Testimony

 My name is Anne Ohman. I grew up in a pastor’s home, and I was surrounded with the Truth all the time. At age six, I accepted Jesus as my Savior at my church’s VBS and was baptized a few months later. As I became a middle schooler, I started questioning my salvation, along with much of the Bible. God  patiently worked on my heart in answering these deep questions, but I still did  not want to surrender my life to Him. I thought that, if I did, He would send me to a dangerous country where I would be martyred for being a Christian. However, I remember remaining in my seat after a Sunday night message  struggling with surrender, when God suddenly showed me that He would take  care of me, wherever He sent me. I would be safe as long as I obeyed Him. Since that day, I steadily grew  stronger in my faith throughout my teenage years. I have wanted to be a missionary since I was a little girl, spurred on by my fascination with foreign  countries. But I became serious about this desire in studying Amy Carmichael and her love for the children of India. I longed to be a blessing to people of other countries and show them Christ’s love so  that they might know how to have a relationship with God. In high school, as any other teenager, I was required to take a foreign language. I chose Spanish, and I loved it. That was the closest that I got to the  mission field, but my desire for missions grew. A year after I graduated from high school, my parents suggested that I take an extended mission trip to  see how missionaries lived and if this was a lifestyle God wanted me to have. So, through my savings and  the generous gifts of others, I flew to Trujillo, Peru, for three months to help Caleb and Ecko Stein. I  helped in homeschooling and church children’s ministries, and I took some classes at the Baptist  Seminary to become more integrated with the language and the people. The most important lesson I  learned was that being a missionary is much like living out the Christian faith in one’s hometown,  because the people are still people who need a Savior, no matter how different their culture is. I came  home wanting to be a missionary more than ever. Through various circumstances, I was not able to fulfill this desire. Instead, I attended Maranatha’s new  Baptist Bible Institute for a two-year certificate of Bible and Church Ministries, with which I graduated in May of 2022. During my last semester, this past spring, I began communicating with Bruce and Lisa  Burkholder, missionaries supported by my home church. Bruce is the director of Editorial Bautista  Independiente (EBI), Baptist Mid-Missions’ Spanish publishing house to Latin America, based in Sebring,  Florida. After visiting EBI over spring break, I had God’s peace that God was sending me to EBI. I plan to move down to Florida as soon as God provides enough support for me to do so.