Jerry & Doris

They're back in Liberia fixing things

Some people can look at a music score and hear a symphony. Others can look at a recipe and taste the cake. Jerry Freeze can look at a pile of parts and see a washing machine. Give him a little time and you can do your laundry in it.

When Jerry and Doris Freeze were married, they agreed to seek God's guidance for their life together. One day his uncle, a missionary to Africa, asked him, "Why don't you consider the mission field? We need people who can fix things."

At the time, Jerry was doing industrial maintenance. He thought all missionaries were either pastors or nurses. But he and Doris prayed about it and of fered their services. Four years later, just as his efforts to buy a modest business seemed frustrated, a call came from the mission board. So the Freezes packed up their family and landed at the Curran Hospital in Zorzor, a remote Liberian village.

That was 1972. They stayed five years, came home while some of their children finished school, and then went back in 1987, just two years before civil war plunged Liberia into chaos. Eventually they had to leave. Over the next years the Freezes heard reports of churches burned, people massacred, and refugees fleeing into neighboring Ghana and Sierra Leone.

In 1998, Jerry was asked to go back as part of an assessment team to survey the effects of the war. "I was shocked as I stood in the ruins of Curran Hospital," he said. "Trees were growing up inside the walls. This was the place where our youngest child was born. Now it was a blackened shell."

All those years of work, and nothing but ashes to show for it.

But old friends were there. He found them spiritually alive, thanking God for each new day. Some of the refugees had begun a Lutheran church at their camp in Sierra Leone. Congregations still met under the leadership of Liberian pastors.

So Jerry and Doris left their home in South Carolina and went back to Liberia last year-not as fulltime missionaries but as volunteers. They joined a growing number of Lutheran lay people whose talents can be used in short-term projects worldwide. For six months they helped reconstruct facilities for a nursing school. They plan to go back again to help a team from the Upper Susquehanna Synod re-roof a church.

Thank God for people who can fix things.

By: H. George Anderson

A monthly message from the presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

His e-mail address:

[email protected]

Call the Presiding Bishop's Hotline: (773) 380-2930. Messages change every two weeks. Topics: Oct. 1Farming and the future; Oct.15-Impressions from the Conference of Bishops.

Copyright Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Oct 2000
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