My Story...

Hello from the Sonoran Desert!  My name is Julie Ford. My family & I are missionaries to the Tohono O'odham Nation in Southern Arizona. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to become a contributor to the In Her Shoes blog. In introducing myself, I keep asking “where do I start?" and “what do I leave in and what to leave out?”.  You see, as a “not so young” missionary, I can look back over my life and see how God orchestrated each step to where I am today. So, I guess I just need to start at the beginning.  I was born in Northeast Tennessee and raised in the small town of Fall Branch. Andy Griffith’s Mayberry would have been the big city to us! The youngest of three daughters, I was raised in a single parent home by my mother.  Unfortunately, I would grow up without my father, as he was killed in Vietnam when I was eleven days old.  While I didn’t understand back then, God would use these things considered obstacles to shape me into who He would want me to be.  

At age sixteen, my sister set me up on a blind date with a guy she worked with.  That guy turned out to be my husband, Billy. I would like to tell you at this point how both Billy and I grew up in Christian homes and got saved a Bible Camp in our teens, but we didn’t.  Both of us grew up in dysfunctional families and neither of us had a clue about this man named Jesus.  But God’s plan for our lives opened doors that would place us in a Christian Outreach where Billy would be saved and myself in a little country church where I accepted Christ as my Saviour. 

In 1998, God would bless us with our daughter, Madison. We were a picture of the American family.  Billy was managing a multi-million dollar company and having just completed a Bible degree,  I was a career social worker in a ministry position that I adored, and Madison was going to the same school I attended as a child and even had some of the same teachers I had!  Our family owned an eight-acre farm with horses and we attended a Baptist church that was highly respected in the community and served weekly as bus captains and as a Sunday School teacher.   In 2012, our family traveled to Southern Arizona for a short term mission trip on a Native American Reservation that we had never heard of. Little did we know that it would change our lives forever.  During that week, God showed us remote villages where the O'odham live too far away to attend a Bible believing church.  Coming from the Bible Belt, it had been hard for us to comprehend places in America where people did not have access to a church.  The one thing that kept going through our family’s hearts was how selfish would it be for our family to go back to Tennessee, knowing that we held the ability to provide something these people didn't have…the Gospel. After much prayer and counsel, we surrendered our lives to become missionaries to the Tohono O’odham people. After three years of deputation, we arrived on the mission field in November 2016.  Today, our family provides through the use of a Mobile Mission Trailer,  Bible Clubs in remote villages on the reservation. The O’odham people hold tight to their traditional beliefs mixed with Catholicism, but they keep coming to join us each week. How humbling it is to know that the Lord Almighty chose our little family to be His servants in this awesome way.  

It is my hope that the words I write glorifies God and blesses someone along the way. You can follow our ministry at: https://www.facebook.com/fords2thetonation/?ref=bookmarks.

 

"Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert".  -Isaiah 43:19-