MISSIONARY KIDS MAKE MUSIC TOGETHER

Award-winning novelist and missions journalist Jeanette Windle shares her unusual story.

My husband Marty and I are both missionary kids raised in Latin America. Though my parents were missionaries in Colombia's Amazon guerrilla zones, my husband reached adolescence in the Bolivian Andes.

We first met in Bible college (Canada), and college we attended was extremely conservative regarding interaction between opposite genders, even classroom and dining-hall seating strictly segregated. So male and female of the human species had little opportunity to strike up an acquaintance. The only exception being ministry outreach assignments. Most of the Latin American missionary kids and foreign students signed up for the same Spanish-language outreach in Calgary, Alberta.

For this Colombian MK fresh from the tropics and in the throes of culture—and weather—shock (I'd ever experienced that white stuff called snow, much less at 40 degrees below zero!), that Spanish outreach ministry and its team members became a home—and family—away from home. Including a certain Montana-born, Bolivia-raised missionary kid one year ahead of me in Bible college. My husband insists he remembers vividly my expressed opinions that I would never consider marrying a "gringo" (North American foreigner), much less a blonde-haired, blue-eyed one, since growing up in Latin America had imprinted "tall, dark, and suave" as my idea of handsome. He on the other hand was convinced I was destined to be his wife from the day we'd discovered that God had laid on both our hearts during high school the same life verse (Philippians 1:6). 

Somehow by my second year, he'd changed my mind that a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Montana boy was any less romantic than those guitar-strumming, petal-strewing Antonio Bandera-lookalikes who serenaded outside my bedroom shutters back in Colombia's guerrilla zones (No joke! My father had three teenage daughters at once, and he used to threaten violence to the town youth for any serenading after midnight).  I always add the caveat that I didn't really marry a "gringo", since Marty too is a Spanish-
fluent MK and plays a rather romantic guitar himself!


That was going on thirty-three years ago.  Since then we've 
raised four kids, traveled in ministry through more than thirty countries on five continents. 

CONGO DAWN    
The smallest flame shines brightest against the darkest night

2013 Golden Scroll Novel of the Year

 If absolute power breeds absolute corruption, what happens when a multinational corporation with unlimited funds hires on a private military company with unbridled power? Especially in a Congolese rainforest where governmental accountability is only too cheaply for sale and the ultimate conflict mineral is up for grabs. 

Thanks Jeanette. I cannot wait to begin reading this suspense filled story myself.