In 2009, when our son was three and still taking naps in the rocker with me, I was thinking a lot about missionaries around the world. They often came to speak at our church when they were in town, and they were the true celebrities in my mind, aside from doctors, nurses, and teachers.
We were living in Santa Barbara, California, at the time, and I knew that the local TV station had a series of classes that anyone could take about producing a television show.
I recruited some young students to volunteer behind the cameras, and we took the class together.
I had never done anything like hosting a TV show, but I was thrilled to begin inviting visiting missionaries from all over the world to be interviewed on our new Friday night show, Fishers of Men.
We produced 12 shows featuring missionaries from the Hopi Nation, Mexico City, Madagascar, and more. It was a ball. I don’t know how many people saw them, but at least everyone in the city was a click away from hearing their amazing stories, however inexperienced we may have been in presenting them.
I have almost nothing left of that experience except my 10-second intro on a disc that won’t allow me to transfer it onto anything. The site that held all of the interviews went offline without warning and all of the shows are now like a figment of my imagination.
All that is left is a website with this description…
“I created this show simply because I want people – not just ‘churchgoing’ people – to get the chance to hear the fascinating stories of people who have veered away from ‘the American dream’ of working, saving, owning, and retiring, and ventured out to see where God’s plans might take them. (In Matthew chapter 4, verse 19, Jesus is quoted as saying, ‘Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.’)
“Several stories in particular really stuck with me, egging me on to create a larger audience. Take Gary Haugen for example. He quit his job as an attorney when he realized that perhaps there was no one out there taking the risk of rescuing innocent girls enslaved in the sex trade. Now he travels across the globe, gets in good with scary dudes with guns who guard prostitute compounds, and rescues the women in the middle of the night when he thinks he can get them without getting shot to death. His wife’s main request is that he be home every weekend, sitting at the dining table, ready for a normal dinner with his family.
You, LORD, hear the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, and you listen to their cry, defending the fatherless and the oppressed, that the man of the earth may terrify no more.
Psalm 10:18
“Or take my neighbor’s mother. Upon her husband’s death, she realized her passion would be to help people in the poorest places in the world. She wrote Mother Teresa and asked if she could join her order. Mother Teresa wrote back…yes. Since then, she’s been in cities that are so destitute and dangerous to visit that her son’s family once had to hire a hearse to safely get into one of them.
“Then there’s the story of a couple from our church who have been missionaries in a tribe in South America for 32 years. They declined being interviewed on the show because their continuing work of translating the bible into the local tribal language – which, by the way, they had to first learn fluently – could actually get them killed if the ‘right’ people were to get word of it. They used to live and work in the wilderness but have been forced to the safety (and relative lifelessness) of a guarded building in the city.
“Missionaries, justice seekers, conservationists, translators, teachers, pastors, leaders, authors, speakers, you name it. I wish I had heard life stories like these when I was younger; they’re often only heard in churches. So this is my way of bringing the stories out of churches and into the global community.
“There is no money involved in any of this; we are all volunteers.
“Thanks for watching and reading!”
I continue to love hearing the stories of people who have stepped out of “normal” life in order to serve others rather than themselves, and I will continue to post their beyond-inspiring stories.
I hope that I, too, will be one of them someday, somewhere out in the world.
