For those of you who don’t know I broke my leg. This has clearly changed all of my plans, but some plans were changed for the better. Because I’ve been unable to work my schedule was free enough so I could volunteer at my Church’s VBS program in July. The theme of the VBS was “Twist and Turns” looking at how following God’s plans will change the game of your life. I was asked to speak for the Monday closing session about the twist and turns I’ve had in my life becoming a missionary. This is paraphrase of my speech typed up.
My name is Hannah Reed, and I’m here to talk to you today about the twists and turns I’ve had in my life in becoming a missionary.
I grew up 5 minutes from Wakeshema, and I lived a pretty ordinary life. But unlike people around me, I had no clue what I wanted to do when I grew up. One thing I knew I didn’t want to do was go to college, but beyond that, I had no direction.
Things started to change in my life in the summer of 2020, and I mean more than just the pandemic.
I was 17 years old, about to start my senior year of high school, when my family decided to sell our house here in Michigan and buy a sailboat in Kentucky. We were going to do the great loop; you start anywhere on the map and make a big circuit around the east side of the country. It sounded like an adventure to me, so I was excited to leave!
And while it was fun and I’m thankful for those experiences, I still didn’t know what I was going to do next. Things changed quickly, but not in the way I thought they would. At the start of 2021, we had just reached Florida, sailing on our boat, when we found out my dad was sick. The doctors didn’t know exactly what was wrong, so we didn’t know how to fix it either. This was a twist in my life that I wasn’t planning on or wanting. It made me even more uncertain about the future. So, with the news of my dad’s health, we had to stop sailing, and we ended up staying still on the boat in Florida without finishing the loop.
Life became normal and boring; yes, that can happen even while living on a boat! I was going to graduate in the next month, and the only plan I had was to work at Camp Michawana, the summer camp I grew up going to. I felt like I needed some bigger life goals to work towards, so I sat down and made a list of goals I would like to complete within the next 5 years. One of the events on this list was going on an out-of-country mission trip. I didn’t think this would happen for a while, but then I received an email from Camp Michawana asking if anyone would like to go to Guyana, South America, for a week to help run a summer camp. I took this as a clear sign from God that I needed to be on that trip!
So, after working at Camp Michawana for the summer, I headed to South America for the first time. This was not what I expected to happen that summer, but God had better plans! I had a great week in South America, but it was still just one week. Because of this trip, lots of people in my life assumed that I wanted to be a missionary, and to that I said NO!
Just because I went to a different country for one week didn’t mean I wanted to do that for the rest of my life. That means I would have to give up my family, my native language, and a good Wi-Fi connection.
So instead, I did what I knew best at that time: I accepted an internship at my camp and worked there for a total of 6 months. I thought that was where God wanted me, and while I learned a lot from that time, I was actually being disobedient. God kept calling me to missions, and I would redirect my focus to camp ministry. I was good at it, so why would I give it up?
Eventually, my family convinced me to come back to Florida and find something else to do. I felt concerned that my life would be directionless again and that I would just waste my time doing nothing important. After being home for only a couple of days, my parents told me they wanted to go to a missionary conference in Virginia, and they wanted me to come too. I was totally against that plan; I didn’t care about missions, and I thought I knew that I was destined to work in camp ministry and nothing else. I was not going to be a missionary. But after some more convincing on their part, I agreed to go, mostly to make them happy.
This convention changed the path of my life, and it was another twist I would have never seen coming! There were hundreds of booths with different missionaries representing hundreds of countries. I never realized that there was this great need for missionaries. I learned that over 1/3 of the world does not know about Jesus, and some of them don’t even have the resources to read the Bible or go to church. God really worked in my heart that weekend, and I was able to meet many people there who were faithful to God’s calling in their lives.
One booth, in particular, stuck out to me. Kontakt Mission, they’re a missions agency that specifically sends missionaries to Europe. After having a brief interview there, I agreed to set up a trip for the spring of 2022. So now, at 19, I was finally feeling like my life had some direction! I was going to go on a short-term trip to Europe and see what God would do next. I was still hesitant to consider being a long-term missionary, but it was always in the back of my head. So, in May 2022, I went to Germany for 2 weeks and then to Albania for another 2 weeks. During my time there, I was able to meet other people my age pursing being a missionary and I was able to serve the local churches. It was an amazing experience, but I still wasn’t sure what could be next.
Everyone around me was going to college to be a missionary, and like I mentioned earlier, that was never something I was going to do. But I witnessed the change that happened in a person when they accepted Jesus as their savior, and I felt like I needed to be a part of that happening. Like Romans 10:14–15 How then can they call on the One in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe in the One of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone to preach? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” I felt like I had to be a part of this call to share the good news, but I still didn’t know how.
But all of a sudden, God started changing the game for my life. I started considering that maybe I did have to go to school to be a missionary. And with the Google search for “Cheap Bible Schools,” I heard about Ethnos360 Bible Institute for the first time. It was an inexpensive 2-year program that taught through the entire Bible and focused on missions. But, like I said my whole life, I’m not going to college. But God had other plans; everywhere I looked, I heard about this school. My friend had a cousin who had a friend who went to this school. Someone I had been following on Instagram for years had gone to this school and decided to post about it. The last straw for me was while I was working at Camp Michawana for my second summer. One of my campers had a backpack that said, “Ethnos 360 Bible Institute.” When I asked her where she got it, she had no clue.
After sharing all of this with a friend, I decided that maybe I needed to look into this school. I doubted I would be able to afford it. But when I checked, I had the exact amount needed for the first payment in my savings account—no more and no less. So, less than a month before school started for that year, I applied and got accepted.
While at Bible school, I learned so many things. I don’t have enough time to share everything I learned, but one of the most important things I learned was the need for missionaries. There are people all over the world who will die and never have the chance to hear the gospel and learn about Jesus. They might speak a language that no one else knows, and they may live too far away to ever encounter another Christian. Someone has to go to them, or they quite literally have no hope. And these people know their lives are missing something important, but no matter how much they try to do things to bring joy to their lives, it’s lacking. Because knowing Jesus is God’s son changes the game. So, this brings up two important points for us.
- We need people to go and reach these people, because God loves them so much, and they deserve a chance to know that.
2. We need to be able to share Jesus with everyone we meet, even our classmates and neighbors.
Because no matter where you live or what language you speak, knowing who Jesus is will change your life. Why would we be selfish and keep it to ourselves?
I just finished my first year of Bible school in May this year, and now that I know God’s plans for me are to be a missionary, I thought everything else would be really straightforward and easy. The next step I had in my life was to go on a mission trip to the Philippines. The Philippines has lots of what we call unreached people groups, so entire towns or villages full of people who will never have a chance to hear about Jesus unless someone goes out of their way to share it with them. I had plans since Nov of 2022 to go on a two-week trip there to serve and to see if that would be a country I could possibly serve in once I graduated school, but God had other plans. On May 24th, a week before my trip to the Philippines was scheduled to leave, I fell on a hill, dislocated, and broke my leg in three places. And instead of leaving for a different country, I had surgery in Battle Creek. This was not what I had planned for my summer at all.
And it’s been a really hard two months. Going on this trip was a good idea, but I have to trust that God has something even better planned for me. Looking back on these past 3 years of my life, I can see that no matter what you are doing in your life, there will be twists and turns, but it doesn’t matter what life throws at you or how hard it is to trust in God. Because following God changes the game.