Well, as always, from the sounds of conversation, you're engaged in, the discussions of the morning. Always glad to hear that. I hope you've had a chance to both talk about, your favorite place you've lived because I think that will have a bearing on what we're going to hear this morning from the Deckers. If you're like me, it's not on. You hear okay.

I'm sorry. Margaret's always telling me I need to speak directly into the microphone, so I'll do that now. But I hope you have, had a chance to discuss some of the places you've lived and what your, favorite choices have been of those living places. If you look to the map, you'll see what we're going to hear this morning includes a diversity of places to live, so, we'll look forward to that. Let me pray and then I'll introduce the Deckers and we'll start.

Thank you, Father, for being together this morning for the freedom to do that. We, recognize as we've many of us heard, the message from your word that even when we're not in control of our circumstances, we know the one who is, and we're grateful to be together with that freedom this morning. So guide our minds, guide our ears as we hear, help us to listen well, and to respond to what we hear in the this faith story. In Jesus' name, amen. I'll even read from my phone, which is a new, trick for me.

Glenn and Ann Deckert. They've been here, for four years at Faith Church, married for nearly fifty eight years. They have two children, Natalie, who I think is here, and James, and four grandkids here at Faith Church. Glenn recently wrapped up teaching a Sunday School class in Thessalonians, and Anne is a church office volunteer. I know because I've seen her several times when I've broken into the church during the day, and she participated in women's Bible studies.

So we're looking forward to hearing from the Deckers this morning. And you've read that right, taking your vocation, not your vacation. That sounds real good also, but I'm talking about taking your, skills, your education, and settle in a foreign country to serve in that country with a purpose of bearing witness to Christ, to your your colleagues, all the people that you meet in that country. And so, I had the privilege of being born in a Christian home in Detroit, Michigan. My mother was one of eight from Detroit and my my father immigrated from Saskatchewan, Canada.

Big wheat farms there and came to Chicago and then settled in, Detroit. He got a job as a trainee with a new company and ended up fourteen years with IBM. But after fourteen years, and as a district manager, he decided to, resign and bought a small company where he could be wouldn't have to be moving around. IBM, you know, he stood for I've been moved. And he didn't wanna have that type of life, and so he bought a little company, called it Decker Electric Company.

And I during my high school years, I would take two buses to get to my father's shop downtown Detroit, just four blocks from the Fisher Building, and learn to tear down electric motors. And here I am rewinding, electric motor. Alright. I did this after, my junior and senior year and then during the summers working for my father at his shop. Both my mom and dad were practicing Christians, and I I have a story I'm very grateful for that.

And I had a dream of buying an old car, tearing it down to the frame, and building on the chassis, a car of my own conception, my own design. And so, how did I start? Well, my uncle my uncle had, this model model a Ford sitting on his property. It hadn't been started for a while, and he sold it to me for $80. We had to tow it from from his, property all the way to our home in Detroit, just 40 miles or so.

But my my dream was to tear it down to the chassis. So that's what it looked like after several months. That's the chassis and a drive shaft and other things you can see there. The engine was removed, and I overhauled that, put in new gas and all. And, around this time, I was heavily involved in this project.

There was a news flash in across The United States that five young men were slain trying to reach the Alka Indians in the Amazon Jungle. They had landed on the shore of a river there, and, they did all they could to show they were coming peacefully, though they knew they were a a people who had a reputation for killing any people that would come into their territory. And so they, after several days of approaching them and spiraling around above them with the plane, dropping gifts to them, they landed on the shore, but their efforts were met with spears, and they all died. I thought to myself, my, I have my life ahead of me, my career. Maybe I could be a missionary pilot and do something like that.

So that was around us. With that in my mind, and I was very acquainted with missions. My father was the chairman of a mission board, of our church. We often had missionaries into our home and, stayed overnight sometimes, hear their stories from Africa, from parts of South America. So I was steeped in missionary, experiences.

And, after about two years of working on this car, it was sort of in this shape. You can see all the changes I had to make on it and it, had to lower the chassis and all kinds of things. And I went off to Houghton College. And I found myself befriended by lots of MKs who had lived in other countries and had come to Houghton to study. And I also, met international students.

And I was one of a a cluster of kids who were thinking about world missions for their own career. And so, I got involved in the missionary prayer band at Houghton College. And every time there was a missionary speaker, I would just see here them and talk with them and ask them questions, and I just grew in my commitment to world missions. Eleanor. It was at the end of this is the car I finished, and it was after my after my year at Houghton.

I came home and put the finishing touches on this car. And, it was a barrel of fun to drive it around, with the model a engine in it still chugging away. And, I would get looks all the time. This was the front view with the top down, and I learned a lot working on that car. But it was at this stage Yep.

I could hear Jesus saying to me, do you love me, Glenn, more than you love your car? That was a hard question. I remember taking it very seriously. I would wake up at three in the morning, morning after morning, just to pray over it. Lord, I wanna do your will.

I can use this car in service for you, but if it's not your will, let me know. And that grew heavy on my heart. I decided I had to get rid of it to please the lords. How do you get rid of a car like that? It was still the title was 1929 Ford.

You look at it. That's not a 1929 Ford, but, I Illinois Avenue in Detroit had more used car lots than any city in the world. This is the mid nineteen fifties and or late nineteen fifties. And, I, well, went up and down, drive this car, got surrounded by salespeople asking questions, but they were a little hesitant to do a deal with me. One one, one owner, he was Nash Rambler to be exact.

He said, just one of those cars on the back row. Just choose one, and we'll do a swap. And I chose about a seven year old Dodge, had a little bit of engine work to do, but I could do that, and it was a good car. And I did a straight switch. What a relief I had.

I knew. Jesus knew. I loved him more than a project that had clouded my commitment to Christ and, had dominated my life for so long. So, I went on to finish Houghton College, very active in the mission prayer band, on to further graduate work. It was a Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

I was there when Chet was there, and, Chet Wood. And, I remember, Paul Little, one of my professors, said, look at if you don't have clarity about overseas service yet, why not work with InterVarsity? And so I, with his, support, I became a staff worker with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. That was for four years. I remember after two years, a year in Evanston with international student work, and then at the University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana, working both with the international student ministry and also with the with the, student ministry at large.

God gave us wonderful opportunities there. And after after two years of inter varsity, and this was my my, year and year, Before those two years, Anne and I married, and here we are. This was, I didn't go down the aisle this way, but, this was sort of a playful time after the reception, And, from then on, we prayed together. Lord, where do you want us to serve you overseas? And we thought of a lot of creative approaches, studying in a foreign university, and then getting more deep in that country, whatever it was.

And during my last year with InterVarsity and the middle of the year, I learned that the University of Illinois had started a TESOL program, teaching English to speakers of other languages, a master's degree. So I enrolled in that, and wonderfully, during my last semester with InterVarsity, and had been substitute teaching, and she was offered a full time job at a vacancy that just popped open. And it was very hard to get an educational position in those days, but she was given a nice position teaching, what grade was it? grade. And, so then she studied for one semester, or taught for one semester, and then for the next year while I was studying intensively the MA program, we had our source of income.

Also, God's guidance to us, it was before I finished that master's degree, the University of Illinois signed a contract with Tehran University inviting graduates from from Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, a few other states, Ohio, to be positioned at Tehran University to teach English. I was one of the to sign up in that program. The only problem was that Anne was not in that program. She's an elementary school teacher, but I had her to come with me on one ticket. All we got there on one ticket is, a story in its own right, but we got there twenty minutes late to Iran.

So mostly by bus. You know the story of Iran. It was in 1978. We had been in that that country. I had meanwhile finished a PhD and had gone back to Iran in 1978, and the revolution was unfolding.

We had made a commitment to be long term in Iran, but soon, the Shah was overwhelmed. He left the country, and the Islamic Republic was established. And we foreigners were invited to leave, to say it nicely. And so we left. God always provided places for us to serve overseas.

We went on later to Saudi Arabia, and on these tables, there's a little show a write up of the different places we have lived. This is the same thing on your table. After Saudi Arabia, it was Hong Kong for eight years. And after that, it was many short term positions in Azerbaijan and Moldova and Qatar, places that we were able to live in and serve the Lord. And wherever we went, there was opportunities to bear witness to nationals, to people who were our colleagues.

We never had to raise support. We were tentmakers, that is, self supporting people with a missionary purpose. We spent seventeen years of that type overseas. And similarly, later at the Eastern Michigan University, where I had a tenure attack, tenure track position. This is a book I wrote about tent making, and it's, I've given far more copies away than I have sold.

It's it hasn't been a big moneymaker. In fact, I find Europeans are more attractive to the tent making model of missions than Americans tend to be. You can guess why that's so. But I think I'll pass it over to Anne to share her upbringing and early part of our story. The interesting thing about carpets is that people like to have them they put them out on the road and have cars run over them and their feet run over them to get a nice shine.

And so the whole carpet looks so much older and so much more beautiful. And I compare that to our life because the threads of our carpet are sometimes not really that beautiful. We've had some hard times. But as we look back on our life, and as I'm sure a lot of you look back, you can see God at work. And the beauty of the pattern comes out, in the end.

And so that's a reminder to us. Another thing about a carpet is there's lots of mistakes in a carpet. You might not think so when you look at it, but if you look at it long enough, you'll find lots of mistakes. And that's pretty much the way our life is as well. Imperfect, but in a way that God can weave those parts of our life together.

In my experience, my family and my church and my school and music were probably the most important things in my life. I'm from an immigrant family, and, this is a picture of my grandparents in Sweden. And they were, part of a group of people that were, farmhands. And my sister and I sometimes remarked to each other, well, never mind. We're just from peasant stock.

And it's true because this picture proves it. We were, they were, getting ready at this point. My grandfather, my grandmother is the one with the baby and my grandfather is the one with a pitchfork. They were getting ready to immigrate to The United States. I think they wanted to immigrate for economic reasons, for freedom and for opportunity.

And that was the immigrant experience, wasn't it? So it's very easy for me to understand, immigrants that come here and want to live together collectively. They went to Rockford, Illinois, which was a haven for Swedish people. And, it was there that they, settled and then they decided, well, this isn't going anywhere. I think we'll just, go to Montana and have a have a homestead there.

So my grandfather got in a boxcar with a cow and went to Montana and North Dakota and Montana. And, he set up a homestead there and that was where my father was raised. My grandfather died in the Spanish, war, Spanish flu epidemic. And, my grandmother moved back her family to Rockford. In Rockford, there were many Swedish people and they all lived together.

They went to church together. They did things together. And my grandmother somehow got her four sons and her daughter as a widow to go to church on Sunday morning. And they went to the free church, the Swedish free church. And the the language was, that was spoken was Swedish.

And I remember when I was a child, some of the some of the remarks from Swedes were like, hallelujah or Praise the Lord. And, you know, we don't we don't talk like that anymore, but these people who were from that that that background had a love for the Lord Jesus. And the one of the things that they did was that they established a church. My father was an engineer and my mother was a homemaker. And, we grew up in a, just right near all of my father's relatives.

And it was a very secure family, but it was also a family that didn't reach out to other people. We were secure in our own and, somebody from a different ethnic group or a different color, was not part. We weren't, they weren't excluded, but they just weren't there. And so my upbringing was a little bit different than Glenn's who grew up in Detroit. The, The, the childhood memory that I have is standing on a chair in a, in the in our in the front of our church, and our church had a radio program.

And I would stand up on a chair, and the microphone was probably bigger than my face. And I would sing on the radio as a two year two and three year old. And I don't know why they asked me to do that. I will say this, that it was, Sunday trying to get children to go to Sunday school in the free church. And so, I just contributed in that way, but, actually, that was the beginning and the end of my solo career right there.

And that they're all women on one side and men on the other side? Yeah. It's what it looks like. I don't I don't know the reason for that. I think it I'm sure some of them were married and some were not.

That was part of it. My grandmother was a had been a maid in that house for quite a long time. So, yeah. No. It's a, it's a really interesting picture, I think, of, that most people don't have.

In high school, this is a picture of my sister. One interesting fact about my childhood was that I had read Hair and Freckles and I didn't always feel like I belonged. And another tidbit of information was that there were three of us at one time, three sisters, and my youngest sister passed away, before she was one year old. And I think that greatly impacted my life. I was 10 years old when that happened, and my parents, were of the old school and did not talk about it.

I think they felt like if they didn't talk about it, we wouldn't be heard. But it made a great impact on me. And I think I pulled inward and, it was a time of real sadness when I felt as though I never ever in my whole life wanted my parents to cry again. And so, that was also part of my growing up years. Another part of my growing up years was acapella choir in high school.

We had the wonderful opportunity to have a conductor who loved Bach, And he taught us wonderful, musical pieces that endured for my lifetime and were a great help to me when we went overseas. And I could listen to them on the scratchy old tape recorder. It was a it was a ministry in my life that I could not have put there myself. This is a picture of my, acapella choir. We did an operetta every year, and I was in the operetta.

But I will have to say that this was my acting experience and my last acting experience, so don't get any good ideas from that. When I when I was teaching in, in the suburbs, I went to college and and majored in elementary education. I wanted to major in interior design, but my dad, who was very keen that his daughters learn how to, how to care for themselves and be able to take care of themselves should something happen, thought it would be better if I majored in education. And so I did that. I wasn't upset by it.

It just was one of the things that happened. And I majored in elementary education and it was one of the best pieces of guidance that I ever received because it stood us in good stead through the years as we were overseas. I went to college and then I did my student teaching in Skokie, Illinois. If you know anything about Skokie, Illinois, it's a Jewish community, and it was a tremendous experience for me to be involved in a in a totally different environment, totally Jewish community. And then I went on to teach in a suburb of Chicago.

After I'd been there a couple of years, it seemed as though I was very engaged in church. I was very engaged as a follower of Christ in many Christian activities. But I just, at that time, I just sort of felt like something was really missing. I really did not have the compassion or the, or the, commitment to Christ that I really needed to have. And so I don't know why it's not like my personality, but I spend about two or three or four months just reading books and trying to figure out what does God want from me?

Is there more to my Christian life than going to church every Sunday and being the faithful person who, helped with the youth group or, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I think God used that in my life to help me to focus. And what I came out with was a very, a very decisive commitment to follow Christ in whatever he called me to and whatever that meant. It probably meant in my case that maybe, perhaps, I might never be a wife and a mother. And I don't think that that's unusual for God to deal with us in that way. A little while after that, Glenn and I started dating and, we I knew that he was committed to missions.

And so that was part of our commitment to one another is, to pursue what we felt God might have wanted us to do. In our wedding vows, we made up some of our wedding vows and which is dangerous in itself. But, I quoted from Ruth, Entreat me not to leave you. Wherever you go, I will go. Your people will be my people.

Your God, my God. And I can say with a great deal of certainty, I had no idea what that meant. But I think those two experiences in my life of really committing my life to Christ and making that statement to Glenn were things that I looked back on when we moved overseas, and I looked back on them as a covenant with God. And I made that covenant, and I was forced to come to grips with whether I was going to live with it or not. And so I think God used both of those things in my life for good.

And I'm very thankful for them. During our time with InterVarsity, when we were married, Glenn came home one day and he said, well, I'd like to have the grad students over for dinner. And that was fine because that sort of started the kind of life that we had. He said, I'd like to have them for waffles. Well, having 15 or 20 people as a new bride for waffles, That was quite a challenge.

And so I said to him, well, we only have one little waffle maker. He said, never never mind. He said, I'll borrow another waffle maker. And so that was the beginning of our of our, of our, soldiering together, and, he'll he'll give you some more information. slide of my presentation, and I'll be a little more brief this time.

I wanna highlight, three places where we lived of the many and how God just opened up doors for us to be witnesses to Christ, of Christ to nationals. That's what we went for. After all, a tentmaker doesn't have to spend time raising donor support. They just need to have prayer support, and they just parachute into that culture because you're employed there. And you are going to hold a job there and be one of those people side by side working together in whatever job you might have.

And so I wanna focus on how that worked in in Iran, in the city of Shiraz in the South Of Iran. And then I want to talk a bit about how it happened in Hong Kong. Doors just opened for ministry. And then lastly, in the little kingdom of Qatar on the Persian Gulf where I had a Fulbright position for six months. This is Cyrus's tomb just outside Shiraz.

This is biblical, king Cyrus, hung out of the early times who God used that king to bring, those Israelites in captivity back to their own home hometown, their own city. Shiraz is a special city in the arts. It had great poets. The graves of those poets are there with beautiful gardens, all cypress trees, mountains in the background, sometimes covered with snow, but it's a more moderate climate than the North Of Iran, and it was just a beautiful city. Thousands of people from Tehran would come in the early spring to celebrate the New Year, which is the of spring in Iranian, culture.

So, there was one church in that city. It was an Anglican church established by British missionaries. They were not there anymore. The church was, in the hands of a Persian vicar. I got to know him well.

He well received me. I was teaching at the local university. I wasn't there to start another church that he might have feared. He saw that I was there to be a resource for his church, and he began to, point different young men to me. Said that fella is a sincere seeker.

Would you meet him for Bible reading? I had Persian pretty well under control at that point, and I would meet with this one and then another one and a one, just meet again and again reading through the gospels. And one or the other of us would raise a question or point to something we observed in that text, and God just used those. I remember one day, pastor Saya, who you see in the front row at the lower, he took us off, and we drove a couple cars to a nearby small city that once had a church that was now abandoned. We went to that town.

We just hiked around with these young men. And, that pastor, of course, four years later, during the revolution, had his throat cut by an assassin, and we lost him to the cause of Christ. He was a godly man. Here's another another picture of the same young man. That's a traditional Iranian village in the background.

There are 50,000 villages throughout Iran. You hear about the big cities, but many of the Iranians live in these small clusters of in small towns. Here's the fellow I spent a great deal of time just reading the Bible with him, helping to understand the Christian gospel. He was a high school graduate. He played goalie on a local soccer team and was just a splendid little guy that I could just I was privileged to be able to spend lots of time with him.

About Hong Kong, You might guess what's that. How does that relate to Hong Kong? These are Afghans. In Hong Kong, I think two things stand out. One is I got in touch through a local Chinese Christian with Afghan traders who were fighting the Russians in their own home country and bringing lapis lazuli stone, a semiprecious stone, bringing it to Peshawar where they had settled their families for safety, and then shipping it to Hong Kong.

And this Chinese Christian introduced me to them. And because I had Persian, they have Dari, their sister languages, I could communicate with these guys. And we, had them in our home for dinners. We sit on the floor. Anne can tell you about that, perhaps more than I.

And, I went with them for trips in the new territories. They enjoyed riding along. I had a little old car that we could get four or five into it. So, that's my son with them, and he's here at that table in the blue. And, and so is his wife and our our daughter is also there, and some of our grand our grand grandchildren.

So, in Hong Kong, more consequential maybe than the time with the Afghans was my colleagues. I had office bible studies. I was in a small college. I was in charge of the language center and and had to design the curriculum for all incoming students. And, the lady on the on your left, as you look at that, that was, a non Christian, but she was hired around the time I was.

She was in charge of all the Chinese courses. She designed communication and modern Chinese courses, and she also set up the Mandarin courses because this is twelve years before the handover, to China, and many of the young people wanted to know to hack the the Mandarin language for their future opportunities. And so, these were colleagues. I shared the gospel with all of them, and hook her name is Yin Ching. We're still in touch with her.

She's on the lower left and, here's another picture, and what is unusual, she was not a Christian. We had a few chats about spiritual things the three years, and I remember her saying, well, a couple friends of mine became Christians. Well, I'm not ready for that kind of commitment. And but she called me one day. This is probably our year of the chitchat sometimes.

And she said, Glenn, will you help me understand the Bible, the New Testament? I was delighted for that. So we set a time in my office. She came to my office, and we started just reading the gospels. And, she would say things like, there's some things in my life I just don't like.

Maybe God can help me. And, as we read through the gospel, we meet every every week for an hour. Sometimes it'd go an hour and a half. She just had lots of questions, and we just read, and, she would say things, like, it's something I I need, but I'm not ready for that yet. And, it turned out, if you know what happened in China in 1989, this is our fourth year working together, by the Tiananmen Square face off between thousands of Chinese demonstrators facing the Chinese army even with tanks and machine guns.

And, people in Hong Kong were glued to their television sets. They could hardly believe, that Chinese would be gunning down Chinese. It was unheard of. And lo and behold, when it came close to that, she phoned me one day and said, Glenn, we must call a prayer meeting. Well, she was not yet a professing Christian.

And I said, that sounds like a good idea. We set a time to meet in my office. That time, she comes marching in with six or seven other professors. She had gone knocking on doors, inviting these people, Christians and non Christians, to a prayer meeting. They followed her.

She's been a leader ever since. She announced to the whole group, I'm new on the Christian team. We need to pray to God to intervene at Beijing that there will not be a bloodbath. And she wept and prayed and wept and one after another in English or in Cantonese, prayed. I don't know how long that went on.

I was so startled by all that was going on. From then on, she was a zealous Christian. She led her husband an engineer to the Lord, and she went on to tell me about neighbors who are coming to know the Lord. She once called me and said, I can't come right now. I'm leading someone to Christ.

Well, just go ahead and do that. And, God used her tremendously. She now is into watercolors and has demonstration of not only her poetry, but now her watercolor paintings are an attraction in Hong Kong, and she has times of showing them publicly. So, this is the kind of place since we lived in in Hong Kong, and what a thrill it was to be positioned so we could just share the gospel with our colleagues and people around us. The last thing I wanna get a little more briefly, when I had a a Fulbright appointment in 2002 to be in Qatar, on the Persian Gulf, I was to be teaching education courses.

They didn't have that ready for me. So I ended up teaching English, classes of females and a class of males. They didn't mix in Qatar like in Saudi Arabia. And, I learned early in my stay that a former friend from Saudi Arabia, a biologist from Iraq, was now teaching biology in my same university in Qatar. And so I invited him for lunch, at a Ponderosa house in Doha Doha, Qatar.

And, he opened his heart to me. He knew that his, his position was in jeopardy. For some reason, they'd like to phase people out after four or five years. His wife and daughters were in, in Jordan, and he was supporting them, but he was afraid of losing his job. And, I I said, well, Hossein, can I pray for you about that concern?

Oh, please do. So at that lunch table and the restaurant, I prayed for him. I had already showed some verses from scripture that gave us some hope to pray about. And, he he just said, that's that's wonderful. That's different.

We started meeting for lunches like that. And then after several, weeks, I said, why don't we just meet on Friday at your house? I'll come over, and we can read further the bible. He said, that's fine. Do so.

And so I began to visit him in his apartment and just, well, read more and more. You read about praying behind closed doors. That's the way there ought to be. Not out in public to show off. He was just identifying all that we were reading in the in the gospels.

And, my time ended. After about six weeks of meeting like that on Fridays, the day off, he he's the one that drove me to the airport, so I flew back to The States. I hesitate to write very much about spiritual things. I'm sure correspondence is monitored. I didn't want him to get into further trouble.

And but it was six years later, I had an appointment for a short term bit of work in Jordan. I thought, oh, he's in Jordan now, I learned. I'm gonna look him up. And what in Jordan, through a a dear, Arab speaking friend, I learned that Hossein had died. And I don't know the circumstances and all of that.

But I remember his his, his hunger for what the word of God has. And I had given him a New Testament, and I just pray that someday I'll see him in glory. God only knows if he ever crossed the line, but he had a love for the scriptures as we read together. The picture of the apartment complex is typical of the homes where we lived. We were always in homes that were, tightly tightly contained.

In Saudi Arabia, we lived in a 14 story high rise with, almost all, Arab faculty. And so that was a way of really integrating into the society. I'd like to talk just a little bit about, our home and our children. Our home was, a place of refuge for our family, and that was the principal reason for setting up our home. But I do believe that God used parts of it to have people in.

Now this was did not take place in our home, but it would have been typical of the Afghans who came to our house and had I put a, a sofa or a tablecloth on the floor and, the men, not me, the men would eat, their rice and, they're horesh off the floor in the in our living room. And that was an interesting experience. This little guy came to our home at the request of a vicar who in Shiraz, who, his mother was a wonderful, wonderful Christian. She passed away in childbirth and they needed a place for this little one to stay until they could find out a place to, keep him. His father needed to make some arrangements for him.

So Rodin came into our home. And I think the reason I'm holding him like that, I think, is because he had thrush in his mouth. And so it was kind of hard to feed him, but he was a wonderful little boy. And, it gave me the opportunity to carry on what his mother had begun and that was to pray that he would be a man of God. I didn't, I didn't, pray all that much.

I mean, I tried to pray. I tried to remember through the years, but sometimes God shows us what happens. And this is Rodin. He came to America. He went to engineering school in Colorado.

And at this point, he had become a follower of Christ, and he came to visit us in Ann Arbor, Michigan when we lived there. Isn't that a wonderful story? And an answer to his mother's prayers. This is a friend who became a believer in our Hong Kong apartment complex. And this is my friend, Varpu, who was Finnish and she was a, a very good friend in Saudi Arabia and had opportunities to share faith with her.

And I think she, at one time, she did become a believer. This is our daughter, Natalie, and she's sitting here right now. One of the things that is, because of my background, I wanted to have some, you know, Swedish traditions for my children. Well, in The Middle East, that's just not a practical thing to do. So, I decided that we would have to set up our own traditions.

And this was one tradition that we that we set up is that we would have fish on Christmas. So she went with her dad to the bazaar and got fish, and she carried it all the way home. And it was a very serious, event for her, but it shows to me, it to me, it encapsules that the things that we think we need to provide for our children are not always the things that they need. They need they need the traditions of the places that were around them. And so Natalie Natalie had a a really, good experience.

And this is James at the bank in in Saudi Arabia. This is James at a at a soccer meet with his Chinese friend. And this is our children snorkeling in the Red Sea. Now you talk about a tradition. Our daughter has never been to a prom.

She has never, been to, some of the things that our children here in The States take for granted, but we have to encourage the other traditions that were part of their life. And certainly circling in the Red Sea was, was a, a tradition that we did when we were in Saudi Arabia. And they had many friends from around the world. Palestinians, all kinds of Arab friends, European friends, and I think it enriched their lives. There's an interesting, you'll have to ask them about their schooling and the way that they were grown up.

I think it's unfair for me to tell their story, but I can tell you that they went to international schools. Natalie went and James both went to British school. We sent Natalie to, one year of American boarding school in Taiwan, and then she went with her roommate from Purdue from, Taiwan to Purdue and, got a degree at Purdue. And because those girls were roommates in Taiwan and they were roommates at Purdue, I think it greatly helped Natalie in her adjustment to, to coming back to The States because she could she could go out and do all kinds of things. And then she would come back and they could process together what they were experiencing as culture kids.

So that was one way that I think God protected our children. And James had his own experiences. I think it was in some ways more difficult for him because he came back as a freshman in high school. One thing that I noticed is the way that God protected our children was when my father was a layman, he was a very wonderful evangelist, and he led a man in our town, a young man, by the name of Joe Whitchurch to the Lord. And when, Joe Whitchurch went on to school and when Natalie went to Purdue, Joe Swicherich was her staff worker for InterVarsity.

Now, if you think about the generations passing through and the way God protected and led in that situation, it's pretty amazing, isn't it, that he would protect our children in that way? And, InterVarsity turned out to be a wonderful experience for Natalie. Well, interior design was never in my, study habits or in my studying, but it certainly I certainly had plenty of opportunity to do interior design when we moved from place to place. I had to we had to set up home in different continents. So I think God gave me that kind of that tweak in order to be able to set up homes.

God also provided for me opportunities for, teaching. This happens to be the the daughters of a prince in Iran, in in Saudi Arabia, and I had the opportunity to tutor them. In in Hong Kong, I had, what I thought was the dream job, and I worked in an international school. And this is a picture of a book, a study day, and I was trying to be Mother Goose. And in Hong Kong, you can you can get a real goose.

So that's what that is. My final, job was in Ann Arbor, Michigan when we moved there, and I was in administration in a Christian school. And I saw God work very evidently through a very small school and bringing it up to a larger school, and it's still in existence today. So I'm very thankful for just those little tidbits of time that God used. Well, what do we say about the blessing of God through our lives, that thread, those threads that weave and are made into something beautiful.

I think we're extremely grateful for the people who invested in us. People like Harold Erickson, our pastor. People like, our youth leaders. People like our Youth for Christ leaders. People that were influential in our lives for the person named Carol Meijer, who took opportunity to to mold me for one year before Glenn and I married.

There are people who invested in us and we ourselves have tried to invest in other people. And I think that's the way that God intends for us to do work. We are grateful people for people who have invested in us, and we're grateful for the opportunities to serve abroad. And we never felt as though we were independent of, of the church in The States. Our home church helped us and people prayed for us, and that was essential in helping us to adjust and to have ministry.

So if you look back, the church where I grew up and where my parents were married and where my grandparents were married and where we were married is in a lot, the building is no longer there. It's a parking lot for a big The school, one of the schools where I teach taught was made into a park. And what has endured? Well, you know that that God is at work in the lives of people, in in our lives and in our children's lives. And he's also been at work in the church that I grew up in.

The church that I grew up in was the Swedish Free Church. It was founded because people wanted to be free from the Lutheran church in Sweden, and they were stubborn, and they were they were very, insistent that Swedish be the language of the church. But eventually that church grew and it grew and it grew and it became something totally different. They had a robust mission program. They have, a mission to, people who are nearby, who need help, a benevolence mission.

There are many ways in which the Evangelical Free Church that you are part of has grown out of this little kernel of immigrants that came to The United States. So when we look at the immigrants that come to us and the one that Glenn meets with regularly, the pastor, this is the beginning of a new church. And we in this building have benefited from our forefathers, and we are very grateful for that heritage.