You have stories no one can tell but you

On Tuesday I saw a short video by my son's English teacher. The wall behind him had lots of novels on shelves. I immediately felt at home as I watched it. My kind of classroom! And above the books were the words: "You have stories no one can tell but you." This reminds me of the message I heard from a speaker at a women's retreat back at the start of my writing journey over ten years ago. She too urged us to write our stories.

My son's English teacher briefly introduced what he'd be teaching his students in this coming school year. He said "we'll be finding ourselves in God's story and telling the part of it that only we can tell."

That resonates with me too. Each of us has a unique story, though there are common themes that we find when we share our stories with others. I am passionate about helping missionaries share their stories. I believe that by doing so, we will all be richer in our understanding of what mission work really is like (and therefore be better at supporting missionaries), as well as grow in our own walk with the Lord. 

This deep passion carries me through the various work I do: from editing a magazine for missionaries to managing our mission's social media content, from being on the editing team of a prayer booklet to communicating with our own supporters and on this blog. Even leading writing retreats and facilitating workshops that help missionaries prepare for home assignment.

These last ten days I've spent several hours with the Japan Harvest magazine team. Once a year we have a time of team building, evaluating the magazine, and planning for the future. Because we're geographically dispersed (several prefectures in Japan plus three other countries) it's difficult to get together. Usually some of us meet together physically and others join us via a video call, but this time we did it entirely online. It worked very well, though I missed the informal opportunities to interact around the edges of the meeting.

I love getting together with this team because they also are passionate about what we do. Not just about the skills that they bring to the table, but about the bigger picture of the magazine. Our mission is to encourage, inspire, and equip people who serve Japanese people (specifically members of the organisation that publishes the magazine). I can say that the volunteers who make up our team are passionate about this—that's what makes this magazine better than just average (in my opinion), and makes working on the team a joy to me.

I've come to see that what I do is a rather unusual endeavour for a missionary. If I'd come to the field saying that I wanted to be involved in helping missionaries publish their stories, I would probably have found a quite different path. If you say that, then people immediately think "books" and "publishing companies". Certainly, trying to explain to someone what I do and why in under a minute is hard.

Missionaries have a challenging and ongoing demand on them to explain what we do to people who've never experienced living outside of their home country—our lives are not as private as they would be if we were not in full-time ministry. But I think David and I are saved, in a way, by one of us in our marriage doing a more easily recognisable (and easy-to-remember) role: teaching missionary kids. That's how we're most often identified. And in general I'm okay with that.

Celebrating our wedding anniversary on Sunday.

I am very happy with the direction God has led me in and the continuing opportunities he has brought for me to pursue. Amazed, actually, at where I began and where I am now! And indeed, I've got some stories to tell, and hope that I can keep on telling them.

But I'm wondering if it's a little odd to look at some of the things my boys are studying and wish I could be a fly on the wall, learning from their teachers too! There's another class that one of my guys is taking that I'd love to audit (about Japan).