Testimonies
From Angela Mohn
student from Reading, Pennsylvania
Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I set you apart. I appointed you to be a prophet to the nations. Jeremiah 1:5
A father is an irreplaceable person in a girl’s life. I know that firsthand! Even though God proved His love for me and showed me countless times that He is my Father, I still used to struggle because my earthly father wasn’t always there. I used to be so jealous of other girls when I watched them with their daddies—playing and laughing—because I didn’t have that as a kid.
As I grew older though, I realized how blessed I actually am. Not only do I have the best Father in the world, but He has placed many father figures and spiritual fathers in my life who really care about me. I am so blessed to not have grown up in an abusive or totally unloving home, like a lot of kids do, but God placed me in a loving home and put many people in my life who genuinely love me.
Don’t get me wrong—even though I realized God’s goodness and recognized Him as my Father, I still had my ups and downs knowing I didn’t have a father in my home. It has been a 20 year healing process. Finally, God brought me to a discipleship school where He totally healed me. He is my number one Father who loves me unconditionally and I choose to forgive and love my earthly father as he is.
From Marissa Barnett
student from Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania
The hot sand sifts into my shoes as I struggle to adjust my long skirt. The heat lingers beneath my head covering creating tiny beads of sweat. “So this is Africa,” is the thought that echoes through my head.
Our School of Global Transformation team had joined a medical team from Pennsylvania, and together we had traveled to a Muslim community in Kenya called Garissa. Unlike Kenya’s modern, lush capital, Garissa’s streets were filled with women in long head coverings, piles of burning trash and random cows and goats wandering through it all.
Every day the medical team and two from our team would head out to a village and treat as many people as time allowed. Overall, we saw more than 700 people in four days. The rest of us did cleaning jobs, mostly scraping off mud from the recent floods. A few afternoons we joined up with the medical team and some of us did some face painting with the children.
Crouched in the sand one afternoon, with a dozen small black hands, fingers caked in paint, waving in my face, I felt a strange overwhelming feeling of fulfillment. It was one of those moments where you know you are exactly where God wants you to be, doing just what He desires, and suddenly nothing else holds appeal.
I feel safe to say that perhaps it’s this kind of feeling that gives us the strength in the “heat of the day.” But what was especially wonderful was coming alongside and helping missionaries Amos and Grace with the mission God’s given them. We pray for missionaries all the time but what a privilege it is to come alongside them and work with them.