The school bus full of kids is rolling down the street again. I feel the change. Fall is here with football and hunting season. Pretty soon a big cool blast will sweep this year’s summer away for good, and everything will seem fresh and new. 

Since Mrs. Maca’s kindergarten class way back when, this time of year has always felt like a beginning to me. New clothes and supplies. New friends and new stories from old friends. A new direction and exciting possibilities for the next turn of the calendar. I feel stronger and smarter than last year. It makes my missionary mind travel to what I have witnessed, and what has happened to an ordinary guy like me.

Just when I thought life had become stagnant and boring, something always, always happened to show me there was a next level. God is always showing me how to grow. I think about Efraim, the 8-year-old orphan in Cuzco, Peru. He must have felt quite a new beginning when he came out of the hospital and was reunited with his brother after almost being beaten to death and drowning. A bad man had beat him unconscious, tied him in a flour sack and thrown him in the polluted Cusco River for dead. But the Lord sent a woman who “accidentally” discovered him, and the brothers arrived in our orphanage and accepted Christ. Efraim is now a top student – another new beginning.

Hugo, another 8-year-old orphan, had a plan to be an American style gangster with a Thompson sub-machine gun and a pinstripe suit. Nobody would ever hurt him again. It was pretty ambitious for an on the streets of Cusco. The Lord guided Hugo to our orphanage, and now he has a new beginning in law school. He never got the “tommy-gun”, but he really looks good in that suit.

I think of when I was baptized by my friend Neil Jeffries in Dallas, and how I felt when I came up out of the water. I knew I had gotten something, and at the time I didn’t really know what all it was or what I should do with it. It was kinda like getting the free gift of a brand new jet. I was happy to have it, but I didn’t yet know how to fly.

But that was okay. What I can tell you for sure is: It felt fresh and it felt new.

Steve Dyer is a Christian missionary who traveled to Peru in 2007. It changed his life forever. He has been a real estate broker for 25 years and his wife Sheri is an attorney and CPA. They left their careers to expand their mission services and recently returned to encourage others to serve. Read about his missionary adventures in The Secret Passages of Stevie the Guide. Learn more at www.dyerfamilymissions.com.