It's Your Call: To a Missional or Missionary Life

By David P. Jacob

For most believers, several factors influence their missions call. Some are called to stay in their hometown and support missions at their local church, others are called to short-term mission trips, while others are called to spend a lifetime overseas as career missionaries. This SNAPSHOT book will highlight three things that can help you discover the adventure God has for you in his mission: prayer and Bible study, missionary mentorship, and short-term mission trips.

If you need to understand your call or if you know someone who does, get them to walk with David through "It's Your Call: To a Missional or Missionary Life".

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Carey Publishing
• Release date: Jan 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780878080526

Book preview

The Confusing Call

In a little out-of-the-way hotel in Ecuador, God woke me up just after 2:00 am. It wasn’t jet-lag, because we were in the same time zone as my home. It was God. Normally I’m a very sound sleeper, but that night I woke up in tears, disturbed that so many Ecuadorians didn’t know Christ. My burden for them was intense and I was overwhelmed with the need to do more to help them discover the Savior’s love. It took a good part of the night praying and writing in my journal to process all that God was doing in me.

I was already in Ecuador, near Quito, participating in a shoebox gift distribution for Operation Christmas Child (OCC). As the OCC Upper Midwest Director, my job was to promote the project in five states: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Traveling from church to church in these states, I encouraged people to pack shoebox gifts for needy children. Those gifts were then delivered to kids all over the world, sharing the good news of Jesus as we handed them out. In fact, yearly, I would travel to another part of the world to assist with the distribution of the gifts. That’s why I was in Ecuador. My team spent our days handing out gifts and sharing Christ with some of the neediest children in the country. This wasn’t my first mission trip. I’d been to Europe, Kosovo, and Panama, but I’d never felt a burden for the people like that night in Ecuador. This was different. What was God up to? Was He calling me to be a missionary to Ecuador?

Staring at the ceiling, I wondered if God was speaking to my wife back at home. We had been married for about ten years and had two small children. When my wife was little, she had heard a missionary speak at her church, and during the service she told God that if He ever called her to be a missionary, she would go. While in high school, she had taken four years of Spanish and knew the language quite well. She loved the Latin American culture, and I could easily see how God had lined things up for