Since Claudia and I married, we had dreamed of moving overseas — to be missionaries, and to send missionaries to the world’s hardest and most persecuted nations. When we finally arrived in the Philippines, I felt I was fulfilling God’s call on my life, my wife’s life, and our family.
Within our first month, Claudia was pregnant. And then, sadly, it ended in a miscarriage.
“Do you want to go home?”
On top of the loss, we had no family, no old spiritual community, no familiar friends to comfort us. Everything was new — the culture, the language, the missionary home we shared. We didn’t even know how to get online to call the people we loved back home. Our welcome mat into the Philippines wasn’t a celebration. It was mourning.
I remember looking at Claudia and asking, “Do you want to go home?”
As a husband, my instinct was that when the loss is this great, and you’re away from family, and you can’t speak the language, the right thing to do is go home and mourn among people you know.
Claudia looked at me and said, “What are you talking about? I never even thought about going home. God called us here. This is supposed to be our home — whether we have a miscarriage or not.”
I will never forget it. It marked our marriage. It showed me that my wife was taking this call as a conviction and a command from the Lord, not just an experience. And it settled where we stood: no matter what happened, how we were attacked, or what obstacles came, our comfort would be doing what the Holy Spirit was doing. For us, that meant mission work in the part of the world we were called to.
That theme of spiritual warfare became the name of our first child: Warrior.
Lioness of God
Within a month, Claudia was pregnant again — with our first-born daughter, Ariela Justice. Ariela is Hebrew for “Lioness of God.” We knew what God was asking of us: courage in faith and love, and no backing down.
This time the baby was healthy. Near the end of the pregnancy, we were also in the final stretch of a big Gospel campaign, and it was a heavy season for Claudia. I remember telling her, “If you want to help with the campaign, maybe you could just pray at home.”
I was trying to find a way for her to feel included without exerting herself. And as I said it, I sensed the Holy Spirit rebuking me: “You always preach about taking up the cross. Stop telling your wife to put down hers.”
Right then my wife said, “Hey — I am called to do this too, not just you.”
One more time, I was set straight. Even as a husband, my job is not to make my wife comfortable. It’s to make sure she keeps picking up her cross and stays in the center of God’s will — and that I do too. No matter what we were going through, God’s will was the purpose, and my role as a husband sat inside that, not above it.
What happened next
Then we ran the campaign. Tens of thousands heard the Gospel that year, and many gave their lives to Jesus Christ.
It happened because we stayed aligned with what God was doing — not what felt comfortable, not what made sense to us. We leaned on His understanding instead of our own.
“Kids We’ll Never See”
This song is dedicated to our three children — Warrior, Mattias, and Sophia — whom we lost on the mission field, and to every child in the world we will never get to see because of injustice and circumstance.
Keep reading: Why the Philippines? · Meeting the Love of My Life · From Gangster to Missionary
This is the cost. Here is the harvest.
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