Mara Cook felt like she was supposed to be a missionary. But when the then 8-year-old mentioned it to her pastor, he brushed her off. “You are much too young to know what God has for you,” he said.
From that point on, Mara dismissed the pull on her heart as nothing more than an emotional response.
Mara’s husband Andy first felt burdened for missions at a conference in college. While the president of a mission agency spoke about God using people with any type of college degree, Andy felt a tugging at his heart. Although he was painfully shy, he made an appointment to discuss going to the mission field. When the president asked him his major, Andy told him he was studying chemistry. “We don’t have anything for you,” the president said as he turned and walked away.
Both Andy and Mara call those moments their “get out of missions free” cards, admitting that they shaped the path they would take for the next two decades.
The Cooks dated throughout college and married their senior year. After graduation, they began working in youth ministry. They spent the next 18-years rooted at the same church in Panama, New York, working with the youth group and serving in ministry. Then, in 2007, Andy read an article about a ministry position in Portugal with ABWE. Something inside of him cried out, this could be you!
The thought scared Andy pretty badly.
He was happy serving where he was and he knew that his family didn’t like change. But he gave the article to Mara to read. Several days later, Mara came back to Andy. “When I was looking through that article and it talked about the youth specialist position, it was like someone took our resume and wrote it into this article,” she told him.
Throughout the fall, God got the Cooks’ attention through numerous verses citing the call to share the gospel. Still, they doubted what they were supposed to do. We don’t fit the profile of a missionary, they thought to themselves.
For more than two years, the couple tried to be sure they had heard God’s voice. Using the scriptures, prayer, circumstances, and Godly counsel, they were repeatedly encouraged to begin pursuing missions. But they struggled with the thought. “We didn’t think we were missionaries. And we certainly weren’t evangelists,” said Andy, who jokes that once while being tasked with giving a homeless person a free lunch, he couldn’t find anyone willing to take it. “Finally at one point, we prayed, God, do we really have to go or are you just burdening our hearts to pray for a certain region of the world?”
Later that morning the family’s devotional book made it extremely clear. The opening line read, God commands you to go. You need permission to stay. “We immediately changed our prayers,” Andy says.
In addition, the Cook’s children had come to them on two separate occasions about going on a family mission trip. “Dad, we believe that God is telling us that we should be going on a mission trip,” they said. “When I realized that they hadn’t been talking about it amongst themselves, we began saving right away,” Andy says.
When the family decided they would take a missions trip to survey Portugal for future ministry, they asked that their church family would pray for three things. “We asked that our entire family would know that God was changing where our family was ministering. Two, that we would have a definite idea to whether or not God was having us to serve in Portugal before we arrived back home. And three, that we would be able to minister to the team on our trip,” Mara says.
During their first four days in Portugal, God systematically removed every false motive they may have had for moving to the country. “First, the weather was colder than we had packed for. We also heard a national pastor state emphatically that he didn’t think missionaries would be needed by 2016,” Andy says. They also saw how some of the newer missionaries were struggling with homesickness and feeling ineffective in their ministry. “On top of this, the team leader and ‘keeper of the vision’ informed us that he was leaving the field.”
“Everything within us was screaming, this is a stupid. Go home before you throw your life away,” Andy says. “I took that to God and he took me to the verse in John which says if a grain of wheat dies, it multiples. The next day we reviewed everything God had said to us over the past year, through prayer, godly counsel and circumstances. We decided that there was no question. God was calling us to go.”
On their way back to the United States, the Cooks realized that God had also answered all three of the requests that they had made of him for their trip. “All that was left was for us to be obedient and follow his call,” Mara says.
During their discerning period, the Cooks were amazed at how often God confirmed His will in specific ways. “Sometimes, we thought we were just making it all up, or reading into things. But God brought people into our lives at key moments,” Mara says.
Once while attending a youth camp in New York, the couple began discussing the details of becoming missionaries in their downtime. Questions about their children’s schooling and ability to adjust to a new culture poured out of Mara’s worried heart. Later that day, a camp counselor approached Andy and Mara and began sharing about things that had impacted her life. “She mentioned that her principal had left and gone to the mission field in Portugal,” Andy said. “Our ears certainly perked right now. Then, she talked about how she had gone there and studied and served a year at his school—the exact same school our kids would attend if we went onto the mission field,” Andy said with a laugh. “Without even knowing it, she answered every question Mara had been asking earlier that morning.”
“Sometimes when we get to tell our whole story, people are amazed by all of the details,” Andy says. “What God has impressed upon me is not how amazing our story has been, but how patient God has been with us both in clarifying and confirming his call upon our lives.”
God has been gracious in speaking repeatedly to us in a way we would hear it and understand it.”
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