About a week ago, I sat on our front porch basking in the peace of our lovely neighborhood in Greenville. I couldn’t help remembering all the years I’d spent disliking this town! When we lived twenty minutes away in Sandy Lake, I came here as little as possible─for groceries, doctor appointments, sporting events and birthday parties (two of our children and four of our grandchildren live here). I had decided Greenville was a depressing, dying town.

I remember the night we found out we definitely weren’t going to New Zealand (a story for another day) and I was looking at houses online in preparation for our return from Japan. We’d always thought we’d come back to live in Sandy Lake where we’d lived before or in Grove City where we went to church. However, we hadn’t found a house suitable for our retirement years in our price range.That night, I started looking at houses in other towns─even Greenville, where I discovered three pages of houses for sale. One of them had everything we needed at a ridiculously low price.

But Greenville? I didn’t want to live in Greenville! I clearly remember the moment of decision where I almost bypassed this house because I disliked the town. As I hesitated, the Holy Spirit reminded me that most of our grandchildren, all of whom are the apple of my eye, lived here. Maybe Greenville wouldn’t be such a bad place to live. I left the website open, telling the Lord that if Donn was excited about this house and wanted to pursue it, I would assume that was HIS plan. He was and he did!

A few short weeks later as we drove into Greenville on the way to meet our realtor, I noticed a sign on a business I didn’t remember. “Fresh Grounds, Caffeine for the Soul.” I told Donn, “I bet that’s Marty’s place!” I’d known Marty Johnson for years, being good friends with his mom Barb Johnson, and had run into him at a Hempfield School Open House before we left for Japan in 2008. He had told me about the donation they’d been given to buy a business in Greenville and the vision the Holy Spirit had given them of a coffee house that was also a ministry.

I was pretty sure we were looking at the culmination of that vision. Excitement bubbled up in me. I couldn’t wait to get inside. I’m still in awe of what God did between the day I heard the vision and the day we saw it with our own eyes. I felt sure this was one of the reasons we were in Greenville. (Later, we discovered that pretty much everything God had for us to do was in Greenville.) Being part of the Tuesday morning Downtown Ministries’ prayer group has been and is one of my greatest blessings.

Now, five years later, I can hardly believe how much I’ve come to love this town. We prayer walk and I weep for neighborhoods struggling with poverty and drugs. I know it’s our mission field. Several months ago, I talked to a missionary who visited our church whose theme was, “The love of Christ compels us…” (II Cor. 5:14). When I talked to her about the years we’d served in Japan, she wondered whether the compelling love of Christ would allow us to stay in Greenville. I realized later that her thinking overlooked the fact that the compelling love of Christ isn’t given to us only for a foreign land.

Some months before we’d started prayer walking, I had taken a break from going to Fresh Grounds for prayer meeting when my counseling schedule got busy. Then Donn and I began to feel led to prayer walk in a part of Greenville that concerned us. The first day we walked, I wept and cried and told Donn, “I have to go back to Fresh Grounds; it’s where we pray for this town.” The love of Christ compels me to pray for this town, for the ministries here, and for opportunities to be the hands and feet of Jesus to the people.

The love of Christ still compels us to  pray for the people of Japan. (We will return to minister there with One Mission Society from October 28 to November 7, 2016. We covet your prayers.) But just as surely, the love of Christ compels us to pray for the people of Greenville and to minister in the town in which we now live.

“Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jeremiah 29:7).