Someone once asked me, “How do you cultivate a missions lifestyle in young believers?” I answered the question with examples from my life. It started when I was in Acteens. The Girls in Action leader of my church asked if I wanted to help her with GAs. Then I was given opportunities for leadership through state missions camps and state Acteens Activators teams.

In college, the associational WMU council invited me to join its team. We traveled for hours together to state training events. I taught missions discipleship conferences in the association. I was awful. They loved and encouraged me anyway. When I felt God’s call on my life and made the decision to go to seminary, my associational WMU director used her own money to drive me to visit the campus two states away.

Do you get the picture? Missions leaders taught me. They loved me. They accepted me. They gave me responsibilities. They let me fail and learn. They poured their lives into mine. We have to love, nurture, bless, and turn our young people loose for God to do what He wants through their lives.

As Southern Baptists, we have one thing that unites us. At our core is the passion to take the gospel of Christ to those who have never heard. We work together toward that common goal. As a child and young adult, my heart was sealed for missions. I am a product of the Cooperative Program (CP).

The CP is Southern Baptists’ unified plan of giving through which cooperating Southern Baptist churches give a percentage of their undesignated receipts in support of their respective state convention and the Southern Baptist Convention missions and ministries.

Nearly 40 years ago, my tiny Southern Baptist church participated in a World Missions Conference (later called On Mission Celebrations). That was my first opportunity to be up close and personal with missionaries. More than 70 percent of your national CP dollars are at work in the United States and around the world supporting missionaries.

The day before my daughter’s fourth birthday, we buried her two-year-old cousin. I watched my family try to cope at the funeral. When my brother carried the tiny casket from the church, I thought my heart would break in half. It is not right for parents and grandparents to bury children. From the words of the minister, I took comfort. He told us Oakley was in the presence of the Father. He reminded us of the pain Oakley endured every day of his life, and since his death, Oakley has been pain-free. I took strength from the words spoken by the minister at the funeral as he shared from the Bible. Those words of comfort sustained my family during a very difficult time.

I am reminded of the story of Jairus and his daughter in the fifth chapter of Mark. Can you imagine Jairus’s pain as he pleaded with Jesus while his daughter lay seriously ill at home in bed? He, like any parent, would do anything for his child. There is no worse pain on this earth than watching a child suffer and die. Then Jairus’s tears of sorrow were replaced by tears of joy as Jesus raised the child from the dead. Can you imagine the hugging and sobbing that took place in Jairus’s home that day?

As I read the words, my eyes began to tear. The Prayer Patterns focus in Missions Mosaic was on Moses. Judith Edwards wrote, "‘Burning bush’ experiences come without warning and often in ways that are indescribable in human words. Any encounter with God causes us to examine where we have been and what may lie ahead, but ‘burning bush’ encounters are those that catch us by surprise, take our breath away because of their inexplicable wonder, and sometimes leave us asking, ‘God! Are you sure?’”

That sums up my journey to national WMU. In a way, that sums up my entire life. I am the daughter of a coal miner and foundry worker and have been caught by surprise time and time again. Repeatedly I have asked, “God! Are you sure?”

A friend sent me a book by Alton Lee Webb. In Go Outside, he writes, “So, if you feel completely called and completely inadequate at the same time, you are in the perfect place to get up, get out, and change the world.”¹ I do feel completely called and utterly inadequate.