I remember coming home from school on a cold and dreary February 1968 afternoon, opening the back door, and walking into the kitchen to see my red-faced mother quietly crying while working at the sink. At the kitchen table sat my little brother, playing a board game with Marilyn, a young woman who was living with our family at the time. It was evident to me that she, too, had been crying.

My 6th grade-self stood there trying to make sense of what I had just walked in to. “What’s wrong?”, I asked. My mother pulled me into another room, explaining to me that they had just received the news that Marilyn’s sister, a missionary serving as a nurse in a Vietnamese leprosarium during the height of the Vietnam War, had been captured by the Viet Cong as part of the Tet Offensive. I remember it being a horrifying innocence-crushing punch in my 12-year-old stomach.

As you can imagine, the next few months were lived under a dark cloud as we joined those who were praying while waiting every day for news of Betty Olsen’s whereabouts and fate. Later that year we received the news that she had remained alive for ten months of captivity, enduring beatings, near starvation, day-long marches, and no medical attention. She died a slow three-day death as a result of being poisoned by her captors. Her fellow missionary captives buried her body in the jungle. As a kid, Betty Olsen’s death hit hard, causing me to think about the price of giving one’s life for the sake of the Gospel and the potential cost of serving Jesus Christ.

When I got older, I set out to learn what I could about Betty Olsen and what it was that drew her to serve Jesus Christ in such a dangerous place. I found these words she wrote about her calling and commitment: “Most of the people that I have told about going to Vietnam are greatly concerned, and I appreciate this; however, I am not concerned, I am very much at peace. I know that I may never come back, but I know that I am in the center of the Lord’s will and Vietnam is the place for me.”

I’m guessing that many of you reading this have kids who are serving near and far through your church’s short-term summer missionary trips. If so, not only will the Lord be working through your kids as they serve in this way, but you will see the Lord working in your kids, taking them deep in their faith, fueling their passion for God’s work in the world, and perhaps even hearing God call them, like He did Betty Olsen, to full-time missionary service. And if that happens, how will you respond? Will you release them into God’s hands, trusting Him to work out His will and way in their lives for their good and His glory?

As you think about how you will answer those questions, consider the story of the first foreign missionaries sent out from the United States. Their names were Adoniram and Ann Judson, and they embarked for Burma on a harrowing four-month sea-crossing, casting off from Derby Wharf in Salem, Massachusetts in 1812. When young Adoniram wrote to Ann’s father, John Hasseltine, to ask for her hand in marriage, he wrote these words: “I have to now ask, whether you can consent to part with your daughter early next spring, to see her no more in this world; whether you can consent to her departure for a heathen land, and her subjection to the hardships and suffering of a missionary life; whether you can consent to her exposure to the dangers of the ocean; to the fatal influence of the southern climate of India; to every kind of want and distress; to degradation, insult, persecution, and perhaps a violent death?”

It’s not at all surprising that one of John Hasseltine’s friends told him that he would tie his own daughter to the bedpost rather than let her go on such a risky adventure. But John Hasseltine, concerned as he was over his daughter’s well-being, blessed and released his daughter on account of her calling from God. Fourteen years later, Ann died in Burma from smallpox.

If you’re like me, you’re now pondering how difficult it would be to give up your child to the Lord in this way. But when our children hear and answer the irresistible call of Jesus to “go into all the world to make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:16-20) regardless of what it might cost them personally, it is then that we must come to terms with the fact that our children were never truly ours to begin with. Rather, they’ve been given to us to steward while we raise and nurture them in the Lord. And like the childless Hannah who prayed fervently for the Lord to give her a child who she promised she would give in service to the Lord, we must say, “So now I give him to the Lord. For his whole life he will be given over to the Lord” (I Samuel 1:28).

Are you willing to release your children into the hands of the Lord for the sake of the spread of the Gospel? Pray now for your children and teens, asking God to use them as He wills, while preparing you to willingly accept whatever risks and costs that might bring. After all, they are His and not ours.