Which Reminds Me

Barbara Wilder is the person who had D-size feet. She was also flat-footed due to fallen arches. This is possibly the only thing that everyone can remember about our 6th grade classmate. She had a brother in 8th grade, Jeff Wilder, and they were from a different mission, maybe the Central America Mission although I am not sure. The CAMers were many in number even though their work was smaller than ours, not that that means everything. The AG kept 4 or 5 missionaries in the country while the CAMers had maybe 20 or 30 missionaries but the AG was less missionary oriented and spent a lot of energy training the local people to run their own show. My Dad always said that he was working himself out of a job, which was the indigenous church idea. The day would come when they would no longer need foreign missionaries to help them with that so perhaps the day has arrived and we are indeed out of a job. Anyway, we live in the U.S. now so apparently we will need to find other occupations with which to occupy until He comes since obviously the missionary career is not what it used to be. Tent-makers at least can pay their way by making tents but if you are expecting to do full-time missions work nowadays then you almost need to be independently wealthy because the money just doesn't flow the way it did a hundred years ago. Gigantic parachurch ministries function as giant vacuum machines, funneling away lots of church dollars to pay for their gigantic operations. Nowadays there is nothing for poor people to do but mail the check to the rich people. If the rich people get their missions money to play with then perhaps they will go away and not harass poor nobodies like me.