Mere Missions

138 • M ere M issions : M oving F orward to M ultiply

looking forward to meeting her. When I first saw her in the Wichita office, I said to myself, “Forget Monks on Marriage .” Susan is beautiful, brave, a risk-taker, creative, mother par excellence, and an incredible wife. It wasn’t the monk’s advice but the Lord who answered my prayer. Singleness in ministry was not to be. In August, before she went back to Taylor for her senior year, we were engaged. Susan came back to Wichita after her Fall semester, and we were married February 16, 1991. We took a two-week honeymoon trip out to Fresno California to help restart World Impact’s ministry and moved into an area that the police affectionately called “The Devil’s Half Mile,” or “The Belmont Triangle.” Like the stories of the Bermuda Triangle off the eastern tip of Florida in the Atlantic, where ships and aircraft are said to have disappeared under mysterious circumstances, so it was rumored that people have “mysteriously disappeared” in the Belmont Triangle. We called it the Lowell Community after the local Elementary School. It was exactly where the Spirit wanted us to be. Susan finished her degree in social work by serving at the Poverello House, a ministry “serving the hungry, homeless and destitute” and I began to rebuild the mission and vision of World Impact. We started the ministry with children and youth. It was not long before we had hundreds of children and teens in our weekly Bible Clubs. The World Impact Fresno staff were young, energetic, and sold out to the Gospel and we began to witness the fruits of our prayers and labors. Disciples were being made. Though these were exciting times these were also very trying times in ministry and family life: a gang member high on drugs shooting at another gang member, on our lawn next to our little girls’ window late at night; gangs running after each other and shooting while leading Children’s Bible Clubs and having the