Eagerly, I squinted through the flying dust as our driver propelled us along at dizzying speeds, blaring his horn constantly. At last, we were on our way to a small village along the Mekong River to live among our people group—the Cambodian Cham! At last! I thought, now we can unpack and settle in.

As I stepped out of the truck, my husband Greg came to meet us. He had arrived before us on the motorcycle. "Honey," he said, "I just need to prepare you before you go into the house. ... It's a construction zone. We can't move in yet."

I swallowed the words that bubbled up inside me: But they knew we were coming and said it would be all ready!

"They said they can clear out one of the bedrooms for our stuff," Greg reassured me. "We'll stay in a guesthouse in Chhlong until then."

I had been sick before our move, and that week I had a relapse. Greg got sick, too. We lay around on our beds with fever, headaches and sore, congested lungs.

After five days, we were finally able to move into our home. Living in village conditions was a lot of work. It took most of the hours in the day just to survive. To compound this, the morning after we moved in the Mekong flooded, and we awoke to a fetid lake under and around our house. Driven upward by the rising water, entire ant colonies made our home their ark. I've never seen so many ants in one place before.

This would have been difficult even if we were in good health, but our sickness made it almost unbearable. Greg had to haul water from cisterns, slogging through floodwater three-feet deep. Simplest tasks like washing dishes were huge ordeals. I would often stay up late into the night doing laundry. Three, sometimes four, hours later I would fall into bed, nursing my bleeding knuckles.

After a week of pushing myself physically and emotionally beyond exhaustion, I finally broke down late one night after collapsing into bed next to my feverish husband. My head pounded, and my tears flowed. It felt good to cry. I wondered why God was allowing all of this to happen. Hadn't He called us to the Cham? Did He really expect us to work in these conditions? I felt I couldn't go on another day.

As Greg and I talked, a thought came forcefully to us: We are exactly where God wants us and exactly where Satan doesn't want us. Satan's tactics had brought us to the point where we would love nothing better than to pack up our bags and go back home. As Greg and I took hold of God's strength through faith, I smiled through my tears as comfort enveloped me. We wouldn't be packing our bags. If Satan was this mad about us being here, God must have some very special Cham children waiting to hear the good news of salvation.

Mollie Timmins, along with her husband Greg and children, Hannah and Caleb, have served as Adventist Frontier Missions missionaries since November 2006. Before joining AFM, the Timmins family lived in Petoskey, Michigan. Their e-mail address is gregandmollietimmins@msn.com.

Adventist Frontier Missions is a Seventh-day Adventist Christian lay ministry dedicated to establishing church-planting movements worldwide among people groups with no Adventist presence. AFM currently works with 18 unreached people groups in 16 countries. To learn more, visit www.afmonline.org