God’S Direction

This is a thrilling narrative of the remarkable journey of a medical missionary couple and the way God worked to reveal his leading to accomplish his purpose. The narrative covers a period of over fifty years, describing the great variety of work situations in exotic and sometimes dangerous places in over thirty countries. The journey portrays the couple merging to become a team that labored together in providing medical care to an astonishing variety of tribal groups, refugees, leprosy patients, and remote Thai villagers.

The story unfolds to provide insight into the way a sovereign God can open doors to ministry in a stunning variety of places in needy, unreached areas. Those doors included a hospital in rural Southeast Thailand in a previously underserved area, providing medical care to over four thousand leprosy patients from a wide area, also in Southeast Thailand. Another open door developed when Dr. Goatcher became medical director of a hundred-bed, M*A*S*H* type hospital in a camp of twenty-two thousand refugees in the jungle between Thailand and Cambodia. It was in that setting, with artillery and small arms fire a daily occurrence, that unusual manifestations of God brought thousands of people to become Christians. Concurrently with medical care, the author was responsible for providing food and other services to over forty-five thousand refugees daily in four different camps. In India, the couple trained locally selected leaders in how to provide primary health care to the villagers in a remote, tribal area. Those ministries provide insight into the way a sovereign God can open doors to ministry in an amazing array of places.