Month: July 2025

1986

For foreigners like us to stay in Jamaica longer than the 6 months we could stay with a tourist visa stamp, we needed a work permit, “sponsored” by a Jamaican church or recognized parachurch ministry and our income must be supplied in US funds from outside the country. So when we left Bread of Life in Linstead, we needed a new “sponsor” ministry. We would still be responsible as before for raising our own support from outside Jamaica. When we moved to Kingston in 1986 to work with Whole Life Ministries, the Bread Of Life leadership agreed to continue to sponsor our work permit until the two year period ended and then we would renew the work permit under Whole Life Ministries.

So we were pressing ahead with ministry, beginning to develop Children’s Ministry resources for churches, making connections in the community, ministering in churches, and sharing the vision for an interdenominational Bible Training Centre. However, it’s clear that someone notified Jamaica Immigration Authority (a branch of the Ministry of National Security) that we were no longer pastors at Bread of Life Church. No one told us that this had taken place and we were simply getting on with life and ministry, waiting until the permit was due for renewal to switch it to WLM.

Then one morning we received a phone call from an officer of Jamaica Immigration Authority ordering me to present myself at the office of the Ministry of National Security in Spanish Town that morning and to bring our passports and any further documents showing reason that we should be permitted to stay in Jamaica. We immediately phoned Al Miller’s office and found out he was very sick with some kind of flu and couldn’t get out of bed!

Jean stayed at home, Melissa was at school, and I asked Karlene Barrett, Al’s secretary, if she would come with me to the appointment in Spanish Town. With some trepidation, we drove to Spanish Town and located the Ministry of National Security complex. I parked and locked the car, wondering if I would be coming back to the car to drive back to our home in West Armour Heights that afternoon! I wondered what to do about picking Melissa up from school at 3 PM. I wondered how to let Jean know if things didn’t go well!

After making our way through a security checkpoint and giving my name at a barred window near the door we entered, Karlene and I sat and waited in a large area with rows of chairs and several doors opening onto the room. Only a few people were in the room and periodically someone would emerge from one of the doors and call a name and show the person into an adjoining room. Finally, my name was called and the “fetcher” would not allow Karlene to accompany me into the room.

I found myself standing before a very gruff immigration officer who began to paint the picture for me: I was in the country illegally. I had stayed on after my work at Bread Of Life was finished and I now had no valid work permit and no basis for being permitted to stay in Jamaica. I explained that we were in a transition process and that Whole Life Ministries was going to sponsor our work permit when it was due for renewal. The officer said we were currently in the country illegally and we must leave voluntarily or be deported. Once we were out of the country, WLM could apply for a work permit on our behalf, but it didn’t look good for us as we had overstayed our visa and that certainly wouldn’t be in our favor.

I said, “There must be something we can do! We’ve been in Jamaica for nearly two years and our home and everything we have is here in Kingston. When we left Linstead and moved to Kingston we were told that we could simply continue working under our work permit with BOL and then when it was time to renew, we could submit the renewal application through WLM. We’re not trying to do anything wrong here!”

After some additional unpleasant questioning and more waiting, I ended up standing before the desk of the assistant to the permanent secretary of National Security, Mrs Thompson. This was a nicer office and a bigger desk. Mrs Thompson looked up from her work and saw me standing there and said, “Pastor Jim! What are you doing here?”

She recognized me because I had spoken at her Baptist Church in Kingston a few weeks before. In that service I had told about the Bible Training Centre we were starting in Kingston. Her son, who was also present in that service, was interested in becoming a student. And she was very familiar with Al Miller’s work and WLM and her son was part of one of the sports leagues sponsored and coordinated by Al Miller’s team!

The officer who had been “interviewing” me told her the facts of the situation: I had been in Jamaica on a work permit with BOL in Linstead and was no longer with them but was working with WLM but no work permit application had been filed. I explained that we had agreed with BOL to simply continue the work permit until it was time to renew it and then transfer our sponsorship to WLM.

Mrs Thompson said, “We’ll sort that out right now!” She had Karlene hand write a letter of invitation and sponsorship by WLM for us on a piece of typing paper from her desk and sign it with Al’s signature. She sent our passports and work permits back into the recesses of the building and they came back in a few minutes stamped for another two year term! Whew! What a relief!

Then Mrs Thompson asked me if I knew anything about an organization called Youth With A Mission or YWAM. This was only a few weeks since I had taught at YWAM’s Discipleship Training School. So I told her about YWAM in general and about YWAM’s base and Discipleship Training School in Mandeville and our week of ministry there.

She said, “I have a young Nigerian man named Daniel in custody and I’m trying to decide what to do with him. He says he is part of the YWAM team but he has overstayed his visa and he is scheduled for deportation.” I knew Daniel from a week with him and his DTS and I vouched for him. She allowed him to stay for one month while he and YWAM did the process of getting him legal status to remain. He eventually married a Jamaican fellow YWAMer and lived happily ever after (last we heard!).

I may have aged a few years in a few hours since the phone call early that morning! It’s such a helpless feeling when your whole present and future life is out of your hands and in the hands of a faceless and feeling-less bureaucracy! It’s such a hopeful feeling when someone who has the authority to determine your present and future life has a heart of care and concern and is determined to use their authority to find a way to sort things out!

Thank God for Mrs Thompson! Thank God for Karlene! Thank God that I had been with YWAM just a few weeks earlier and met Daniel! Thank God that I received grace and then was able to be an instrument of grace to Daniel! A day that started out as a bad day for me turned into a good day for both me and Daniel. My heart overflows with gratitude when I think back over the events of that day! Thank God!

When I see masked and faceless ICE agents grabbing people from their workplaces, or snatching them while they’re taking their kids to school, or breaking into their homes and grabbing them, or taking them from their churches, my heart aches! Their families aren’t informed where they’re being taken, children are left to be cared for by neighbors, the fabric of their lives is shredded.

That day in Spanish Town, I was an “illegal”! I was spoken to a little rudely a couple of times, but it turns out I had a “friend in court”! I only had a few hours of anxiety and uncertainty and then it was resolved. For so many people, now, here, that’s not the case. I don’t know what to do about it, but I do understand at least a tiny fraction of the anguish thousands of people and their families are experiencing. My heart aches! I pray for them. Will you pray with me?

As always, I’d love to hear from you. If you have a question or a comment simply reply to this email or if you’re reading on the blog, comment below.

Grace to you today, Jim Stephens

1986

Our time as missionary pastors at Bread of Life church in Linstead had come to a close. There were Jamaican leaders in place who could teach, lead worship, and administrate the affairs of the church. It was time for us to “gracefully” transition out! Interestingly, when we first began to discuss the move to Jamaica to lead Bread of Life more than two years earlier, we had thought of it as an eighteen-month assignment. Yet we had made a decisive move away from all we were doing in the US and didn’t feel as if God was moving us away from Jamaica. So what to do next?

In this transitional season, when the present God-assignment was completed and the next steps weren’t clear, we met Al Miller, Founder of Whole Life Ministries, a man with a vision for the nation! Al invited us to begin meeting with him and his team once a week at the WLM office in Kingston. We soon realized that we cared for and were called to very similar and compatible assignments. And we realized that we cared for each other and were called to partner together in ministry for the current season.

Al Miller had connections across denominations and in all the fourteen parishes of Jamaica. We had the desire to help churches with discipleship teaching and training and with children’s and youth ministry. We were soon busy developing and conducting seminars in local churches and for groups of churches in denominations. It became clear that we needed to make a move from Linstead to Kingston to be closer to the action.

At Al’s introduction, Jean and I joined the Jamaica Association of Full Gospel Churches, a fellowship with member churches of 33 different denominations. We began regularly attending their monthly meetings and Jean was asked to serve as Secretary for the Association. I became a regular contributor to discussions and was soon invited to speak at member churches. A new and completely unforeseen thing was blossoming!

Sidebar: A condition of our residence in Jamaica was that our work permit be “sponsored” by a Jamaican church or recognized parachurch ministry and that our income be supplied in US funds from outside the country. So if we left Bread of Life in Linstead, we needed a new “sponsor” ministry. We would still be responsible as before for raising our own support from outside Jamaica. The relationship with Al Miller and Whole Life Ministries was solid and as we discussed the way forward, Al offered for WLM to sponsor our work permit. Remember this detail! It will be important in the story coming up next week!

Also, in this transitional season we met the team from Youth With A Mission, who had established a base for ministry and Discipleship Training Schools in Jamaica. They were in the process of moving their base from the North Coast to a village in the mountains outside Mandeville, in Manchester Parish. The YWAM Director asked us to come and do a week of teaching at the first DTS (Discipleship Training School) in their new location. We made the two-and-a-half hour drive from Kingston and got settled into our room for the week.

The local YWAM base had a good team made up of young people from around the US, a director from Canada, a couple from a country in Europe I can’t remember, and even a young man named Daniel, from Nigeria. Remember this detail! It will be important in the story coming up next week! Several Jamaicans were on the course, a Discipleship Training School, and would become part of the YWAM team on completion of the DTS course. We taught the day classes and then on the final night we spoke at a meeting to which people from the community were also invited.

When we finished speaking in the evening session of our final day at the YWAM base and returned to our room, we found a note on our bed that a phone call had come for us that Jean’s Dad was in the hospital and we needed to get in touch.

I’ve got to explain the phone situation! This was before mobile phones! Remember when phones had wires connecting them to other wires connecting them to the known universe? I know, right? How primitive! And in Jamaica in the 80’s there was a three or four-year waiting list to get a phone line to your house. So if you wanted a phone, you had to rent or buy a house that already had a phone! In this case, the YWAM team had worked out an arrangement with their closest neighbor, who had a phone, to build a small hut next to their house, put an extension phone in the hut, and then allow the YWAM team to use the “hut phone” and pay for the calls. It was a great system!

We have never figured out how Jean’s family in Washington State found that number, called it, and left a message for us. And they can’t remember either. But there it was! And it was the rainy season. And it was night. And the hundred-yard path through the jungle was muddy! We walked through the jungle with our little flashlight to the phone hut. We called Jean’s sister’s home and the only one there was nine-year-old Brian. Brian took our “collect call” (remember those?) but couldn’t tell us much. So we told Brian that we were traveling home to Kingston the next morning and would call when we got there.

We learned that Jean’s Dad had been diagnosed with cancer and had surgery to implant a steel rod in his upper spine to stabilize his vertebra and would begin radiation treatment soon. He didn’t live long after this but Jean was able to go to Washington State to see the family and spend time with her Dad before he passed away.

One of the sacrifices of “missionary ministry” is that because you can’t be in two places at once, you miss a lot of extended family stuff. Jean got to see her Dad for a few days when he was ill, but didn’t get to attend his funeral because we couldn’t get her a flight from Jamaica at the time he passed away. I didn’t get to see my Dad before he died, but because I already had a ticket to Jacksonville, FL when he passed, I was able to get home to Oregon for his funeral. My Mom and my brother Skip both passed away while we were overseas. You miss a lot! But it’s a legitimate sacrifice and the rewards are great as well! We’ve had a wonderful life and now we’re in a season where we get to be with our kids and grandkids a lot and we’ve reconnected with our surviving siblings and cousins. And I get to walk in the desert with my dog Jake! It’s a great life!

As always, I’d love to hear from you. If you have a question or a comment simply reply to this email or if you’re reading on the blog, comment below.

Grace to you today, Jim Stephens

1986

This event took place 39 years ago, when I was 43 years old. The memory is still vivid as I tell the story…

We had handed over leadership of Bread of Life Ministries Church in Linstead to the Jamaican pastors Emile and Sophie Azan and we were already spending quite a bit of time in Kingston getting to know Al Miller and his team at Whole Life Ministries. Jean and I were still living in Linstead, St Catherine as we planned the move and looked for a place to live in Kingston to work with WLM and develop an interdenominational lay leadership training centre. I was beginning to travel around Jamaica teaching and looking and learning and Al Miller and I had just completed a two day school of evangelism (Al’s focus) and discipleship (My focus) in Port Maria, St Mary Parish, on the north coast. We were finishing up with an evening evangelistic and healing service at the Port Maria Baptist Church which had hosted the training.

I was recovering from a month-long bout of hepatitis, still not very strong, and Jean was at home in Linstead, in St Catherine parish, halfway across the island from Port Maria. Jean was sick with hepatitis, her illness following mine by almost exactly a month. I had an hour and a half drive through the mountains to home each evening after the sessions were over, because Melissa had school each day in Kingston and had to leave on the bus about seven each morning.

After worship and a stirring message from Al, we gave an altar call for people to come for prayer for salvation, re-commitment to Christ, and healing. The people who had attended the training seminar were our up-front prayer and ministry team. Dozens of people came forward at the invitation and I had intended to coordinate the prayer time, but so many came forward, I had to jump right in and begin praying for people. The prayers I prayed in this kind of situation were prophetic prayers, usually sensing something about the person and their situation then waiting for a moment and simply beginning to pray for them and say the words that came to me in the moment. I’d had a significant amount of experience with that kind of praying and often it would provoke an emotional response from the “prayee” as I spoke of specific things about them and their situation that could only have been revealed to me – through me – by the Holy Spirit.

I finished praying with one man and as he stepped away, the woman who had been standing right behind him came forward. I was weak and tired. The physical condition that the hepatitis had left me in was taking its toll. I felt like I needed to go sit down, even better, find a place to lie down!

As the woman stepped up for prayer, I didn’t even need to ask what she wanted prayer for. She was probably in her late-thirties, and just shorter than me. She had a very large growth on the right side of her jaw and face and neck. It distorted her appearance so much that it almost made me want to look away so as not to stare at the growth. I’ve since learned that the growth was probably what’s called a “goiter” and is typically caused by an inflammation, infection, or disease of the thyroid gland. And it’s usually pretty serious, especially one this large!

I took a deep breath, put my hands on either side of her face and started to pray that God would heal her. Before I even completed the prayer, the growth just disappeared! It didn’t begin to gradually shrink, it just disappeared! It happened so suddenly that my hands just kind of came together on either side of her face and jaw!

The growth was gone! There was no sign it had even been there. The skin of her face, jaw, and neck was normal and smooth. It’s not like if a balloon deflated suddenly and was all flabby and wrinkled, it was just normal, like the other side of her face and jaw and neck! It happened so suddenly that she gasped and jumped back, I stepped back too – we were both kind of stunned at the instant and amazing healing God did for her!

I had prayed for sick people many times before that time. I’ve prayed for sick people many times since that time. At our house and in our family we still pray for healing when one of us seems to be coming down with a cold, we pray about my cancer, my hearing loss, about Jean’s Afib condition, about our old-age arthritis, we just pray for health and healing. We pray for our kids and grandkids. We pray for relatives and friends. The other day I prayed for a friend while we were standing on the sidewalk outside a restaurant with people walking around us on both sides as I prayed. And God helps us. Sometimes it seems pretty much like “We prayed and God healed!”

But that evening almost forty years ago at the Baptist Church in Port Maria, St Mary, Jamaica, remains very, very clear in my mind and memory. It was not due to my own energy and strength. It was not due to “super-faith” on my part. That was an immediate intervention of the hand of God!

As always, I’d love to hear from you. If you have a question or a comment simply reply to this email or if you’re reading on the blog, comment below.

Grace to you today, Jim Stephens

…For the joy of the Lord is your strength. (Nehemiah 8:10)

Long before Jake the Desert Bone Dog came to be part of our family in 2015, there was another dog who spent his life from about one year of age until he crossed the rainbow bridge in 2014 bringing a wonderful quality of the very best kind of “dogginess” to our extended family. Buddy was a rescue dog, a Cocker Spaniel mix. He never told us what the other elements of his “mix” consisted of, but Buddy was a great dog! And after his passing, I didn’t think there could ever be another dog as great as Buddy, but that was before I met Jake! If you read my stuff for any significant period or follow me on Facebook or Instagram, you’ll read plenty about Jake! But this story is about Buddy the Dog.

One crisp, sunny winter afternoon I walked along an old track in the Juniper forest east of my Central Oregon home and watched my dog Buddy run. Buddy’s no greyhound, but he really loves to run! He runs with such abandon, long ears flapping, dodging sagebrush, leaping over weather-bleached juniper logs, chasing imaginary rabbits and deer!

Sometimes, watching Buddy run, I just had to laugh out loud! I could see the joy in him, joy that comes from doing what God created him to do. Because I loved that old dog, I felt joy when I watched him doing what he loved to do.

Buddy loved to run because that’s what God created him to do. I believe that because God is so good, and loves us so much, he made us to have the same joy in doing what he created us to do that my dog Buddy had in running through the forest and the fields.

Here are a few things we know about ourselves:

• We do best what we care most deeply about.
• We do best what comes from deep inside us.
• We do best what we do with greatest passion.
• We do best what gives us joy.

Eric Liddell, the Scottish distance runner featured in the 1981 movie “Chariots of Fire,” is quoted: “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.”

Why does it often seem so hard to know what God created us to do and to experience the simple, profound joy in doing it? Do we get stuck in the routines of merely “getting the job done”? Have we become trapped by the expectations of others? Are we too busy to take a deep breath and ask a couple of honest questions?

If these questions resonate with you, here are some ideas you could try:

• Take time to take stock. What gives you pure, simple joy? Have an honest think about when you’re most joyful, most fulfilled.
• Talk to those who know you best and care about you most. Ask honest questions: “When do you see me most joyful, most energized?”
• Talk to your Creator about what you were made for.

I’m certainly not minimizing the importance of discipline, of doing what must be done, of fulfilling our commitments. This isn’t about only doing things that make you feel good. This isn’t about shirking responsibilities or duties. This is about being honest, being brave, and being willing to step out of your “must do” zone into your joyful “get to” zone!

And one thing more. You’re an influencer of others. You are, at some level, in some relationships, a leader and influencer. So think about—be aware of—what gives joy to those you influence most.

What if we parents and teachers and managers and bosses and other influencers looked carefully and caringly at those we influence and helped each of them discover just what God created them to do? What if we made it our pleasure to create opportunities for each person we love and influence to do the things that they were created for—the things that give them joy? What if we did that?

Just as I often took Buddy to the Juniper forest or the desert to create an opportunity for him to run, I believe God loves to create opportunities for people like you and me to “run!” And I believe that when we are simply doing what God created us to do, he rejoices – he feels the pleasure and joy of it with us!

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when dreams come true, there is life and joy. (Proverbs 13:12 NLT)

 What do you think?

 As always, I’d love to hear from you and I welcome your comments and questions. If you’re reading on the blog, leave a comment below. If you’re reading from the email, click “Reply” and tell me what you’re thinking.

Grace to you today, Jim Stephens