Whispers

The sun’s brilliant colors engulfed the mountainous sky as dusk set in on her drive home from another long day at school. The unexpected but welcomed beauty outside quieted her thoughts as they turned towards praise to the creator of both her heart and the sunset, “Lord, thank you for the sunset, thank you for its display of your majesty, I can’t imagine a more beautiful sky.” She drove silently with only the sound of her prayers interrupted by a whisper in her heart, “Africa has beautiful sunsets…” Her eyebrows furrowed as if squinting to hear it again and turned her gaze towards the hills and sunset with searching eyes. “Africa,” her heart leaped up into her throat and she shook her head as if to make the words would fall right out of ears onto the floor. But the sound was not heard by her ears, but rather felt by her soul, her heart. For the second time it came, “Africa.” Finally she spoke aloud, “Africa? God? What about it? I can’t go there, I don’t want to go there,” and again she retreated to her thoughts “I must be going crazy, I just made that up, it was a long day. Me a missionary?” she laughed to herself. “ That’s ridiculous, I could never…” “Africa,” Her chest began to pound again “A-F-R-I-C-A” it was being carved into her heart.

Frantically she turned up her radio attempting to drown out the call she knew she had heard. She drove faster, desperate to get home and shut herself up in her room. She raced into the house, shut the door behind her and sought distraction in phone calls no one would answers, tv shows she couldn’t focus on, and radio stations that sang nothing but static. An hour passed and still her heart had not stopped beating to the drums of the far off continent.

She tore through a journal, her pen furiously staining line after line with tormenting denial, “no no no, not me, you’ve got it wrong, I heard you wrong…” she wrote again and again till her hand refused to write and pushed her to her knees. There by her bedside she knelt, on an ordinary evening, beige carpet underfoot, God’s voice overhead.

There fear began its negotiations as tears welled up behind closed eyes, “Ok Lord, if you want me to go on a trip I’ll go.”
Silence.

“I’ll go wherever you want as long as its short term, I can do short term right?”

Silence.

For what seemed like hours she argued with the unrelenting silence. Her hands began to tremble as the words rushed through her veins, “that’s not what I asked of you.”
“Oh but God, can’t you tell me when, at least tell me where, how long, why must I go, send someone who wants it, my heart is here in America, I’ll serve full time here” she cried out once more.

“Would you die for me?”
She knew her answer, “yes.”
“Then live for me.”

Silence.

Then it came, each salty drop of water spelling out her surrender, “Wherever you want me, whenever you want me, however long…I will go.”
Peace and a holy fear flooded the soul behind her awestruck eyes, while her small hands remained clasped as joyful praise found her on her knees.
Again she whispered “I will go.”


This conversation between my heart and God’s took place in october of 2005. My memory is obvioulsy prone to imperfection but the echoes of what God showed me that night still remain clear and so this story is just that, an echoe of the moment God began to point my heart to the nations. This summer my where is Kenya and my when is now.

Isaiah 6:8 “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I. Send me!"

May my heart continually sing “here I am, send me.”