Departure Dates!!!

It finally happened!! The day I’ve been waiting for is finally here!! I bought my one-way plane ticket to the Dominican Republic!!! :) From now on, when someone asks me when I am planning on leaving, I don’t have to say “I don’t know,” or “We’ll see,” or “My goal is…” I can simply look at them and say, “This November. November 10^th.” 

I probably will not stop there, however.  I will go on to praise my awesome God for the way He has provided exceedingly and abundantly more than I could have ever asked for or imagined!  I just began raising support a few short months ago in June…as many of you know, it can often take years to raise full-time support. Apparently that was not the plan that God had for me, though!  Since I first felt God calling me to the Dominican Republic, I always had a feeling that I would go sometime this fall.  I didn’t know how God would do it, and honestly there were times that I doubted.  I often wonder why it is that as Christians we can trust God for so many things, but when it comes to our finances it can be so hard to fully trust Him.  We have a gracious God who is a patient teacher, however, and He has astounded me in the way that He has provided for me in such a short span of time.  It is clear that His hand is in all of this, and it gives me such a peace to see Him confirming so clearly the call that He placed on my heart.

I am currently at 92% of my monthly support goal, and I have also received many generous one-time donations to help with start-up costs!!  It has been incredible to look back and see how God orchestrated every bit of it.  
He put amazing supportive people in my life who are almost as excited as I am about this opportunity for ministry.  He surprised me with substantial donations from people I have just met within the past year.  He gave me two incredible churches to support me: my church in Tennessee that I grew up in is sending me out, and my new church in Pennsylvania has also accepted my family with open arms, considering me as one of their own.  It wasn’t easy to pick up and move 10 hours away from the rest of our family, but I now see our move as a huge blessing in disguise.  When I think of how far the Lord has brought me, and all that He has been doing in my life, I am overwhelmed with joy!

Two months to go, and 8% to go…to put it in perspective, every $18/month is another percentage point. For me, it is a no-brainer that God will provide everything I need before I leave! Thank you so much to all of you who are supporting me…you have no idea how greatly God has used you as a blessing in my life and a testimony to His goodness.  Please continue to pray for me as I am kicking it into high gear with preparations for the move, as well as collecting medical supplies to use when I get there. May God be given all the glory for the great things He has done!

Summer Internship

I have sat down many times to write this blog post, but it seems that every time I tried to put into words all that God taught me through my experience in Philadelphia, I got lost in thought and felt so burdened for those precious people once again that it was difficult for me to write.  This time, though, I think I can do it. It is high time I write an update and give glory to God for everything He has done!

I spent the majority of the month of July in a part of inner-city Philadelphia called Kensington.  For those of you who are familiar with the area, you know that it is not necessarily the safest part of town.  With high rates of violence and drugs, it is no wonder some people have nicknamed the city Killer-delphia. I was excited, however, to be living so close to the people I was going to be working with, despite the fact that the first night we heard gunshots and a rat chewed a hole in my bag.  I knew right away this was going to be quite an adventure! 

As an intern with Medical Campus Outreach and Esperanza Health Center, I was on a team with 17 other people from across the country.  The majority of team was made up of medical school students; I was the only nurse.  Honestly, one of the most amazing parts to me of the whole experience was this group of people. We were from all different cultural and educational backgrounds, yet we were unified by our passion for serving the Lord and reaching out to the poor and needy.  The sense of community there was incredible, and I learned so much from those dedicated Christ-followers!

The premise of the program was to spread the gospel and raise awareness about local churches in the area while identifying health disparities and offering the services of Esperanza Health Clinic. We did this by going door-to-door and offering free health screenings.  It is a predominately Puerto Rican community, which I loved, because I got to speak more Spanish than English! They were so friendly and hospitable, inviting us into their homes and many times offering us food, but these people also have many medical needs. I don’t know if you’ve ever had Puerto Rican food, but it is incredible! The problem is that lots of deep fried and salty foods leads to lots of cases of high blood pressure and diabetes.  In poor areas many people do not know they are suffering from these conditions because they have no access to healthcare, and it can become life-threatening. We offered health screenings for both hypertension and diabetes, and at the end of every screening we did a spiritual assessment as well.  It was incredible to see how quickly people opened up to us about their spiritual needs because we were helping them with their physical needs.  

One of the greatest lessons that I learned is what an incredible tool medicine can be in spreading the gospel.  It establishes a trust relationship very quickly.  Kensington is a drug-ridden community, and I daily had the opportunity to speak with people who were currently addicted to drugs or selling drugs. Many times they would even do these things right in front of me! It was an eye-opening experience, especially when these people would allow me to pray with them.  So many of them knew that they needed help, and would even stop us as we were walking down the street to ask us questions about their health. One day, a man with a large abscess in his arm approached our group asking for help.  He told us that he had been shooting up a mixture of cocaine and heroine ten times a day and it was completely destroying his life. This opened up a conversation about the condition of his soul, and God in His mercy gave me the opportunity to lead that man to the Lord and direct him to a men’s rehab program through one of the local churches!  The beauty of partnering with local churches is that they will have an impact in these people’s lives long after we are gone. They are on the real front lines, and it was a joy for me to be able to serve alongside them during my time there.

Probably my favorite story is about a man I met on my very first day of outreach.  He was very hospitable, offering us fruit juice and a seat on his couch.  During the medical interview he stated that he began smoking only 5 years ago. When asked why he began smoking later in life, he opened up to us and said that it was to cope with depression after his son had been shot and murdered because someone wanted to steal his dirt bike.  At first I had no idea what I could possibly say to him, but God was so faithful in giving the right words to say.  We talked about the concept of forgiveness and about a hope and peace that can only come through Christ. He was very receptive to the gospel, and agreed to go to church with us the following Sunday.  He said he believed that God sent us to his house that day for a reason; other things had been happening lately that made him think maybe God was trying to get his attention, and now here we were. He not only came to church with us the following Sunday, but he accepted Christ!! With tears in his eyes he said to me, “Diana, I can really feel it here. I feel happy for the first time since my son died!”  That day was so emotionally stirring for me, as was the following week when he brought his whole family to church! I was and still am so overwhelmed when I think about how God pursues each of us, how He loves us so much that He puts circumstances in our lives to draw us to Him, how He sought out this man and freed him from so much hurt. 

It is so humbling to think that God would choose to use me, a broken person, to reach other broken people with His love. I do not fool myself into thinking that I was the superhero in any of these stories. God had been working in each of their hearts for a long time, and I was only there for a small snapshot. Sometimes I got to plant the seed, other times I watered it, and a handful of times I was blessed to be there for the harvest.  It was cool to see that God has the whole story already written out, and He just calls us to be obedient in playing our part.

There are so many other stories I could tell, and maybe I will someday, but I should bring this post to a close. In summary, throughout my time in Philadelphia I witnessed many people come to know the Lord, caught a glimpse of God working in so many hearts, saw the hope on believers faces who were reminded they are not alone in their dark community, and even had the opportunity to tell one woman about Jesus who had never heard of Him before! All of these things blew me away and stirred in me a passion to share my faith with more boldness. This is what we were made for: to glorify God by delighting in Him, and to be His ambassadors, telling everyone about the hope that comes from Him alone.

Thank you again to everyone who was praying for me during my internship. God is so sovereign--it was exactly the preparation that I needed for my future ministry in the Dominican Republic.  He continues to equip me in ways that I never could have planned for myself! 

O Lord, You are my God.

I will exalt You, I will give thanks to Your name!

For You have worked wonders,

Plans formed long ago, with perfect faithfulness.
-Isaiah 25:1

How I Got Here...The Full Story

If you asked me a year ago what I was going to do with my life, I would probably have told you that I was planning to one day work as a Nurse Practitioner with Spanish-speaking people in the States. Little did I know that God had different plans in store that were greater than I could have ever imagined! I have always had a love for foreign missions that I could never seem to get out of my system, so I decided to go on one last trip the summer before my final year of college.  I was planning on studying in Spain at the beginning of the summer, so I thought it would be great if I could do a mission trip while I was over there.  Every avenue that I pursued, however, seemed to be another dead end.  I began to ask God, “What is your will for me?? I don’t understand why this isn’t working out…it seems like something you would want for me to do!”  I soon discovered that sometimes we think we know what is right for us, but God has plans for us that far exceed what we could ever ask for or imagine for ourselves.

Just when I was about to give up on my dream of one last missions endeavor, I went to an ice cream social during the annual mission conference at Cedarville University, just to say hello to Gary and Alli Hale. Alli was my 5^th grade Spanish teacher and I always tried to see her when she came in town. This time, however, they asked me if I would like to come down for a summer internship with Daystar in the Dominican Republic. I honestly didn’t even know then that the Dominican is a Spanish-speaking country! After talking it over with them, I decided to pray about it. The dates worked out perfectly, and God gave me such a peace about it that I applied within two days, and from that moment my life was set on a totally different trajectory!

During my six-week internship with Daystar, I was blessed with the opportunity to see what the daily life of a missionary is like, as opposed to the “group trips” I had been on in the past.  As I got to know Daystar’s ministry, I fell in love with the way they do missions. They work as a team, partnering with the Dominicans and equipping them to reach their own country for Christ. They are multi-faceted, expanding their church plant through ministries that meet the needs of the area, such as a bilingual school, a baseball ministry, and a safe house for women who have been forced into prostitution.  Their focus is not on how many “conversions” they can get, but rather on making true disciples that can in turn go out and disciple others.  It is a thriving and visionary ministry, and I came away with a desire to be a part of a similar ministry in the future.  It was during this internship that God confirmed my call to full-time foreign missions in a Spanish-speaking country.

Although I loved Daystar’s ministry, God’s leading in my life to join their team in the Dominican was not a sprint, but rather a slow and steady walk.  I learned over this past year that if I get back to the basics and just trust God, daily committing each day to being obedient to Him and striving to know Him more that day, He will lead me to where I need to go, step by little step.  He brought people and experiences into my life that continued to guide me, and blessed me with difficult circumstances in which I had to rely on Him, using the difficult times to grow my faith. It is a beautiful thing to look back and see how far God has brought me because my focus was on Him, and not on trying to figure out what “His will” was. God has given me such a peace and confidence in my calling, and He has continued to confirm it.  Daystar’s ministry and specifically the Dominican people were on my heart and in my prayers constantly, and I felt that it was where God was slowly but surely leading me. After talking with my parents about it over Christmas break, I began to pray and ask God that if He wanted me to go to the Dominican with Daystar, that He would give me a need to meet.  Daystar does not have a medical ministry, and I did not want to go somewhere that I would not be useful as a nurse.

My prayers were answered two weeks later when Doug Hodges and Dominican pastor Miguel Mercedes came to Cedarville for the annual mission conference. They told me that they had been praying about starting a medical branch to the ministry in the future, and that there is an immediate need for a nurse to work in both the school and baseball ministries.  They had seen a need, but were waiting for God to call someone with a medical background to join the team. It was a direct answer to prayer for me, and for them as well.

Another confirmation of God's leading came by events that were totally unrelated to Daystar’s DR ministry and totally unexpected by me! Early on, during the fall semester, I had been accepted to go on a medical missions trip with Cedarville University in the Dominican. I had applied for the trip just because I knew that I loved the DR and I wanted to use nursing on the mission field. I had no idea that the location we would be working in was only 15 minutes away from where I interned in the summer!!  God was sovereign in orchestrating this as well, because while I was on my mission trip in the spring, I was able to meet with the Daystar team and talk about the possibility of joining the team!

The medical mission trip to the Dominican in the spring was an amazing experience. I was given my own station because I speak Spanish fluently and had experience working in the hospital. It was intimidating because I diagnosed and prescribed medications, but it was a great experience and I learned a lot from the doctors on the trip.  Most importantly, there were so many opportunities to share the gospel! The majority of the people there are so open to talk about spiritual things, and I found that meeting spiritual needs goes hand in hand with meeting physical needs. Medicine opens up so many doors on the mission field, and I saw what a great tool it can be to not only evangelize, but to raise awareness about the local church as well.

God was not done there, however. He continued to provide ways to prepare me for my future ministry. As I got to know two of my professors in Public Health Nursing, they saw my passion for missions and using nursing as a ministry, and one of them recommended me for an internship with the Esperanza Medical Center in Philadelphia. I was accepted into the program, not even realizing that it was only about one hour away from where my family was to be moving! During this 3-week internship I will be living in a poor Hispanic community in inner-city Philadelphia, serving in a local church and using community health nursing and door-to-door health screenings to tie in the gospel and expand the local church. I am really excited about this internship because I believe it will be a great blueprint for me to implement a similar program in the Dominican Republic.

These two professors have become mentors to me, and have been providing resources for me to use in the Dominican.  They have even offered to continue to be “on-call” for me in my future ministry. One of these professors also approached me with a request to partner with Cedarville in sending nursing mission teams.  She said that the Nursing program had been interested in developing new contacts in Central or South America, and that she would love for me to be their main contact person when I got onto the field!! This was a huge confirmation for me that God was at work.  He was moving in other people’s hearts as well, and giving me all the resources that I needed to fulfill His vision for expanding the ministry.

If I stop and think about it, I honestly feel inadequate as a 22 year-old fresh graduate from college, to go straight into full-time missions in a third world country and start a whole new branch to a ministry, but God has been teaching me more and more that I am incapable of doing anything on my own.  He is at work in me, however, and He is able to do exceedingly and abundantly more than I could ever ask or imagine! He has plans for the ministry in the DR, and He will accomplish His will no matter what. All I have to do is be obedient and let Him use me. It has been a crazy ride, but through it all I have seen God change me as well as those around me…and He has brought so much glory to His name through it all! That is what this life is all about!  When it comes down to it, I just want Him to receive all the glory for what He has been doing. God continues to amaze me, day after day, by His work in my life and His sovereignty.  I don’t want anyone to ever say of my life, “Look at what Diana Patrick is doing, look how well-equipped she is and what she can accomplish!”  I want to live a life in which people look at it and say, “Wow, look what God can do!! Look at how He can use even someone like Diana and how He has been so faithful in providing in her weakness! That means He can do incredible things through me, too!”