Before Erica Patrick served as a student summer missionary in East Asia, she had no idea there were places in the world where there wasn’t even one person who followed Jesus.
And when she found out, she knew she could no longer be content.
“We have the light here,” said Patrick, who grew up in the Tuscaloosa area. “There are places in the world that don’t even have the light.”
That set her on a path to serve in East Asia. She wasn’t going to let anything stop her from dedicating her whole life to Jesus and His mission — including a husband. Getting married and having a family was “never on my radar,” she said. “I just thought this is where I’m going and this is what I want to do; I want to honor the Lord and be faithful in that.”
But her mother bumped into a woman at the doctor’s office whose son, David, also had served in East Asia for the summer, and the two women thought they should meet and swap stories.
They did — and during the conversation, she told him outright that she didn’t want anything, including a man, to stand in the way of going back to East Asia. And he went home and told his mother he’d found his future wife.
“It seems God had different plans!” Patrick said.
Great team
Everyone could see the two made a great team — they were both intentional, working to maximize every day for the glory of God and the spread of the gospel. They married, planted their lives on the other side of the world and began raising a family — a son, Elijah, and two daughters, Auburn Grace and Evie.
For 15 years, David Patrick trained church planters and helped start churches. She was involved in sharing Christ and discipling believers any way she could, carrying a small oven into villages, baking bread with the women and talking about Jesus being the bread of life.
Together the Patricks helped with a range of ministries, including getting the New Testament translated into the local language.
Then one day, they got a call that they could no longer live in their country. They had to be out in 72 hours.
“It really did become a crisis of faith for me,” Patrick said, admitting she didn’t handle it well — she was angry at God as she held her kids as they wailed about leaving the only home they’d ever known. But David Patrick reminded her of the words of Job — “Though He slay me, yet I will hope in Him.”
“And I said, ‘You’re right, I’ve got to keep my hope in Christ,’” Patrick remembered. “God started bringing me out of that darkness and started to grant me hope. And it was such a gift that David walked me through that tragedy, because what I didn’t realize then was that He was using that and this person in my life who was so strong in the Lord and such a rock for me, to prepare me for a greater suffering that would come later that year.”
They left East Asia in March 2020, and seven months later were staying at a missions house in west Alabama, preparing to take another assignment in Taiwan.
One morning Patrick walked into the kitchen and didn’t see her husband reading his Bible like he always did, and she knew something was wrong. She tried calling his phone and he didn’t answer. Then she looked at Find My iPhone and it showed he was 25 feet away.
While he was working on the playground between the mission house and the church, his heart had stopped with no explanation.
He died about 45 minutes before she found him.
Hard road
“I remember when I had left the hospital and come back, and I just sat on the playground where he died and just cried before the Lord and said, ‘My greatest prayer is that I wouldn’t fail this time. I don’t want my faith to fail,’” Patrick recalled.
She wanted to honor Him well in her suffering and walk the hard road in front of her in a way that brought Him glory, she said.
And she has. Colleagues and friends from the mission field say they’ve been challenged and blessed by the way she has walked through her grief with courage and grit, leaning on God. She and her children are now preparing for their new assignment in Taiwan.
“I think it is another faith journey for us as well,” Patrick said. “If we were going on our own, never. But we have been called there by the Lord, Who is going to go with us every step of the way and provide for us and show up for us … we trust Him. And we don’t know what’s to come, but we know God does. And we know that He is faithful.”
Tiffany Law*, a fellow missionary in East Asia, said people might hear her friend’s story and think, “She’s so strong.”
“But she would say, ‘I’m absolutely so weak. I’m absolutely so dependent, more than ever before,’” Law related. “Her dependence on the Word … she would say there’s nowhere else to go; this is what has kept me going.”
Patrick said she leans on that every day.
“I think the world would push against us and say, ‘Look what your God did to you. How can you say He is trustworthy? How can you say He is good?’ And that is what God is calling us to, to have this spirit of faith to say, ‘No, He is good and trustworthy and wise, and He is worth all of it.’”
Editor’s note — *name changed for security reasons
Hear more on the Stories podcast
Want to hear more of Erica Patrick’s story? Check out Season 5, Episode 2 of TAB Media’s Stories podcast, available now. This season tells her story along with those of two other women who lost their husbands while on the mission field, but saw God do incredible things to sustain them. Listen at tabonline.org/stories or wherever you get podcasts.
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