I lost my mind for the Lord

 Losing my mind for the Lord

Anxiety.  It's been with me for almost all of my life.  When I was younger, I was afraid that my mother would die. I was afraid of bullies in school.  I was bullied at my first job out of high school as well.  Many things made me anxious, but at that time I did not know the Lord.

In 1987, my life turned around when I received Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. But I was still anxious. I had insomnia and did not eat much by the way of healthy foods.  I ate a lot of junk food. 

After my husband and I married, I still had anxiety.  Ministry, work, personal life, relationships with family, having children, taking care of our home and our children.  Sometimes it felt like way too much.

Then we went to missionary candidate school.  We prayed much about this, starting before we were married.  The Mister was interested in Bible translation since he was in college.  I became interested in missionary work as a new believer. The candidate school was for 2 weeks, and a week afterward for an enrichment conference. Afterward, we were missionary appointees to Odesa, Ukraine.

Pre-field ministry, during which time we present our ministry to churches and raise support, took us 5 years.  The first 2 years were quite slow.  The Mister quit his secular job in 2000, and we were full-time on pre-field. That year we had 60 meetings! In late spring of 2001, we went to field prep seminar, which was to help us get ready to leave for the field. In summer 2001, we made a temporary move to Bloomington, Indiana to study Russian. It was a 9-week course, so we stayed there for 10 weeks. In June 2002, we finally left the United States for Odesa.