Just prior to Christmas, 2003, a
friend gave Bill and Lena two Peruvian alpaca sweaters. In 1993, while on a
missions trip to Peru, God spoke to this friend, telling her to buy the
sweaters and instructing her to wait until He told her who to give them to and
when. Ten years later, God told her to give them to Bill and Lena. As she did
so, she said, “There’s a message from God in those sweaters.”
Bill asked, "What is it?"
She said, "That's for you to find
out."
So Bill prayed. Every day, he cried
out to the Lord in a loud voice, "Oh God! What's the message?"
God spoke clearly, confirming what
everyone suspected. The message was to go to Peru as missionaries.
Bill writes about two of the
confirmations:
In March of 2000, my wife (Lena) and I
were serving as collegiate missionaries with the Assemblies of God. While on a
missions trip to Mexico, we drove through a barrio of economic orphans—a
community of children, separated from their families by the harsh conditions of
poverty. The community was composed of cardboard shacks covered in plastic
garbage bags. A large crowd of dirty children in tattered clothing chased our
van begging us to throw out anything of value. A veteran missionary working
with us explained that their parents were migrant farm workers, hundreds of
miles away, harvesting crops in another state. The children had been left to
grow up on their own. I asked why they were not in school. We were told that,
although public schooling was free, the government requires the families to pay
the price of a school uniform. These families never earned enough to pay the
nominal fee. The missionary continued to explain that the parents of these
children never went to school, these children will never go to school and that
their children would never go to school. Their only hope was to wait until they
were old enough to work the migrant fields themselves.
I was deeply affected by the
experience—specifically, five aspects of the children’s lives: (1) the extreme
poverty, (2) the absence of adult care, (3) the seeming injustice that, for
lack of a small amount of money, the children’s development (mentally,
vocationally, and spiritually) was forever constrained, (4) the absence of
hope, and (5) the potential for ministry. Where was the Church—the
representative of Christ in this barrio? Who was nurturing them, protecting and
comforting them? Who was telling them about the sacrifice of Jesus and the
power of the Holy Spirit? Who was teaching them to read, so that they could
find work, be liberated from poverty and drink deeply from the word of God? Who
was doing the type of ministry that Jesus did? The barrio was as laden with
strategic potential as it was heartbreaking. There was an opportunity to meet
real needs, transforming the children’s lives with education and the gospel. As
our van drove away, the dust from the unpaved road fell upon the children’s
forlorn faces. They appeared as wanderers, “foreigners to the covenants of the
promise, without hope and without God in the world. (Eph 2:12)” Tears welled in
my eyes and I prayed, “Lord, I beg of you, if you ever move me out of
collegiate ministry, I pray that you will put me in a ministry where we can
change the lives of kids like these!”
In January, 2004, shortly after we
received the sweaters, I asked an Assemblies of God World Missions
representative about the missions work going on in Peru. He said that the need
was great and proceeded to speak of a ministry called ChildHope (formerly Latin
America ChildCare). He informed me that ChildHope works with schools in
impoverished communities, where they provide an education, gospel teachings,
and ministries of compassion (such as feeding and medical programs). ChildHope
is a ministry doing the work of the Messiah, transforming the lives of the
poor. He continued to say that ChildHope in Peru needed a director. I
remembered my prayer in Mexico and knew that God was ordering our lives. God
inspired my prayer in Mexico to confirm our call to Peru and to ChildHope.
Many years prior, during a missions
service, Lena had a vision of a woman and child. They were dressed like the indigenous
people of the Andes mountains. Lena sensed that God was calling her to work
with women and children as a missionary. When I left the meeting with the
missions representative, I took a brochure on ChildHope home and asked Lena if
she had ever heard of ChildHope. She said, "Don't you remember? After the
vision, I looked into working with them." Lena sensed then that the time
was not right. But, many years later, God brought it all together. Through a
prophetic word, a prophetic vision and a prophetic prayer, God called the
Shraders to serve as missionaries in Peru.
