Thursday, Dec. 28 am

Following upon an extended period of musical worship and growing excitement about God's love, Wycliffe Bible Translators' missionary Carol Anderson shared how God healed her from a feeling of failure and discouragement and the depression that resulted.

Anderson was born in Australia and moved to Washington State (USA) when she was young. Her non-Christian family was plagued with alcoholism, violence, and divorce. At the age of 13, she attended a youth camp where she met God and was transformed by a purpose and meaning for her life. She heard a missionary speaker there, and while she didn't know at that time what missions was all about, the experience set her on a life course for missions.

After joining a church filled with what she termed "dignified" and "spiritually mature" missionaries who became her role models, she met her husband, Neil. Subsequently, both joined Wycliffe with the goal of translating God's word for a tribe in Papua New Guinea.

The crowd roared with laughter as she shared her dislike of bugs and the story of a boy who brought her a bug on a stick. The bug leapt on her, and Anderson demonstrated for the group the dance she performed in order to remove the bug from her skirt. "So much for dignity," she said.

Since she couldn't aspire to dignity, she hoped she could gain spiritual maturity on the mission field. Unfortunately, she felt she wasn't performing in her work as well as she had hoped, and a sense of failure led to two years of depression. So she prayed for God to help her and renew His love in her.

First, God taught her to serve Him; this opened up past bitterness and resentment towards others that she had to forgive. Second, God gave her real belief in His love for her and tore down the image that she was trying to live up to, the image of a "dignified" and "mature" missionary. He helped her read scriptures in a new way to be able to see what God thinks of her.

Her joy came in the reality of God's love and citing 1 Cor 1:27-28 and 2 Cor 12:9, she realized that He chooses and uses ordinary, weak humans for His purposes. The crowd let out a shout affirmation to this promise of God!

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