Karen Watson counted the cost. Then she followed God with her heart and with her head as she entered the war zone of Iraq to share with people there the message that had made her willing to sacrifice everything.
“To obey is my objective. To suffer is expected. His glory will be my reward,” Watson wrote in a letter to her pastor, meant only to be opened upon her death.
Watson, 38, of Bakersfield, Calif., was one of four Southern Baptist International Mission Board (IMB) workers killed March 15 when their vehicle was ambushed in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.
Phil Neighbors, co-pastor at Valley Baptist Church in Bakersfield where Watson had been a member since 1997, said Watson accepted Christ about eight years ago after enduring an intense period of grief. Her boyfriend whom she planned to marry, her father and her grandmother all died within a two-year span.
“That really shook her foundation,” Neighbors said. “Those crises led her to turn to the Lord. She came to know Christ and … just loved the Word of God and the work of God. She was passionate about it.”
Watson immediately began taking part in short-term missions trips with Valley Baptist, including two to El Salvador and one to Kosovo, Macedonia and Greece in 2002.
“That experience led her to a realization that God was calling her into missions,” Neighbors said.
The church directed her to the IMB, and she was accepted to serve overseas. She resigned from her job as a detention officer at the Kern County Sheriff’s Department in Bakersfield and sold her house and her car.
IMB personnel noticed Watson’s skills in administration and leadership, and they assigned her to coordinate refugee relief in conjunction with Operation Iraqi Freedom. She set up a base of operations in Jordan in March 2003, but with the relatively quick end of major combat operations, the anticipated flood of refugees did not come. Watson was then assigned to Iraq.
“We talked about the danger numerous times before she left and while she was there,” Neighbors said. “She would always call me whenever anything would happen in the country. For instance, when the [United Nations] building was bombed and numerous people were killed, … she quickly called me to say she was safe, and she did that several times when there was trouble.”
But March 15 was different. Neighbors and other church members heard news that five IMB workers had been shot in Iraq. “I was thinking, ‘Well, maybe Karen will call in a minute. She always calls,’” Neighbors said. “But she didn’t call.”
That night Neighbors remembered the letter Watson had written to him before she left for Iraq with the instructions that he was not to open it unless she was killed. He called it a powerful testimony and evidence that she wanted him and the church family to know she had no regrets and died serving the Lord. (BP)
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