Joe             Don "The Legend" Rollins             Tricia

Alaska 35 years ago

Dear Friends,

Do you know what it is like to desperately need someone to believe in you? To be so wrought with self-recrimination and second guessing that you aren’t sure who you are anymore? 25 years ago Joe and I were living in a remote Alaskan village seeking to bring the gospel to the 100 Eskimos among whom we had made our home. After one particularly troubling season when village drunkenness had kept me from sleep for weeks on end, I broke down and told Joe I didn’t think I could possibly endure the final year of our stint there. Hours of painful conversation later, overwhelmed and completely spent, we boarded a bush plane to go break the bad news to our supervisor, Don Rollins. As I sat looking out the dirty window at the miles of pristine tundra below, I couldn’t help but remember our very first interview with him at LAX airport a couple of years before.

Don was one of those bigger than life kinds of missionaries – one look at him and you knew you were in the presence of the stuff legends are made of. As a trailblazer for Jesus, he’d spent decades going where no man dared go before, his wife and three children following behind to set up housekeeping with each new adventure. I was more than a little intimidated as he sized us up at that first meeting, with his piercing blue eyes, gruff voice and face weathered from years under the Alaskan sun. A man with no use for small talk, Don sat us down and shared for over an hour, showing us pictures and regaling us with stories of how he’d flown his bush plane up and down the Nushagak river, establishing relationships with the people in the remote villages that lined it. In recent years, one group had begun to respond so Don was looking for someone to come and live there to carry out the work he’d begun. Barely married and just out of college, Joe and I must have radiated naiveté like a neon light as we told him of our excitement, confident we were the ones for the job.

With an abruptness honed by a lifetime in the bush, Don then began to question our motives, our character and our stamina. Feeling like he was doing everything in his power to talk us out of coming, we were startled when he stood up, stuck out his calloused hand and welcomed us on board. A couple of months later, he flew us to the village, showed us our small cabin, introduced us to a few Eskimos and left, promising to keep in touch. And he did – flying in every now and then to bring treats and much needed encouragement. As we got to know Don, our love and admiration for him grew. We saw how tenderly he’d cared for these souls around us and how carefully he had prepared the ground for seeds of truth. We felt as if he'd handed us a precious gift, one that we must protect with all our might.

Tears flowed freely as I looked back to that day and thought of how Don’s heart would break when we told him we thought we needed to leave. The enormous weight of responsibility pressed down on me, threatening to crush my already broken spirit. This was all my fault. I was the one who couldn’t handle the summer season when the fishing money came in and the drinking began. I was the one who didn’t have enough faith to trust God as I lay awake night after night, terrified of what might happen. I had failed, plain and simple.

In the hour plus plane ride my mind raced with things I was sure Don would say to us in response. I imagined him reminding us of how God had called us to that place, while stressing the importance of keeping commitments once they were made. I expected some serious words about the financial cost to the mission board who’d invested in us. Worst of all, I was sure Don would let us know in no uncertain terms what our leaving would do to the spiritual lives of the Eskimos he’d entrusted into our hands.

But none of that happened. When we sat down with Don over a cup of tea and homemade cookies, he listened as Joe shared and I cried, nodding and not saying much at all. When we were through, he began to affirm God’s call on our lives and told us of how we had a lifetime of ministry ahead in which God planned to use us. He went on to assure us that God would accomplish His work in our village in His time, regardless of what we chose to do, but that what mattered most in that moment was our welfare. As Don spoke I could feel the weight lifting from my shoulders. Deeply moved, I realized that as important as that ministry was to him, and as much as he had sacrificed for it, Joe and I – our spiritual and emotional health and our faith – mattered more. It is hard to explain, but knowing that Don was for us, that he would always care most deeply about our well being, changed everything. Somehow as that veteran of the mission field gave us the freedom to leave, we found ourselves empowered instead to stay. That day we went back to our village where we served out our time with joy amidst great difficulty while God did a great work, both among the people and in our hearts.

Last week as I was pondering the first phrase in our Living Loved passage -- If God is for us -- I thought of Don Rollins and how much my life changed because that man came alongside like a cheering crowd when life had dealt the blows of a knockout round. And then I began to meditate on how much more my daily existence might be affected if I really grasped that the Almighty, Creator of all, Lord of the Universe is for me, that He is always on my side, that He holds my welfare close to His heart. Frankly, the idea has overwhelmed me.

God is for me…

whether I’m sinking or swimming or soaring the heights.