It was my senior year in college, and like most college girls in the 60s, I was looking forward to that big day in June when the two most coveted degrees would be mine—the B.A. and the M.R.S. I was doing fine on the first one. In fact, the Northern California Conference gave me a scholarship in return for my promise to teach for them following graduation. It was the M.R.S. that concerned me. Not that I didn’t have a boyfriend. God had seen to that. But he was one of those idealistic males determined to walk down the isle to Pomp and Circumstance before The Wedding March.
We started our freshman year at Pacific Union College (PUC) together, but after an adventurous year abroad in Australia at Avondale College our sophomore year, he chose to take off a few months to tour the world, while I dutifully returned to my studies at PUC. So now I was going to graduate without him, and it looked as if I was also going to have to face my first year teaching on my own without him, too. It was a frightening thought.
I still remember that interview in the girls’ dorm parlor. The conference educational secretary and school principal came to interview me for a teaching position. They asked me about my marriage plans; I assured them I would not be getting married and promised not to leave them in a lurch during the school year. They hired me to teach first and second grades.
Sometime after that interview my boyfriend, Jim, and I were invited to the home of one of our Bible teachers, Wilbur Nelson, a former missionary in the Far Eastern Division.1 The student missionary program was just being developed, and the college religion department received a request for a married couple to work in Hong Kong. During the conversations that evening, Wilbur mentioned he would like to send Jim and me; but, since we weren’t getting married, the idea was dropped.
Jim and I spent the next weekend at Jim’s home in Tracy, California. Both of us had become interested in missions as a result of our travels to and from Australia. That weekend we had time to talk and pray. We decided that if God wanted us to go to Hong Kong that next year, we would go. We wouldn’t tell anyone of our decision. It would be up to God to work out the details.
It was spring quarter—the last before graduation. I was required to spend a certain number of hours working one-on-one with young children, so I had gone to the Nelson's home that afternoon to teach their young son. When the session was finished and I was getting ready to walk out the door, Wilbur said, "We feel that you and Jim are the right people to go to Hong Kong. Would you be willing to go?" Would I?! I was so excited, I could hardly wait to tell Jim. Maybe I wouldn’t have to be a lonely, "old maid" school teacher after all.
Before long I heard news that threatened to burst my bubble. For some reason the religion department was unable to come up with the funds to sponsor a couple to Hong Kong. At the beginning of the student missionary program, students were sponsored and not required to raise their own funds. Meanwhile, another call came from Japan for a student missionary to help establish an English language school in Osaka. The student association became involved, opening the call up to others. They would hold an election, and the whole student body would vote at a Friday evening vespers. My marriage plans were now hanging on a vote at the ballot box!
No one knew about my stake in the election. I was fearful. Jim was a quiet, straight-A student, a talented, consecrated Christian, but not the outgoing type that wins elections. I held my breath. At last the ballots were counted, and the announcement was made. Jim Fisher would be PUC’s third student missionary. As we left the chapel that evening, our stern, matronly dean of women, who had also been my mother’s dean a generation before, came up to me and exclaimed, "I voted for Jim tonight, but I feel sorry for you, Ann." When I told her I was going with him, she gave us permission to leave campus together that night—a miracle in itself back in 1966. We drove to the Nelson’s home and called our parents to announce we were getting married and going to Japan.
Now I had the unpleasant task of informing the conference I was getting married and wouldn’t be teaching for them as planned. They were not pleased and asked me to return my scholarship money. I didn’t know how I could do that, but God did. A few days later an envelope from Social Security arrived in my mail box. I opened it and pulled out a check for the exact amount I needed to pay back the scholarship. Congress had passed new legislation entitling me to a small amount of educational assistance, since I was a college student with a father over 65. The payment was retroactive, making it larger than it normally would have been.
And so I marched down two aisles that summer—once to Elgar and once to Wagner. God was leading in a way I had scarcely dared to dream. I wish there was room to tell how God miraculously intervened when Jim received notice he was being drafted into the Vietnam war just days before our August wedding, or how a teaching position opened up for me at PUC Elementary when we returned from Japan too late to interview for teaching jobs, or how the conference returned my scholarship money when I taught for them after all, or how, after seminary, we received a call to return to the Far Eastern Division where we spent 17 years as missionaries.
"If you want favor with both God and man, and a reputation for good judgment and common sense, then trust the Lord completely; don’t ever trust yourself. In everything you do, put God first, and he will direct you and crown your efforts with success" (Proverbs 3:4–6, The Living Bible). As I look back on my life, I am thankful God has blessed and directed my paths, giving me confidence that I can trust Him with my future, too.
Ann Fisher writes from Walla Walla, Washington.
1. The Far Eastern Division has since been split into two divisions—Northern Asia Pacific and Southern Asia Pacific.
