And that was before I’d learned about Marxist guerrillas and kidnappings

What’s a comfortable—and cowardly—young suburbanite to do when her husband wants to move their young family to the middle of nowhere in South America?

I was that comfortable, cowardly, young suburbanite, and moving to the wilds of South America was the last way I wanted to live my life. At age twenty-six, I was in the early stages of chasing the American Dream.

Besides, adventure didn’t appeal to me—unless fixing up our recently purchased house could be called an adventure.

Let me tell you how I first got wind of my husband Dave’s outrageous idea:

One evening he had burst through the front door of our Seattle home and, with a boyish grin and outstretched arms, announced, “We’re moving to Lomalinda! I’m going to teach there!”

A few seconds passed before I could wheeze in enough air to speak. “Where is Lomalinda?”

“Colombia, South America!”

I collapsed to the floor.

I’d always expected we’d live a normal, predictable, all-American life but, without warning, my husband declared he had other ideas.

“We all like things to be predictable, don’t we?” writes author Steve Voake. “We expect things to . . . keep on happening just the way they always have. We expect the sun to rise in the morning. We expect to get up, survive the day and finish up in bed back at the end of it, ready to start it all over again the next day. . . . The fact of the matter is that nothing is ever certain. But most people never find that out until the ground suddenly disappears from beneath their feet.”

That described me: At Dave’s declaration, the ground began disappearing from beneath my feet.

As youth director for our church, Dave had taken college kids to a Wycliffe Bible Translators’ event hoping some would consider missions work. The meeting failed to persuade any of his young people but, when Dave learned Wycliffe needed teachers for their missionaries’ kids in Lomalinda, he was hooked. He wanted to move the four of us, including our preschoolers, Matt and Karen, to a dinky outpost in the middle of nowhere.

After a sleepless night, I hurried to the library and looked up Colombia’s people, geography, climate, wild critters—all strange to me.

Forty years later, I can still picture National Geographic’s close-up photo of a man. Everything about him appeared alien—his jungle surroundings, his face like dark leather, his hair coal-black.

He glared into the camera lens,

the whites of his eyes blood-red.

The thought of living in Colombia scared me out of my wits. And that was before I’d learned about Marxist guerrillas and kidnappings.

But, like Abraham, Dave had heard God’s voice, “Leave your homeland.”

My husband longed to hear me say, “Sure, let’s go!” But I didn’t like his idea. Not at all. The plans I’d made for my life and for my kids did not include living in Lomalinda. The thought of moving to a patch of grassland in South America made me choke. Uttering the word “yes” was unthinkable.

I understood Dave’s desire to serve God—I wanted to serve Him, too—but did he think real ministry happened only on the mission field? If so, he was mistaken. I said to him, a man with degrees in teaching and counseling, “You can minister by using your degrees in Seattle, you know.”

He gave me a blank stare, so I tried again. “God doesn’t need you in Lomalinda. He can find a dozen other teachers to fill that position.” But Dave had nothing to say, signaling he had made up his mind.

This was becoming a personal disaster for me, an emergency. I wished so much it was just a nightmare and that I’d soon wake up.

But I wasn’t sleeping. It was real life. And it had turned into a slippery chaos.

In coming days and weeks and months, Dave’s announcement and its implications would prove to be traumatic for me.

Even before I picked myself up off the floor,

I had begun praying, “Please, God, don’t make me go!”

(from Chapter 1, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir)