In the late 1990s, we visited Ted and Carlene Camp at their home in Trenton, Georgia. Ted had asked Jon, my husband, about being the assistant director of Silent Word Ministries. We had already been “on the road” for many years, living in RVs as we started and helped Deaf ministries in many states, from Florida to Michigan and from Virginia to California. I had grown up in a small town, but we had been ministering in much larger cities. Would we want to go back to a small town? Yes, the Lord touched our hearts to move to small-town Trenton to serve the Lord with the Camps and SWM. Today, we continue to travel a lot, and we enjoy seeing various parts of the country, meeting Deaf people and those interested in ministering to them. We are excited to educate people about Deaf ways and the culture. Several who hear it for the first time are amazed, and they become burdened to pray for, and even get involved in ministering to Deaf people. But at the end of our travels, we are always eager to come back home! Here, when driving to the SWM office, I get to see squirrels playing and rabbits darting across the road. I hear the birds singing and the many “critters” (insects and others) making their noises. From time-to-time, a deer looks at me before running back into his hiding place, or a groundhog crawls quickly into his hole. Truly the Lord has given us a pleasant (pleasing) place to live. Psalm 16:6 says, “The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places.”
But you also can live in a pleasant place. Do not feel you need to move to Trenton! (But you could! We welcome help from volunteers in their areas of expertise.) The places spoken of in Psalm 16 are those places where we recognize that all of the good things in our lives are from the Lord (v 2), and we have pleasure in being in the company of other Christians (v 3). They are where the Lord “counsels” our hearts to choose Him, and teaches us even in the middle of the night (v 7). Places are pleasant when the Lord is before us and at our right hands (v 8), when we rest and have hope, when we see His path for our lives, and when we stay in His presence (v 11). Yes, I thank the Lord for Trenton, a pleasant place to live, but we can all thank Him for our pleasant place of living in His presence!
