Thanks, Faith, for your honest and specific questions. You are at a very significant time in your life. Your formal education, your teaching experience, your short term exposure, plus other things, have all brought you to this threshold.

1. "Go and stay." I respond to this. I praise the Lord for any and all cross-cultural experiences the Lord brings into peoples' lives, but deep and foundational work will always be done by those who take the time and effort to penetrate the worldview of a culture, and this is done by those who "go and stay."
   
   
2. "A burden for any one place." Don't let this worry you. We are all different. Missionary biographies are replete with those who had a lifetime call to a particular people, such as Hudson Taylor's call to the Chinese. Others, like C.T. Studd, moved around. Did Paul have a call to a particular culture or geographical location? He went as he was led of the Spirit.
   
   My own call came as a child. I knew He wanted me to be a missionary. I thought it was going to be in Korea, but He shut this door. Through a chain of circumstances He led me first to Canada, then to Latin America in general and university students in particular. Thirty years in Colombia has made this people very dear to us, but we lived in four different countries and served in many more. The fundamental call of all of us is to God and He will lay the burdens on our hearts when and how He pleases, as we are open to Him.
   
   
3. "Mission organization." I can resonate with your desire to find your team. I like your categories (unity of purpose, commitment to train me, work cross culturally with youth). I think you are on the right track. For some it will be: I'm called to such and such a place and people - how can I get there? For you it is, I want to find my team, people who have the same vision I have for youth and I'll go with them where they are working in a way that I can identify with. Go for it.

Forgive the commercial, but one benefit of the Urbana Convention is that you'll be able to meet many agencies focusing on what your burden is. As you see their exhibits, their style of presentation, their literature, their patterns, their personalities, I think you will find yourself drawn to some more than others. Put all this before the Lord and ask for His sovereign guidance, His divine appointments.

May many more like you be among those that throng the exhibition hall that crucial week at the end of this year!

The Lord bless you, Faith.

Jack