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 5th 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!”
