Prologue

There was a window over the kitchen sink in the little three-bedroom house. A mother gathered up a little girl with blonde hair. She turned her daughter’s face to the night sky and asked:

“Do you think that’s heaven?” 

The clouds shimmered of pink and purple and blue, shot through with moonbeams, alive with color and light. 

The little girl nodded. 

Maybe the memory was a dream, but the spark of wonder was real.

Before long, a sister came. Sometimes the blonde little girl and her father would sneak away from the baby’s cries and watch The Little Mermaid. They would share a bag of M&Ms, if the little girl was in a sharing mood.

The girl watched The Little Mermaid until she combed her hair with a fork, until she pretended to be a mermaid in the bathtub, until she could quote the movie without missing a word.

She could quote other things, too, like Dr. Suess books and Bible passages and her classmates’ lines from the Christmas play. She daydreamed too much to play sports and she cried because she never won a ribbon on field day, but she always got straight A’s in school. 

She grew taller, though never very tall. She loved to ride bikes and read biographies and climb trees with her sister. She wanted very much to follow Jesus, and she tried too hard to be good. Most of the time she was quiet; but she was loud on the inside, and she never doubted that God knew her voice. And as far back as she could remember, she fell asleep praying to the Maker of Heaven.

Sometimes she wished she had more friends; sometimes she wished she was pretty like her sister. Always she was lost in thought, pondering theology or her own mood or the injustices of the world.

With time and prayer, she grew to care about one injustice most of all— the reality that one third of the world had never met anyone who could tell them about Jesus.

When the girl was nineteen, she had a radical encounter with Love. 

She was different then. She sang and her eyes sparkled and she wept over God’s love for her, and she wanted nothing more than to spend her life telling the world.

Until one day, all was darkness. Unrelenting darkness.

The light crept in ever so slowly, a dawn so long it seemed light would never break the horizon. But when it did, she could never unsee it.

In the meantime, she finished college. She worked odd jobs—six months here, a year there—because she had not forgotten the only thing she could do with her life. 

At long last, she found a place where she fit. Where the people she labored alongside lost sleep over those who had never heard. She wasn’t a very good evangelist, and not always as brave as she hoped. Her gift, instead, was drawing others out, unlocking the dark places and inviting the light. She flourished as a mentor, a coach for young missionaries exploring a life overseas.

She grew to love a far-away place in the East, where evangelism was illegal and the name of Jesus wasn’t spoken. 

And, like the blonde little girl who combed her hair with a fork, she wanted to be part of that world.

One night, she prayed for a dream about moving there.