WHERE WE ARE IN MAY (2007)

Below is a letter we have sent recently to many friends and family. It states why we are doing this, articulates the challenges we experience through this, and our hope for the future.


"Most of you to whom we are sending this letter are aware of our hope to spend a few years of our lives in South America as missionaries. This letter is an attempt to share with you where we are in this process of hoping. Although the five of us (Bubba, Angela, Sam, Georgia and Ty) will get on a plane alone at some point to embark on this journey, you will remain very near to us as we remain grounded in our relationships with you while we are away. Simply put, we cannot go without knowing that you are here, without being connected to you in a mystical way.

First, I should say, even now as we are headlong into this pursuit of South America we find ourselves asking, “Bubba, Angela, are you foolish?” We ask this question often, even in response to the most trivial considerations. Like this Spring morning, when I considered having to trade the Virginia landscape for one more noted for its dirt and dust than anything green or teeming with pink and white and yellow. We also ask ourselves this question, of course, in light of the not so trivial considerations: Are you foolish to give up your job, where you have worked for 9 years and have so much security? Our home, where we have lived for 7 years and have created the most comfortable little dwelling we could ever want? Close proximity to good friends and family? Then there is the chief consideration that presents itself to us most often and that we feel most viscerally—the chances are greater in the global South (aren’t they?) that something bad could happen to your young children. Are you prepared, Bubba and Angela, to bear the burden of this risk?

Well, none of this is easy for us. We grapple with these considerations; they weigh heavily on us. But in one profound sense we recognize that we are indeed foolish and so we say yes to South America as an act of concession to God’s will for our lives, which as you know involves a journey that leads undoubtedly to goodness but not necessarily safety and comfort. Our hope lies in the goodness of God’s will for our lives.

Second, I want to tell you that despite the opaque nature of God’s work in the world at times (as I write the Virginia Tech tragedy has recently unfolded around us), we are nevertheless encouraged to pursue God in action in the great hope that He is in fact redeeming and healing creation, restoring beauty to ugliness and bringing freedom to the oppressed. And while there is plenty of good and indispensable work being done here in America (and in Charlottesville for certain), we are compelled to go to South America to engage a culture vastly different from our own and moreover a people who experience brokenness in ways we don’t understand. What message does God have for the people of South America? What articulation of beauty will point them Christ? On the one hand, the message and method are simple, just as it was for the apostle Paul: to resolve to know nothing but Christ Jesus. On the other hand, there are complexities to this in the wake of a human experience that encounters, for example, some of the worst poverty, oppression and corruption as anywhere on earth. We are eager to be with the people of South America, to see how truth and beauty penetrate their world.

Third, to give you an idea of a timeframe and what’s coming up for us, this summer we will attend South America Mission’s candidate orientation course. Upon completion of this course on July 6, we will officially begin raising support and looking forward to a concrete departure date for language school (we need to learn Spanish first; we have begun teaching ourselves using Rosetta Stone). We hope to have language school completed by May of 2008. While our assignment that begins after language school is not yet thoroughly defined, we will most likely join an effort already underway to plant a middle-class church in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. We may also spend half of our time working with an indigenous group in Bolivia—the Ayoré, formally nomadic and fierce, they are now among the poorest and most ostracized peoples in Bolivian society. We will share more details regarding all of this as things develop in the next few months.

And finally, we will be sent to South America under the care of our home church, Trinity Presbyterian in Charlottesville, VA. Many of you are members or attendees of this church. Last summer Trinity sponsored a short-term mission trip to Bolivia. The next Trinity-sponsored trip will take place in the summer of 2008. We hope all of you will consider coming to see us and work with us in Bolivia as a part of this trip that Trinity will support."