I’m Sam Johnson. Here’s how I’m living deeply. 

“I almost said no. My internship at Tombras—a prominent ad agency here in Knoxville—was supposed to start June 2nd. Our flight to Thailand for the mission trip I’d agreed to left June 3rd. I’m studying advertising at UT, I’d just pulled straight A’s for the first time since middle school, and life felt like it was clicking into place. I didn’t want to walk into this internship two weeks late. But then, the start date for the internship moved to the 23rd. I could fly home, recover, and still show up on time. That was the Lord moving before I’d even left the ground. This would be my fifth mission trip with CSPC. St. Louis, Costa Rica, two trips to China. Each one, I showed up to serve: cutting grass, painting houses, running a science camp, loving on kids at a family camp. I knew how to do that. I was good at that. Thailand was different from the start. Chris Meystrik asked me personally—we’d hit it off the year before, on his first mission trip—and he told me straight: ‘Sam, this trip is different. We’re going to be prayer walking.’ I’d genuinely never even heard the term. There’s no immediate reward in prayer walking. No finished wall to look at when you’re done. No camp full of kids to hug goodbye. Just walking, praying, and trusting that something is happening you can’t see. Then I found out our team wasn’t 10 or 20 people like my other trips. It was 5. And the morning we were supposed to leave, one of the guys couldn’t go. 4 of us. Chris—in his 50s—and Anders and Rachel, both in their 20s like me. People I’d met maybe twice, in a pre-trip meeting. My mind kept handing me good, valid reasons why I could sit this one out. (My right foot had been giving me trouble for weeks.) But underneath all of it, I knew, ‘I don’t want to end up in the belly of the whale. Take me to Nineveh, Lord.’ Well, not exactly the same thing as Jonah, but similar in some ways. I’ve learned it’s obvious when the Lord is asking me to go on one of these trips. Not everyone gets asked. The fact that I keep getting considered is a sign in itself. So even nervous, even unsure of the assignment and the size of the team, I went.

A day of prayer walking looked like this: Wake up and eat breakfast with the team—me, Chris, Rachel, Anders, and two women who work in Thailand with Mekong Ministries, Adrianna and Morgan. They had a list of 28 villages. We’d load into a truck, drive to a village, split into two groups of three, and walk for 20 minutes to an hour—praying over what we saw, sometimes singing, sometimes just talking to each other about what was in front of us. We told anyone who asked that we were tourists, just seeing how people live. Some already knew we were ‘Jesus people.’ Anyone who showed interest, we’d talk with about the Bible. Anyone who didn’t, we’d just love on. We split time between Laos and Thailand, four days each, up near Chiang Rai, right at the Myanmar border. One moment has really stayed with me. We went to a village and met a man who’d been in a motorcycle accident years before. He’d lost the use of his legs and recently broken his arm, too. All he does now is sit on a mat in his living room. It’s hard to even describe how sad that is to witness. But he was a believer, and he had this little radio, preloaded with worship songs and Bible stories. He sat there listening to it, happy to see us. Not depressed. Not despairing. Even in abject poverty, there was joy in his heart and I knew it was from the Lord. Seeing that was incredible. Another day, in another village, I was playing peekaboo with a group of kids who’d come running out to see what was going on. While I did that, Morgan, one of our translators, was talking with a woman inside, who it turned out was a believer. She brought out a Bible in their own language (extremely rare there) and let us look through it. This is in an area where something like 80% of people haven’t even heard the Gospel! If I hadn’t been out there goofing off with those kids, we never would’ve stopped long enough to find that out, never would have seen that Bible. But God had moments of encouragement like that planned for us along the way the whole trip.

This trip did something to me the others hadn’t. My previous trips were built around service: you do the work, you see the fruit of it. This one gave me nothing to hold onto except the walking itself, but that was what God wanted me to see: that it’s His work, not mine, and it’s always ongoing. There’s always another step. The Lord can use even the most seemingly small thing I do—just walking around, just praying—to change something. Prayer’s been a big part of my life since my first trip to China, when I was overwhelmed in a country where I couldn’t even recognize the characters on street signs. I prayed and the Lord took my anxiety away almost completely. But this trip took that to a whole other level. Being in a mostly Buddhist culture, I felt a kind of spiritual darkness, an absence. As Christians in the West, especially Presbyterians, I think we don’t really talk about the spiritual realm much. It’s like we believe all of that stopped happening 2,000 years ago. But over there, people from the ministry told us about a man who’d shared his story on YouTube—a dream he’d had of a man in white who changed his life. Other people watched it and wrote in reporting the exact same dream. You just don’t hear about that kind of thing here. It’s another reminder the Lord can do anything to reach people. And in a place where people don’t have a friend to simply tell them about the love of Christ, He’ll find another way in. Most of these people had never heard of Jesus. And yet everywhere we went, His common grace was on display. People were so gracious. So welcoming. They wanted to take care of us—total strangers, from a completely different culture. That kind of hospitality doesn’t happen without the Lord behind it. My hope isn’t that I flipped anyone’s whole life around in a 20-minute conversation. It’s that maybe someone looks at people so foreign to them being that kind, wonders why, and digs a little deeper. That’s the only thing I could ever really hope to do on a trip like this: be one of the stones God places along someone’s path. And that’s enough, because He’s the One who makes those little individual acts that can lead to salvation effective.

Looking back, I can see the Lord’s hand in almost every piece of how this trip came together—right down to the guy who was supposed to go with us not being able to make it. That morning, I felt like the Lord was telling me: ‘I could have taken you off this trip too if I wanted to. But I haven’t given you the same reasons I gave him.’ That settled something in me. My anxiety about this trip, about the size of the team, about missing my internship, about walking into a country and a task I didn’t understand—that wasn’t from the Lord. It was just anxiety. He knew what I needed better than I did. Even my internship start date moving from June 2nd to June 23rd—giving me the exact runway I needed to go, recover, and still show up on time at Tombras—felt like confirmation. I don’t know how to explain that as anything other than the Lord moving. I can’t promise you I’m going to keep doing mission trips every single summer for the rest of my life. (I’d love to tell you ‘yes.’) But the Lord works in mysterious ways, and so far, every time He’s called, He’s made it obvious, and He’s made a way. I’ve had a lot of success just leaving my plans entirely up to Him. So, based on my track record, I’m guessing I’ve got a few more of these trips left in me. What I know for certain is this: There’s no better use of my time—soaking wet, freezing, exhausted, walking down some unpaved road in a village I’ll probably never see again—than bringing the Gospel to a place it may never have been before. I don’t need to see the wall I painted. I just need to keep showing up when He calls.”