a long-term career. Thanks to three more years of monthly dessert nights at the Speyers (never underestimate the power of homemade apple pie and ice cream to convince a college athlete to become a Bible translator) and another short-term trip, I joined Wycliffe. I'm so glad I did!