Number 7 Will Astonish You!: The We-Wu for July 27 - 31, 2026

My nephew called out my use of clickbait last week. This week’s title is all for you, kiddo!

So a photo popped up in my Facebook memories on Monday. This feature can be a lot of fun, but it can also occasionally be a punch in the gut. This particular memory wasn’t all that punchy, but it did make me pause.

See, 16 years ago, I started working at One Mission Society. I had just finished nearly four weeks of CROSS training (which was an emotional roller coaster all on its own), and I was joining the communications department. My boss was in the hospital, I didn’t really know what I was supposed to be doing, and I had signed over two years of my life to this place.

Two. Ha.

Somewhere in those last days of training, the ladies took a group picture.

You may have noticed I doctored it a bit. Mostly because this isn’t really about these women, and I don’t want it to sound like I’m being disparaging or rude. But this group was my first experience of what has become fairly normal at OMS.

People don’t stay.

No one in that photo, apart from me, is still with OMS. The first person left about a month after training was over. One left after a year. Some did a full term. I think the longest lasting was maybe six or seven years. They left for various reasons, some normal, some after really bad experiences.

And then there’s me, thinking I’d be here two years, and now it’s been 16.

I would be the first to tell you that I have wanted to leave over the course of those 16 years. Heck, I kinda already did - twice. But God kept pulling me back. Keeps pulling me back. I have always said that I’m here as long as God wants me to be, and that doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.

There are lots of people at OMS who have been here much longer. There’s a 90-something year old woman who still shows up for chapel every week. But if I’d known from the beginning just how many people I would end up having to say goodbye to, I don’t really know what I’d have said. (I probably would have kept track of them better because sometimes we measure events by who was in what role at that particular time.)

Anyway. That doesn’t really have anything to do with my week. It just made me pause for a bit. And be more thankful for the people who are still here. (And the ones that left who I still talk to.)

This week was pretty standard. I had my regular meetings, and I worked on some transfiles and production docs. French is always the second language we do after the English is finalized, so I sometimes find myself speaking like the Pink Panther.

We also had a three-day discussion about the naming of one of our documents. It’s a tool used to keep track of churches and how well they are doing at practicing the nine elements of a healthy church. The doc was changed quite recently, and it was decided that a name change might be in order.

Of course, the doc is used in Term 2, and Term 2 is what we just finalized in English and got back in French, so we kinda needed to get this done back in June. But now is better than later.

Yeah, so three days to get all of the input from the stakeholders. (I need to start doing shots or something every time I hear that word. I mean, probably not alcohol shots because we don’t really do that here, but it’s gotta be something crazy.) I think I was the final deal breaker because I basically said let’s just name it what it is - the healthy church diagram.

Now I get to change all of the other docs that reference it.

That might be it for the week. I’m gonna have to come up with a better system for recalling all of the crazy bits of my week for after the other half of my brain leaves.

How’s that for clickbait?