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Have you heard the expression “Boots on the Ground?” Well our Live Dead Missionaries are the boots on the Silk Road. Here we’d like to take a moment and allow one of them to share a snapshot of their life with you. Some names and details have been changed, but this is a true story from this colorful, vibrant, and sometimes surprising region.

After graduating from university I spent a year or two as a server, playing on the weekends with friends who stuck around after graduation, praying about what God wanted for my life.

I knew I wanted to live in a foreign country, I had a heart for the staggering portion of the world that has little or no access to the Gospel, and yet I loved the comfort and appeal of the mildly responsible, big city life I was living.

I could see myself going on two very different paths and I had to make a decision.

I chose to give my life to the unreached.

As glamorous as that sounds, many of my days over the last six years living on the Silk Road have been mundane, sometimes lonely, and quite often riddled with inner-turmoil. I have zero regrets about coming, only doubt as to whether my life is really making a difference here.

What Might Have Been

Sometimes I wonder what my life might have been had I not taken this course. I spy on my friends back home on Facebook and see solid Christian people who live near their moms and dads, and live in real houses, and have two cars, and never have to feel like a four year old when they are trying to communicate with the grocer.

Sometimes I go so far as to wonder why I shouldn’t go back and find a nice neighborhood church to be involved in, have a normal 9-5 job where I can clock out and just chill in the evenings and weekends, and not care too much about the eternity of every single person in my neighborhood.

…and still qualify as a good, God-fearing, even passionate follower of Christ.

Follow Me

Perhaps this longing is not far off from what Peter experienced in some of his last moments with Jesus. In his third appearance after the resurrection, Jesus sits down for a meal of fish with his disciples. He challenges Peter’s commitment to serve him and his Church. Then Jesus tells Peter that he is going to die, and in that death glorify God. This was obviously not easy for Peter to hear. He looks over at John and basically says, “Well, what about him?”

This is where Jesus answers both Peter and me: “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me” (John 21:22).

In other words, “It doesn’t matter what I am asking from John.

You come and follow Me.

Follow Me regardless of the job, the house, the church, the ministry, the skills, the destiny, or the death I give to John.

You Peter. You Rachel. You come and follow me to the destiny I have given to you.”

Then I log out of Facebook, forget about the American Dream, and stop looking at my post-college days through rose-colored glasses. Once again, I choose to follow Jesus for the sake of the unreached, for the glory of God.

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