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In your book, you talk about how you struggled with prayer. You say you ended up praying for a hamburger because you just couldn't bring yourself to pray for release any more. And then you got the hamburger. How did that affect your spirituality?

That's when I finally realized that I didn't understand God. I was never going to understand. Why would he send me a hamburger and not release me? And I just realized you can't tell God what to do. God's not obligated to me.

I look back on some of my diary entries and—oh, my—railing on God. "I've been here eight and a half months. I've tried to be a good hostage. How could you be doing this still? You're pleased to keep me here." When the hamburgers came, I realized God can answer a prayer if he wants to, but he's under no obligation. Prayer isn't a magic wand that you wave and get what you want. God's got a plan, and he's going to carry it out. He sent a hamburger to show I'm still here and I'm with you and I'm for you.

I think that's probably when I started thinking that we maybe wouldn't get out. He answered this prayer so neatly and we were still there, and I started thinking "Well, we're just not going to get out of here, and that's God's plan."

But when you started to tell Martin good-bye, he said, "I'm not sure this is a healthy thing for us to be doing."

There was one instance that I officially just sat him down, made him look at me in the eyes, said good-bye to him. I needed to do that because I didn't want him to die and me be left [without saying] bye. And I didn't want me to die [without hearing] good-bye.

Martin had such a good sense of humor; he didn't make me feel stupid. He just let me know "this is a truly weird thing you're doing." But it helped me. After that we would say things—like in the middle of a gunfight. I'd say, "If I don't ever see you again, I just want you to know I love you."

You had kidnapping training with New Tribes Mission. How did it prepare you for your year as a hostage?

[Smiling] Martin said quite often, "If I had known this was going to happen, I would have paid attention in that seminar." Because we truly didn't.

The things I needed to know came back to me: "In those first few moments when people are trigger happy, do exactly what they say to you. Obey without question." That just came into my mind.

The [trainers] had told us, "Some people deal with being held hostage by sleeping all the time, so you don't have to think about it. And that's probably not healthy." And I remember not sleeping my life away. They would say, "Do something to exercise." And I would volunteer to go get firewood. They'd warned us to take care of our teeth. So we made dental floss. We unraveled rice sacks that are made of this plastic string, and we got little pieces of that and made dental floss.

Martin's brother Doug earlier told CT that a lot of people don't understand how important support missionaries are, and that your captivity brought attention to the importance of people like you in support positions.

Martin and I used to jokingly—not jokingly, really—say, "Those are the real missionaries," referring to the tribal missionaries who lived in the jungle, take their families in there, and live in a rough condition every day and work for years to learn a language before they ever can do what they went there to do. We were just there doing what we did best. Martin was an amazing pilot, and I like taking care of people. We were using our gifts to keep the "real missionaries" where they needed to be because it's a rough life.

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May (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47