A Book Of Remembrance

By Terry Colson

Terry Colson and her husband, Jody, along with their three children, have served as church planting missionaries since 1988. After spending nearly 6 years in Hawaii, they moved to Chuuk, Micronesia, where they are currently serving in a church planting ministry.

This “Book of Remembrance” is dedicated to our Lord Jesus Christ, and to our family members, friends, and supporters who have generously upheld us in prayer and financial support over the years. To God be the glory, great things He hath done!

“Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before Him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon His Name. And they shall be Mine, saith the LORD of hosts, in that day when I make up My jewels; and I will spare them, as a man spareth his own son that serveth him.” Malachi 3:16-17

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781435777606

Book preview

TO THE UTTERMOST PART

Out of the deep water with its shades of dark blue

Into the turquoise splendor of a brighter hue

Near the reef, we pause for a closer view

Checking the coral as we find our way through

The coconut palms that grow in the sand

Crowd the mangrove trees past the edge of the land

Where in murky brown water they patiently stand

Forming around the small island an impenetrable band

And there on the dock built in World War II,

A small crowd of people, and a pig or two

Are patiently waiting to see what we will do

If what they’ve heard about us is really true

And so we reach them, and they give us a hand

As we unload our stuff and climb up on the land

We follow them to the place prepared beforehand

And we speak in a language they understand

As we tell them of Jesus, and His Grace and Glory

They sit, mesmerized by the wonderful story

And here in a world time and progress forgot

The Gospel is preached in the uttermost part

Chapter 1 - Field of Souls

We work the field of souls Together you and I,

Some fields are blooming now,

Other fields are dry;

We are not the same,

But differences aside,

We work the field of souls,

Together you and I.

Wayne Watson

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    Help me! I’m going to die! I’m going to die!

    Here, hold my hand. Call on Jesus!

    The man grabbed my hand in a bone-crushing grip as he lay on the hospital gurney.

    Jody! He recognized me.  Just a few weeks ago I had visited his island and given him a Gospel tract.  He had been sitting under a tree with some friends.  Now he was in the Emergency Room, with a filipine in his chest, a small homemade arrow made out of sharpened rebar and shot with a slingshot.

    The doctor asked, Missionary, can you help me?  I need the surgeon now!  He’s out swimming.  Can you go find him and bring him back?

    I ran to the truck and we raced to the Blue Lagoon Resort at the other end of the island, dodging potholes and slow-moving vehicles.  I confess we broke the 15 mile per hour island-wide speed limit, although I don’t know by how much.  God led me directly to the doctor who was just coming out of the restaurant.  We ran back to the truck and went even faster on the return trip to the hospital.

    There was no time for anesthesia, or to move him to the operating room.  The surgeon grabbed a knife and opened the man’s chest.  Then he saw that there were 2 holes in the bottom chamber of his heart, caused by the arrow.  He quickly sewed them up.  One of the nurses waiting outside was a relative of the wounded man.  They needed O positive blood, and she told me, My husband is O positive—can you go find him and bring him here?  I ran out to the truck where Aaron, my friend visiting from South Carolina, was waiting.

    I smelled smoke.  Aaron said, The truck caught on fire after you went in the hospital.  A piece of cardboard fell on the top of the gas tank.  Flames were blazing up between the cab and the bed.  I don’t know where the cardboard came from.  Aaron pulled the truck away from the hospital, so if it blew up it wouldn’t destroy the building.  He happened to pull up beside the drainage ditch.  It has been raining a lot, so the ditch was full of water.  We’d had our dog Traveler in the truck the night before when we’d gone out fishing, and his water bucket was still in the back of the truck.  Aaron grabbed that and began throwing water, mud and anything else wet he could find onto the truck to put the fire out.  It’s a miracle it didn’t explode.

    We prayed that the man would live long enough to receive Christ as His Savior.  He died two days later without ever having regained consciousness.

Jody Colson

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    My husband, Jody, and I and our two girls, Andrea and Alisha, moved to Hawaii on January 15, 1991 as church planting missionaries.  I was seven months pregnant with Matthew, our youngest child and only boy.  The first few weeks were busy ones trying to find a house, furniture, and a baby doctor.  Matthew was born with some health problems, so I was very little help to Jody in those months before we had our first church service, the first Sunday of June.  There were 16 people there, including us.  A friend of ours in South Carolina printed 5,000 fliers with the Gospel and information on our church.  Jody would take 300 at a time and pass them out door-to-door in the area around the community center where we were meeting.  Six months later we were running a grand total of 25.  The area was mostly Buddhist, and the work was very dis-couraging.  Sometimes Andrea and Alisha, ages 6 and 4, would go with Jody to keep him company.

    Jody began to pray that God would direct him to a group of people who were open to the Gospel, even if he had to learn their language.  Honolulu is full of communities from the various islands in the Pacific and around the world.  One Saturday he and Alisha were passing out fliers, and came across a row of apartments.  Most of the people weren’t home, so they left fliers in the doors.  The next day a young couple came just as we were starting our Sunday morning service, carrying one of our fliers.  They were Chuukese.

    Back then, I didn’t even know where the Chuuk Islands were.  I learned they are part of the Federated States of Micronesia, and I remembered a Micronesian girl from college.  (I thought of her as a cute island girl, from somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.  She taught me how to whistle one night as we were walking together to the library after work.) As we began to reach out to the Chuukese community, most of whom were in Hawaii for medical care, many were saved.  Their hearts were so open to the Gospel! Before long our church had doubled in size, with our congregation almost entirely Chuukese people.  We found out that most Americans didn’t want the bother of sitting through interpreted services, but since many of the older Chuukese people didn’t understand English, we began to use an interpreter in all our services.  Many of these people were only in Hawaii for a few months, then they would return to their islands 4,000 miles to the southwest of Honolulu.  We had a window of opportunity with them that we didn’t want to miss.  Soon we were singing in the language, and looking everywhere for Chuukese Bibles.

    As folks who had been saved through our ministry in Hawaii prepared to return to Chuuk, they asked us to visit them, to share the Gospel with their friends and families back home.  Many of them began to pray that we would move to Chuuk.  For five years the children and I waited at home in Hawaii while Jody traveled in and out of Chuuk.  The thought of moving there never crossed my mind.  Matthew had been born hypothyroid, a condition which requires daily medication and careful follow-up by a qualified endocrinologist, with periodic blood tests and x-rays.  I thought it was hard enough to be a missionary in Hawaii, which seemed to me like living in a foreign environment after growing up in the Southeastern United States.

    Jody made eleven trips to the various islands, sometimes taking teams for special medical or dental clinics, and sometimes just traveling alone.  Then, on June 8, 1997, we moved to Chuuk.  After working among the people for nearly 6 years in Hawaii, then watching hours of video from Jody’s trips, I thought I was prepared for life here.  I wasn’t.  I remember the scary feeling in the pit of my stomach as the plane swooped down over the tiny islands on the outer edge of the lagoon, then lined up for the landing on the slightly