Remember your calling, your passion, your inspiration - together
Ropeholder Event offers a simple way to engage your friends and inspire them to "hold the rope" for missionaries to unreached peoples. Formatted as a 90-minute, video-driven "discussion in a box," it doesn't get much easier. Sign up today.
A few days’ hike from the nearest city, through Papua New Guinea’s dense, lush forest lies the remote village of the Maliyali tribe.
For decades, the Maliyali chief mailed letter after letter, begging for missionaries to come and share “God’s Talk” with them. They knew there may be a God who is real, who loves and cares for them, but they did not know the story. They had no knowledge of the intimate details of who God is, what he does and how he chose to redeem them.
After a time, their letters shifted from, “Please send someone,” to “Have we been forgotten?”
In California, David and Emily knew they were called to go to where the Gospel was not yet preached. They partnered with an agency that is focused on Biblical translation and church planting. David and Emily were presented with the Maliyali, a people desperate for the story they were so ready to give.
For two years, they prepared to be uprooted. They sold all their belongings. They raised personal support to cover the expenses to move and build a new home. The one, insurmountable weight they could not lift— thousands of dollars in student debt.
David has a degree in theology and is geared with the skillset necessary to translate scripture into a language that has never been written. Emily's degree is in kinesiology and she is trained to give others physical care and advanced knowledge that provides healing. Both were tied and bound to future decades of loan repayment. The tribe’s future was still uncertain.
Through The GO Fund Champions, God prepared a way for David, Emily and their two children to build a home among these people. They were the first family accepted as partners of The GO Fund and they are there now, sharing God’s Talk with their new family.
Their new way of living comes at a cost. Emily has wrestled with debilitating stomach pains intermittently during their time. Their young daughter has suffered on-and-off again with different viruses and illnesses. The family was recently taken from their jungle home to the closest medical clinic when she was unable to shake a fever after several days.
The life they are finally able to lead is not a glamorous one, nor easy or popular. It comes with pain and uncertainty. However, they have experienced great joys and triumphs as well.
“As we cling to the Lord for strength and stability we are reminded of three truths,” They said. “One, that through hardship, trial and suffering the Lord is forging in us a resolve to be completely dependent on Him. Two, our hope is set on a Father who not only loves us but in His loving faithfulness has, time and time again, shown Himself in the past to be faithful enough to be trust yet again with our future! Three, furthermore, in His great goodness He allows us to be interwoven with a community of brother and sisters. You all, although distant, through your prayers, He provides us with those seen and unseen blessings that are in the accompaniment of our trials.”
For the tribe they have come to know and love? For them, there is no more waiting. There are no more unanswered letters – only God speaking through his servants as he calls many more into his kingdom.
As a young girl, Kaitlyn wanted to become either a marine biologist or an astronaut. Drawn to various sciences and to how things work, she wanted to be either far above the atmosphere or dive far below the oceans’ surface.*
As she grew older, she was prompted by family to earn a degree in early childhood studies. Perhaps she could teach the things she was passionate about to the younger generation.
Throughout her upbringing, Kaitlyn knew she was supposed to regularly attend church services and pray before meals and bed. However, faith never seemed like a priority worth pursuing. It was in her second year of university when she began to realize there may be more to who Jesus is than what she had grown to accept.
“It was a time in college when I realized that my friends weren’t really nice friends,” Kaitlyn said. “I was kind of depressed. I didn’t know the purpose of my life and was trying to find it out.”
She was invited by a college roommate to attend a church in the area near her school and she eagerly joined. When she heard the pastor’s words, it was as if what was once confused and hazy about scripture and the Christian faith was finally made clear. “I was hearing the Word and learning more about who God is and who Jesus really is. I never knew what it was to have a relationship with him,” she said.
Kaitlyn recommitted her life to Christ, and she knew the Lord was instilling in her a desire to share this newfound relationship and love with others. Full of refreshed perspective and curiosity for God’s work around the world, she became invested in groups of friends at her church who taught her about unreached people groups. The more she learned, the more her heart broke.
She joined a short-term missions trip to Southeast Asia. Her church has adopted a country in this region as their focused, un-reached nation to pray for, so they might one day see a church-planting movement happen.
Kaitlyn arrived with her team and she witnessed the reality of the darkness among the unreached. Idol worship, the kind she had only heard of in stories and film, is rampant. She observed real and raw devotion to statues and parents teaching their children how to bow down to golden, man-made forms of what they thought could save them.
“I couldn’t forget them,” she said. “I was meeting people who had never heard of Jesus before. I had never experienced that … They had never heard his name.”
Kaitlyn came home and knew she would return but it would be to live there in full-time ministry.
Everything had come together. Her purpose rested in her position as a follower of Christ. Her passion became to show others who had never heard his name a relationship they could also experience. Only one obstacle stood in the way between her and her new goal.
Student debt she accrued was being paid slowly thanks to her position as a preschool teacher. However, it would keep her from determining when she could join the team who planned to move with her to Southeast Asia.
“I couldn’t forget them, I was meeting people who had never heard of Jesus before. I had never experienced that. They had never heard his name.”
A supervisor at her church encouraged her to apply with The GO Fund.
Nervous and skeptical, Kaitlyn still applied. She interviewed and then was joyously accepted into The GO Fund’s Student Debt Repayment Program. “This weight lifted off my shoulders knowing that I have nothing keeping me from going tomorrow,” she said.
Kaitlyn expects to leave for Southeast Asia later this year. She looks forward to making disciples of this people group she has come to love — people who will hear the name of Jesus for the first time. She is excited to be a part of a church-planting movement that might not take her far above the earth’s atmosphere or below the ocean waves, but it is certainly taking her closer to a purpose the Lord is using to bring many more into his kingdom.
*Name changed for security.