Category Archives: News: Missionaries and missionary stories

Identify this missionary kid . . .

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Who’s the taller one in front, the ten-year-old?

One evening last summer Tim and I were both lounging in bed, both reading. Suddenly I said, “Hey, look at this.” I covered the caption of the picture and showed him. “Who do you think that goofy (but loveable) looking ten-year-old boy is?”

Tim barely looked up from his engrossing novel. “I have no idea.”

“No, seriously!” I said. “Look at him! Can’t you tell who it is?”

“Am I supposed to know?”

“Yes! You should be able to tell!”

He sighed. “Give me a hint. What year is it?”

“It’s 1973.”

Tim squinted at the picture and acted like he was going to turn back to his book again. Honestly, I couldn’t get his attention away from it for two seconds.

So I reminded him that I was reading this book as part of my research for Witness Men. Then I showed him the cover. It was Torches of Joy, by John Dekker, a missionary.

“All right. Now, who’s that boy?” I raised my eyebrows in anticipation.

“Is it Ted Dekker?”

“That’s it! Ted Dekker at ten years old! Remember, his parents went to work among the Dani people in Irian Jaya, I mean Papua, and he says that growing up in that jungle is part of what gave him the background for his. . . .”

But Tim had already turned back to his gripping novel. I think he didn’t even hear me.

What was that compelling book that drew him like a magnet?

Oh, yes. It was Obsessed.

By Ted Dekker.

Power Pieces (Witness Men ch 4)

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“Tuan!” the boy called. “Tuan Botemon!”

Tom Bozeman came out of his little pole-and-bark house to see the bright-eyed boy. Tom had lived here among this Dani tribe a few months, and had learned enough words to begin teaching the people a little bit.

“Greetings!” he said, snapping his fingers with the boy’s. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Hilitu,” the boy said. “I saw you at the cannibal feast yesterday.”

I’m posting one chapter at a time of this children’s book of true stories. Each chapter will be up for about a week and then will come down. Read along with me to get a taste of what the book will be like when it’s published!

The Witness Men, Introduction

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­­ I don’t call it “Introduction,” because children always skip introductions. But this comes before the two chapters I posted in the summer. I’ll leave it up for about a week.

I Need to Explain Something . . .

Several things, actually. And they’re all about names.

I posted this chapter for about a week and then removed it, as I’ve done with others:  up for a few days, as I write them (more or less), so that you can enjoy the work of God with me. After that, I’ll invite you to read the book with your family after it’s published!

 

 

a bestseller, written by a missionary to Irian Jaya

 

Creative Nonfiction: a new writing genre

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Well, only relatively new as an actual genre, but completely new to me.

As soon as I saw it, I loved it! And the reason I loved it so much is that as soon as I read about it, I saw . . . that’s what I write.

I was working on my seminar “Teaching Writing by Teaching Rewriting. ” But I started rethinking the seminar’s two parts: “Rewriting Nonfiction” and “Rewriting Fiction.”

Frankly, this traditional division was becoming more and more dissatisfying.

A biography of a great man of God, written on the lower-elementary level

Because I write nonfiction, but I write it like a story. I find really good true stories—the kind that show how great God is—and I rewrite them, with natural dialogue and specific descriptions. I imagine myself there, and seek to bring my readers there with me.

That’s what I’ll be talking about to teachers in Orlando in a couple of weeks.

So really, does the description of my own writing fit under the Nonfiction section, or the Fiction? Not really nonfiction, since I use my imagination to fill out details.

But it’s not fiction either, because the stories are true.

A  memoir rewrite, mid-elementary level

Creative Nonfiction. What a great genre! It describes all the stories we write that are basically true but have details filled in.

If you’re working on a memoir and have a thousand memories all jumbled together, this is your genre. You want to tell what really happened, but you may have to guess at the order of events; you want to  include dialogue that’s as close to the original as possible but might not be exactly accurate; you want to describe details the way they might have been, probably were, but you’re not exactly sure. . . .

So I’m changing my seminar divisions. The second section will be “Rewriting Stories,” and it won’t matter if they’re imaginary stories or true stories.

And what’s the opposite of stories? Hmmm. . . . I’m still working on that one.

He’s still the Hiding Place

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This summer my two teenagers and I had the privilege of spending some evenings listening together to Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place (mending clothes, brushing the dog’s matted fur as we listened) and then watching the video.

It had been maybe a few decades since I had read The Hiding Place, so I was grateful to be impressed again at how suddenly life can take terrible unexpected turns . . . at how important it is to be spiritually ready to face these new circumstances . . . and at how, through it all, God is faithful.

He never said He would whisk us out of trouble. He said He would keep us safe through it. He never said the storm wouldn’t come. He said that in the midst of it He would hide us.

Betsy Ten Boom died in that concentration camp. But she never wavered in believing that no matter how deep the pit—and those sisters witnessed depths of depravity that I haven’t yet seen—no matter how deep, our Savior is deeper.

We’re facing unprecedented days in our country. Persecution may be coming, possibly even in our lifetime. But God is faithful, Jesus is deep, and He is worth it all.

Corrie was 53 when she was taken out of her happy home to a concentration camp and her life was changed forever. This summer, when I listened to her book, I was 53. The Hiding Place was one of the things God has been using to change my life forever.