Our ministry partner and friend, Adam Sanders, is a true missionary to the immigrant Oaxacans, from Mexico, who live throughout California. His impact among these people is far-reaching as he ministers to them spiritually while providing many needed services to their families.
This was NOT Adam's plan for his life!
I want to share his story with you--as he recently told it to me--because it so powerfully illustrates how a missionary heart--a heart for God's global purposes--can find fulfillment whether or not we ever leave our home town!
As I was a teenager I prepared myself to be a missionary with much zeal. I would sleep on the floor often, and go on long hikes through the wilderness outside my father's ranch in Weed, CA.
Then I spent a lot of time doing street ministry to learn to share the gospel, and wrote letters to missionaries around the world, keeping copies of correspondence. I called this my "letter ministry." I learned Spanish and some passable Laos and heard every missionary speak that I could.
My father provided a good example by going on short term missionary trips to Brazil, Russia (in the first year after peristroika) and we had many missionaries stay in our home, as well as brothers and sisters from Brazil, Russia, and Finland. I went to Mexico several times and fell in love with the culture and people. I was going to take an opportunity as soon as I turned 18 to work in full-time ministry with a team in Mexico who went to the tough places, like mountain towns dominates by drug cartels, and started small home churches (sound good, Roger?!).
I am only writing all of this not to bring any attention to myself but to "set up" what happened next. Tragedy struck - I became deathly ill for four years before receiving a liver transplant which the Lord used to save my life. But, my dreams of taking the Gospel to far corners of the world were crushed. I had to take immunosuppresive medicine and remain somewhere near a very good hospital, such as Stanford. So, now, when I feel helpless and sad that I cannot go on the "field" I can touch it with my prayers - the Spirit of the Lord hovers over the face of the deep of lost souls, and when we pray, He moves! He moves mountains, and fills up valleys, he lifts up and pulls down, making straight the Path of the Lord! We can stand in the gap and stretch our hands across the sea to grasp in intercession to war weary, calloused hands of our brothers and sisters, such and John and Angel, be ONE with them in asking for nations!
As mentioned, Adam does far more than pray for those across the seas, he is significantly impacting a people-group whom God has brought from afar to his own home town!
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