Jesus Led Me All the Way
Thanks for joining us again, ladies! Today’s article is the sweet testimony of God’s leading and grace in the life of a willing servant, my sister-in-law, Melody. I believe you will be blessed and encouraged as you see how God led her in His perfect plan and time.
How do you start the first “blog” article you’ve ever written? Oops, maybe I’m not supposed to admit that it’s my first! But I’m sure you’d realize very quickly that I’m a novice. I love to speak to ladies, but I don’t think the Lord has given me the gift of "writing.” However, since Stephanie is my sister-n-law whom I love very much and admire tremendously (after all, she has put up with my brother more years than I did!), when she asked me to write for ThinkBible, I agreed.
I thought it might be good to tell you a little about myself in this first article and how God has worked in my life to lead me to the place I am now, by His grace. And it IS all by His grace.
In God’s perfect plan, I was raised in a Pastor’s home. Yes, I was a PK (pastor’s kid), as well as an MK (missionary’s kid), as my parents were involved in home missions and church planting (still are, actually!). By God’s grace, I realized my need of salvation and a relationship with Christ at an early age.
We often hosted visiting pastors and missionaries in our home, and while I was still very young, the Lord put the desire in my heart to be a missionary. I greatly admired my Aunt Miriam Abbott, who was a single missionary nurse serving in Brazil, and I wanted to be like her. I read books about nurses and was a “candy-striper” volunteer at a local hospital for a few years. I planned to go to Bob Jones University after high-school graduation and study nursing.
The summer between graduation and entering college, I went to a youth conference where Mrs. Beneth Jones spoke to the teen girls. I was so impressed and inspired by her and her ability to influence young ladies’ lives by her teaching. The Lord gave me another desire – to learn to speak and teach so that I could influence girls and ladies to love and follow God.
So, I majored in Speech instead of nursing! I still wanted to be a missionary and prayed for the Lord’s leading. The summer after my freshman year I took a “mission trip” to visit my Aunt Miriam in Brazil. I thought that perhaps God would show me He wanted me in Brazil. While I enjoyed seeing my Aunt’s mission work and felt a burden for the people, God didn’t call me to Brazil.
During college I was involved in Mission Prayer Band, and every time I listened to a missionary speaker, my desire to serve the Lord as a missionary intensified. But He still didn’t show me WHERE! As many young people do, I struggled with not knowing “God’s will for my life.”
I remember talking to Ken Collier of the Wilds Christian Camp expressing my frustration. He asked me, “Melody, do you need to know where God is calling you, right NOW? Today?”
“Well, no,” was my sheepish reply.
“When you NEED to know, He will show you. Just live daily in obedience to Him.”
What wise counsel!
Many times I have been asked, “When did God call you to the mission field?” The truth is, I never had a “special moment” or “call”, I just always desired to be a missionary! However, the summer after I graduated from grad school, I went on the “Musical Mission Team” with 23 other young people from BJU to Eastern Europe. As a choir we would sing in churches, but we also did evangelistic work - singing on the streets to draw a crowd and then, while one of our young men would preach, the rest of us would pass out gospel tracts. I remember a man who asked me what I was giving him. I told him that it had the Word of God in it and told about Jesus. He said, “I know who God is, but who is Jesus?” What a thrill for us to give out tracts to thousands of people in previously closed Russia and Ukraine, who perhaps had never heard of Jesus!
Perhaps my most unforgettable memory was the day we had a concert in a little town in Poland that had no evangelical church. We sang a song in the town square and then passed out flyers for our concert to be held that evening in the town’s theater a few hours later. When a crowd gathered for the concert, we were surprised to see the first few rows filled with children! As we sang an arrangement of “Jesus Loves Me,” the thought came to my mind, “These children have probably never heard that Jesus loves them!”
In my choir folder I had a simple construction paper “wordless book.” After the concert I held it up and the children crowded around me. I was able to tell those dear Polish children of Jesus’ love and explain the gospel to them – through an unsaved interpreter! Four children made decisions to receive Christ that night and at that moment the Lord impressed on my heart that I wouldn’t be happy doing anything else! It was then that I knew that being a missionary wasn’t just what I wanted, He wanted it too!
In His time the Lord did make it plain where He wanted me to go - and with who!
The story of how God brought a single missionary from Kenya to Greenville, SC so that we could meet and later get married and how He led us to Chile as missionaries 4 months after our wedding is a story that’s too long to include in this article! But it is surely summed up by the words from Genesis 24:27, “I, being in the way, the Lord led me.”
As I look back over the last 28 years on the mission field, I can repeat with the song writer, “Jesus led me all the way!” My husband, Jim, and I have been in Chile as missionaries since 1992. Our 4 children were born and raised here. The Lord has allowed me to have my desire to speak to many ladies over the years, not only in our church but all over Chile and Peru. The Lord continues to allow me to tell children of the wonderful love of Jesus. Most recently, because of the pandemic, I started teaching a Sunday School lesson every week on Facebook Live with my ventriloquist puppet, never dreaming that hundreds of children from all over Latin America would watch them! What a privilege of God’s grace!
This testimony is not just a “hope you get to know me” article. In several chapters in Psalms (77, 78, 105, 145), the Bible tells us that we should “remember the works of the Lord” and talk about them. It brings us out of our “stinkin’ thinkin’”, and it helps us recognize how great our God is: “the God that doest wonders.” And then when we praise Him, it helps others to “set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep His commandments.”
Remembering how God has led in the past encourages us to trust His leading in the future. Whether he leads me by “still waters” or “through the valley of the shadow of death,” I can without fear trust in my Good Shepherd. And so can you!
If you are interested in learning more about Melody’s aunt, missionary Miriam Abbott, I have written a book about her life in Brazil. It’s entitled Watching God Work: Ministry Among the Macushi, and is available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Walmart.
