God's Mercenary: The Struggles of a Modern-Day Missionary

By Philip Van Lanen

In 1990, Philip Van Lanen decided to take his family on an adventure of a lifetime when he accepted a Dental Lab Technician position in Rwanda, Africa. After deciding to move to Rwanda, they sold their home and spent the next several months living out of suitcases as they completed cross-cultural and language training. While training for mission service, he joked, "Someday I'm going to write a book titled 'God's Missionary' with the word 'Missionary' crossed out, and the name 'Mercenary' scribbled over the top of it." Why mercenary? Because a mercenary is a soldier, who gets paid to go and fight, in many ways, that is what he would do. Like a soldier, he would face many battles, literal and figurative, along the way. In mission training, dealing with human resources, and learning French were battles, but he would face others.He soon learned that the expectations of mission service differed from the realities of missionary life. Missionary service had many joys and sorrows. The book recounts the challenges the family faced adapting to life in Rwanda and our experiences with new friends and colleagues.In 1994, after living in Rwanda for three years, genocide erupted. They were witnesses to the events that took the lives of more than 800,000 people. His family left the country in the next-to-last convoy out of the country, four days after the genocide started.After leaving the country, his battles continued after being reassigned to a dental clinic in Saipan. He struggled to make sense of Rwanda's events, and he was eventually diagnosed with PTSD. Follow him and his family as they journey from Indiana to a dental clinic in Rwanda and then to Saipan. Come along as he and his family make it out of Rwanda and the trials that follow as he has to battle PTSD.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B08P5M97J7
• ISBN13: 9798574409800
• Release Date: November 2020
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 202 Pages
• Weight: 0.61 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"