Each month on the World Race, my team will be living alongside a missionary contact in our country of assignment. These missionaries are often longtime residents of the country, who have spent many faithful years pouring into their ministry. They have pressed on through rejection, turmoil, loneliness, doubt, and even threats of danger for the sake of seeing Christ glorified. They are some of God’s humblest servants walking this earth, yet even so, their stories of faithful triumph often go untold.
This next year, I want to invite you into these people’s lives. I want to highlight the amazing stories of these faithful men and women of God. I want to honor those whose lives magnify a total and complete surrender to the Gospel of Christ.
I want to start with my parents.
My dad and mom – Chris and Rachel Hogue – are missionaries in their everyday lives. While they currently live stateside, their hearts have always been to see many come to Christ across the world. They are my greatest inspiration for this journey ahead of me. Here is their story.
My mom was born to American missionaries in Honduras, and spent her childhood growing up on the mission field. Her parents first started a Bible school in a small town called Olanchito, and later planted several churches in Tegucigalpa where her father led as pastor. She felt a calling to serve the Lord even from a young age as she served with her parents in poor communities. My dad grew up in upstate New York, and after he accepted Christ in his teens, he felt a calling to dedicate his life’s work to Christ, and to serve him overseas. When my parents met in graduate school at the University of Tennessee in the mid 1980’s (at a wedding – ADORABLE RIGHT?), their hearts aligned on this desire to live a lifestyle of service to God and to the world. They were married shortly after, and immediately jumped into international ministry. Working with World Relief, my parents lived in Nicaragua for two years, taking a brief trip back to the States for my birth. They served faithfully in Nicaragua until God called them to Uganda several months following the Rwandan genocide. For three months, my dad would travel into Rwanda to help in relief projects, while my mother and I ministered to the locals in our small village (I was two, but picked up on my mom’s ministry pretty quickly).
Several years later, my dad accepted a job with World Vision, and my family began to settle down as we welcomed in my sister Jessie and my brother Andrew over the course of four years. In 2000, God called my family back to the international mission field with World Vision, and we returned to Nicaragua. For my parents, this was an entirely new venture, as they now had three children to care for. I remember my dad taking short trips around the country to survey various projects, and on occasion inviting me along to watch him in action. My mom built relationships with local women, engaging with them in Bible studies and personal visits. It was eye opening to watch them minister to people in the poorest of conditions, and to see how God was moving through their lives even before I could fully comprehend what I saw. After two years of serving the Lord in Latin America, God called my parents back to the United States, where we settled in Puyallup, Washington for eleven years. Since then, my parents have faithfully served the people in our local church and community, and my dad has travelling for World Vision to supervise outreach programs and humanitarian projects around the globe. Even in America, my parents continue to live mission-minded lives.
What I love about my parents is that their compatibility in ministry comes through their unique yet complementary differences. Both of them are gifted with a specific personality and skill set, and have individualized focuses when stepping out to serve others.
My mom leads with warmth and empathy. She serves the Lord through selfless love and genuine empathy for the people around her. Growing up, I remember having to drag her out of church every Sunday, because her love for others always caused her to seek out deep relationships with those around her (at the expense of my desire to go home sooner to watch TV). She is endlessly sacrificial in how she puts the needs of others first, often going out of her way to make people feel special with a gift or surprise treat. Her ability to start conversations and make rapid relationships with strangers is so unreal, my siblings and I often tease her that she could make friends with trees. She listens with her entire self, and always remembers people in need. Her wealth of Scriptural and spiritual knowledge is hefty, and she dishes it out generously. She leads her life by love, and never thinks twice about finding ways to bring God glory through her heart for others.
My dad leads with confidence and devotion. He is a solid man of God, unwavering, and level headed. In the midst of any storm, he is steady and faithful to trust God. He has led our family with constant attention to details, caring for us even in the smallest ways we might never notice. His habitual resourcefulness has often elicited an eye roll from my siblings and I, but the generosity that flows out from what he conserves never fails to silence my cynicism. He is a man of devotion who keeps a steady balance of wisdom and obedience, instructing my siblings in God’s word while also walking out God’s commands in life. I’ve admired him in the times I’ve watched him minister to homeless men and women in spontaneous situations, sharing the Gospel with them even while I would’ve rather hid in the car. He has taught me to be disciplined in my walk with Christ, helping me understand the importance of cultivating a Christ-centered lifestyle. He walks with the Lord in full confidence of his salvation and righteousness in Christ, and seeks out ways to keep others in right relationship with Him as well.
It’s a funny thing getting to know your parents after you’ve grown. You start to see new parts of them, the sleeping passions and quiet vulnerability that were once masked by the immoveable façade of their parental authority. In more recent years, I’ve wondered if my parents were happy with their choice to settle back in the States. I knew that they once had hearts to live overseas on the mission field, and yet as our lives began to settle into suburban routine, it seemed on the outside like this drive had faded. These past few weeks I’ve spent at home, they’ve invited me in deeper. While they still feel called to serve God on mission, they had chosen to remain Stateside and sacrifice their own ambitions for the sake of providing a stable upbringing for my siblings and I. While they look forward to stripping back and serving on mission again after all of us kids have moved out, I have been astounded to see the ways in which they still strive to live on mission in their current lives. Countless times, I’ve seen my dad witness to someone we meet in passing, or heard my mom tell about the person she witnessed to in a grocery store or at work. I’ve seen how they’ve chosen to stay involved in their church, whether it be in a homeless ministry, leading a home group, supporting overseas missionaries, or even volunteering to welcome newcomers on Sunday morning. They understand that their lives are not meant to be lived for themselves, and they live with the intention of serving the Lord with their whole hearts and minds.
I would not be going on the World Race if it was not for them. I wouldn’t know what living a life on mission looked like if it were not for them. I would not feel so assured travelling the world for the Gospel of Christ if they had not already demonstrated this for me. I know that I’m equipped for the journey ahead, because I carry with me the mantle of a generation of missionaries whose hearts blaze with passion to bring Jesus to the nations.
I feel so grateful to have these two amazing missionaries in my life.
I feel so lucky to call them Mom and Dad.
And I feel so honored to follow in their footsteps.
“Hear, my son, your father’s instruction, and forsake not your mother’s teaching, for they are a graceful garland for your head and pendants for your neck.” Proverbs 1:8-9
