It was a Sunday afternoon in January of 1983. I was looking at a map of Indiana. “What’s in Terre Haute?” I asked Roger. “Indiana State University,” he replied. “That’s where we’re going,” I said. It was one of those rare times when I knew something in the moment that I heard myself saying it.
It made perfect sense to me. Roger was from Indiana. Through my years as a summer missionary, God had called me to serve somewhere outside the Bible Belt. I loved collegiate ministry and had been a campus minister for two years before seminary. This intuitive knowing was backed up with a list of logical reasons.
In February of that year Bob Hartman from the Sunday School Board came to the seminary campus to recruit for collegiate ministry positions in “new work areas.” When we met with him and opened the needs notebook to the page for Indiana, the number one need at the top of the page was Indiana Sate University! “This confirms it!’ we thought. The salary was $5000 a year, but that didn’t faze us because we were willing to be bi-vocational. I wrote to the Terre Haute Chamber of Commerce for information. I went around the house singing, “Lord, plant my feet on Terre Haute.” (Terre Haute means “high ground” so I substituted those words in the hymn.)
Then we called the state convention office in Indiana to let them know we were willing to come to Terre Haute and serve on the campuses here as bi-vocational campus ministers They said, “No.” We were stunned. Terre Haute needed a full-time minister they said, which meant we would have to be Missions Service Corps, and raise our own support. We felt that God was calling us to Terre Haute, but we also felt that he was telling us to be bi-vocational, not MSC. He even confirmed it with a verse: “… You should … work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody” (IThes.4:11-12). So we were at an impasse with the state convention and were not allowed to come.
I was devastated. “If I were so sure of God’s will and were so wrong,” I thought, “how can I ever know God’s will again?” We stayed in Fort Worth. We had a baby. The months went by. A year later, in February of 1984, Bob Hartman was back on campus and the Terre Haute position was still open. This time the state convention was willing to talk to us, and it was finally decided that if Roger and I together would guarantee full-time hours, it would be okay for Roger to have an outside job. We began to serve on May 1, 1984, and in the fall Roger began to teach at a Catholic school.
We were making $9000 less than we’d made in seminary, and no matter how many times I crunched the numbers, I could never come up with a workable budget on paper. Yet we knew that God had called us here and that He would provide. After three years, the ministry had grown to the point that we decided we could do without the money better than we could do without the time, and Roger resigned from teaching. The following January, Terre Haute became a full-time campus ministry position, which was $11,000 a year contract worker – no insurance, no benefits.
During all those years God showed us that he could provide in many ways. Cars that should have fallen apart kept going and going. Sometimes people gave us their used cars instead of selling them. The depressed housing market worked to our advantage in buying a home. Great yard sales supplied clothes. Roger grew a garden. Growing up as the children of Depression-era parents had taught us to live frugally. Our daughter received full-tuition scholarships to Carson-Newman and Baylor. What a blessing!
Over twenty years Roger’s salary increased gradually until it reached a reasonable level seven years ago. Now we’re about to enter a new chapter of the story because campus ministry has been defunded and we will soon have no salary. This time we sense that God is leading us to raise support as Mission Service Corps missionaries. Again, God is proving Himself faithful. The verse I had read on the morning we received the news was Psalm 62:2 “Truly he is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will never be shaken. ”Six days later the verse He gave me was Acts 20:24: “However, I consider my life worth nothing to me; my only aim is to finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me—the task of testifying to the good news of God’s grace.” Through these and other Scriptures, though beloved friends, and through people we hardly know, God is encouraging our hearts and meeting our needs.
