Advice for My Daughter

Earlier this month I was in Foz do Iguaçu an amazing city on the border of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. Every morning I would walk across a bridge on the Parana River to speak for four hours to a gathering of young Paraguayan missionaries preparing for missionary service among Muslims. In the evenings I would return to address a similar three-hour gathering of Brazilian missionaries-in-training preparing to take the gospel into the far reaches of the Muslim world.
Foz do Iguaçu is a perfect setting for such a training. The city on the southeastern stretch of Brazil’s Amazon jungle is now home to thousands of Lebanese and Bengali Muslim immigrants. Foz do Iguaçu is one of the hundreds of global gateway cities that God is opening up around the world, cities where Christians can openly reach Muslims with the gospel of Jesus Christ – and through these relationships, impact the ends of the earth from which they come.

One evening, before rising to address the several hundred Brazilian brothers and sisters who had gathered to hear me speak about Muslim movements to Christ, a lovely young woman approached me with a question. Looking up at me through earnest 24-year-old eyes, I couldn’t help but think of my own daughters aged 20 and 25. Through an interpreter, she asked me for advice. “God has put a love for Iranian Muslims on my heart,” she said, “Can you give me advice?”

“Run away, run fast, run the other direction!” This is what my heart cried out. This was my natural inclination, the advice I might have given to my own daughter, if I followed my natural paternal instincts. Instead, I told her of the wonderful work that God is doing among Iranian people, where more Muslims are coming to Christ today than anywhere else on earth. I told her of fruitful and courageous work by groups like Elam Ministries that has grown out of the Assemblies of God Church in Iran. “Oh,” she said with excitement, “I am from the Assemblies of God Church, too!”

I couldn’t protect her. I couldn’t promise her that she would be safe, or that she would be okay. But I could assure her that God was in control, that He loved the people of Iran, and that He was already at work among them, bringing countless thousands of them to faith and new life in Jesus Christ. She smiled, thanked me and dissolved back into the congregation. I whispered a prayer for her as she walked away.

Later this month my 20-year-old daughter, Amanda, will return from a summer of missionary work in India. I couldn’t help thinking of her, as I reflected on the dangers and promise of being on mission with God. I remembered vividly the feelings her mother and I felt when she boarded the plane to India. Launching our precious children into the darkness is one of the scariest feelings a parent ever experiences. But knowing that God is in control, that He was already at work among the people to whom He was calling them, meant it was going to be okay. In fact, it was the only way the kingdom of this world, the kingdom of darkness, would ever be shattered by the Kingdom of Light.

A young generation of Christian men and women all over the world are hearing that same calling from God. They don’t want to cower from the challenge of the world’s least-reached peoples that are immigrating to our cities. They are rising to the challenge, entering the cities, planting their lives among a people who have no hope of eternal life, unless we go. These missionaries need your prayers, your support, your encouragement. Will you join them…with your prayers, your investment in their lives and ministries? These missionaries are your sons, your daughters, your lights in the darkness.

David Garrison
Director, Global Gates