Jon Bergen – March 29, 2012

10 Years ago today we started the next step of our missionary journey… 10 years ago we finished deputation and arrived in the bonnie City of Brechin… We were shattered after the overnight flight out of Chi Town to London to Edinburgh and a two hour drive up to Brechin. Trying to find our house through a town I had only spent a short time in a year and a 1/4 before… leaving it all behind to move by faith to a place that my family had never seen and barely heard of prior to the spring of 2002 and wondering if the box of stuff we had shipped would make it to where we were… Wondering if the churches that had promised to pray for us and support us would stay with us in this journey… Remembering Elmer Deal saying at Hallmark Baptist at the mission conference: “Young man, you go and you stay, don’t worry what others say or think, YOU STAY, you buy a cemetery plot and STAY, YOU JUST STAY and when you feel like leaving YOU JUST STAY!!!! So in my head I bought the plot and we have stayed. It has been the most wonderful years of my life, the most trying, the most learning, the most uplifting, the most crushing, the lessons of faith cannot be measured, I have made more friends and lost a few as well, have seen and learned love and hate. Every contrast you can imagine has been in my journey. I am not the same man I was then and I will not be the same man I am now in another 10 years. There are days I feel a hero and others less than a zero. Today with making it 10 years in a place that even Scottish Baptist pastors tell me I am crazy to be at makes my heart swell with joy and sorrow on this day. There are the days I feel like we have just arrived and not even broken into the community and others I feel we are part of the very fabric of Brechin. There are the days I see our little church and ask was it worth it for this? Other days I rejoice and say it was worth it for this!

So to my friends who support us in so many ways, I just want to say THANKS! It has been a slow hard journey that is beyond my dreams or vision and looking forward to the next 10 years to see what God is going to do.

In Christ, Jon Bergen