Every single person in the world has needs.

Some are a matter of life and death. Some not so much.

Some of us First Worlders get the two confused.

Here I am, five years out from the “Foreign” Mission Field, and I’m ashamed to admit I’m rutted deep. Settled into a house and a routine that appear much too similar to the average consumer in middle class America. And busy, busy.

I long to look as Set Apart as I once did.

Not cut off from people, but standing out. Right in the middle of a crowd, daring to be different. Daring to look into the eyes of the people around me instead of at my watch. Being sold out to a Savior who cares about meeting eternal needs than anything else. On mission to join Him.

Marcia Moston’s debut book, Call of a Coward: The God of Moses and the Middle-Class Housewife, reminded me how that feels. This stirring memoir yanked me out of the security and complacency of my trite little world and plunked me down on the dusty floor of an adobe home in the mountains of Guatemala. Man, did I need to go there.

With humor and aplomb, my friend reminded me of the Lord’s willingness to loosen his daughters’ grip on the familiar things. Those first moments on the mission field, where a capable and dynamic woman morphs into “a thumb-sucking, bed-wetting first grader” had me wiping my eyes–tears and laughter taking turns nicely.

Thankfully, he gave Marcia (and me) something better to cling to. Himself.

She said, “Those kicking and screaming death-throes moments when you realize you aren’t and you can’t are God’s opportunities to show you he is and he can.”

Oh, and he does.

Marcia’s beautiful prose details her journey from shocked anxiety to contented trust, painting colorful and poignant scenes from America to Guatemala and back again. Her heart for missions is evident, her heart for being wherever and serving however God wants her obvious.

Though Marcia said oodles of things which resonated with me, this was one of the loudest: “I wanted to embrace his journey, not resign myself to it.”  If you’ve ever felt like you were meant for more, like you needed to let go of yourself and stop clinging to the comfortable, this is a book you don’t want to miss.

Call of a Coward: The God of Moses and the Middle-Class Housewife is available online at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Christian Book Distributors or from your neighborhood bookstore.