Diana - you're up!

1990

I guess you could call this the second calling! We never thought about Diana traveling to Africa; her job was to stay home and manage the store while I went to do WBS follow-ups. In 1990 Eric Dickey and I had been making plans to go to Malawi again. I had the funds for two tickets and had been trying all year to encourage other men from church to go with me and learn about foreign mission work, but out of 8 elders and 6 deacons, I got 14 excuses not to go. We were out of time, and I received a call from our travel agent, Mary Ann. She said “We have one month. Am I buying one ticket or 2?” I said “I’ll call you back in 10 minutes.” I turned to Diana and off the top of my head, with no thought of flying halfway around the world with a month's notice, I said “Why don’t you just go with me?” To my surprise, she said “I don’t know. Why don’t I?” Until that moment, she had never even mentioned an interest in going to Africa! She has said she felt like God was pointing at her and saying "You're up!" So I called Eric and said 'guess what! Diana is going to go with us!' The month was filled with immunizations for Diana, buying clothes and supplies, and preparing lessons to share with the women, while I was coordinating details with Eric.

Looking back, it's clear that that moment in 1982 when Diana and I talked about what God wanted US to do was coming to fruition, but it was nowhere similar to what we expected! We had surrendered to His will without specifying our expectations.

One of the most memorable events for Diana was when she found herself in Malawi, in the back seat of a rental car with an African woman she’d never in her life seen before… Diana asked Sister Thindwa where we were going, and the answer was “Sister Diana is going to speak to the ladies at some rural village church” !!! Diana said ‘Oh? What’s she going to talk about?! And who will interpret?” (Diana had not yet learned how to enunciate properly so her interpreters could understand her) Sister Thindwa said “don’t worry, I have 2 sons who went to Texas A&M and I can understand Texas just fine. We’ll study from the chart you have.” When George and Geoffrey drove away and left Diana at that church miles from nowhere, she said “Okay, Lord, here I am! Show me what to do.” There were 127 ladies there that day to listen to Diana and Sister Thindwa, and every one of them shook Diana's hand and thanked her for coming to talk to them! Ordinarily these WBS campaigns involved the men having speakers and the ladies out in the kitchen cooking nsima or sitting on the floor keeping the kids quiet. They were thrilled that someone cared enough to fly halfway around the world just to talk to them about Jesus!

1997

To our disappointment, we were not able to return to Africa to do WBS work for lack of personal funding. We closed the store, and Diana became a Certified Optician in 1995. In 1996, out of the blue we were enjoying our regular Friday night out with Larry and Carolyn Foster. Larry was the preacher for Southside C/C in Portales, where we had been attending for a couple of years, and we were good friends. He was an experienced foreign missions teacher and was very interested in our Africa mission trips.

Larry asked us how long it had been since we had been to Africa, and would we like to go back? We said it was six years since we had been there and yes, I would love to go back. Larry said he knew someone who might be interested in helping and 10 days later we had enough money for one ticket for me to go to Malawi for 3 weeks.

I wrote our friends in Malawi to ask if they would like me to come for 3 weeks to teach a 4-day seminar about Jesus to the congregations in the South, Central and North? A resounding YES was the answer. It was a great experience being alone, just me and Malawian nationals

Because of Diana’s opticianry job, we had been eyeing the Lions Club used glasses collection box in her office, and learning about the Lions Club glasses recycling program, which made free used glasses available for distribution in the Third World. We wanted to investigate the need for eyeglasses in Malawi, so I took a few pairs of readers along to see how they would be received.

When we reported the extremely enthusiastic results of my survey trip to Larry, he asked the same question, “Wanta go back to Africa in 1998?”, and that same friend provided funding for both me and Diana for another trip to Malawi, this time to start an eyeglass clinic ministry working only with the local preachers and elders.