Runaway Saint by Lisa Samson

Author:Lisa Samson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2013-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

She goes back to the summer of her arrival in Kazakhstan, where she’d gone with four other young women and seven young men to serve the Lord. They had one backpack apiece, and most of the packing requirements had been spelled out in advance on a photocopied sheet. Their destination was the capital, Almaty, where they would work with a missionary group for four weeks before being divided into smaller groups to travel west, assisting smaller enclaves.

“You have to understand something about me,” she says. “The reason I was there, the reason I’d gone to Bible college in the first place. It wasn’t piety. It wasn’t missionary zeal. No, my parents had become convinced in high school that I was a ‘troubled’ person, that without discipline and structure, I was going to ruin my life. In some ways I believed them, I guess. It’s hard to reconcile this with the way I think now, because I look back at that girl and she seems so innocent and naive to me. But according to Grandmom and Grandpop, I had a wicked way in me, as the song says, and after I ran away as a teenager—scared me to death, by the way—I figured I might as well try the program and went off to Washington Bible College. They were thrilled with my apparent turnaround. Everybody figured I went to Kazakhstan for the same reason.” She rubs the palms of her hands down her thighs. “Whatever the reason, it was exhilarating when we first got there.”

She recounts how the initial weeks in Almaty fulfilled all of her expectations concerning the trip. Working side by side with the other volunteers, rolling out their sleeping bags on the hard floor of an old building, they spent their days renovating to host worship services. It was as if she’d joined a commune of Christian hippies, a selfless unit intent on loving one another and serving the strange and marvelous people they found themselves among.

Traveling behind the Iron Curtain so soon after its fall felt the same as traveling back in time. Surrounded by real deprivation, it was hard for a well-fed American girl to keep thinking of herself as troubled. It was hard to think of herself at all—and when she did, she realized she was blessed.

After the building work was complete, the volunteers fanned out into the surrounding neighborhoods, rounding up children for an improvised Vacation Bible School, where the language barrier resulted in much more humor than confusion as they talked to the kids about Jesus, made crafts, and ate the only snack the youth in charge thought appropriate, punch and cookies. The fact that they were Americans made them a popular attraction. They could hardly have been more exotic to the kids of Almaty if they’d come from outer space.

As Aunt Bel recollects these events, she channels some of the exuberance she must have felt then. The worry lines recede from her face and she seems quite young. “My sense of myself started to change,” Aunt Bel says.

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