Paula - United Kingdom

Nickname: Pauline

My parents were not churchgoers, but when I was a teenager, I started going to a local church – more for its youth club than from any sense of spiritual hunger. It was there that I heard the simple Gospel message – that Jesus had died to pay the punishment for all the wrong things I’d done in my life. As soon as I heard that, I was sure it was true. It had a ring of truth to it, and I was surprised that no one had ever told me about it before. When someone said we needed to pray to ask Jesus into our lives, and to commit our lives to doing the things He wanted, I didn’t hesitate. There was no question in my mind.
Later in my life, I did question a lot of things, and lots of problems arose, as I expect they usually do. I went away to university, didn’t feel I “fitted in” with the people at the Christian Union, so I stopped going. During my 3 years at uni, I had some great friends, but none of them were Christians. That may sound like a good idea as far as a witness is concerned, but I’m afraid their influence on me was greater than mine on them. I had a non-Christian boyfriend as well, which didn’t help my faith to grow. When I came home for holidays, I would go back to my home church where I had first become a Christian, and that would give my faith a boost; but when I went back to uni, I would slip back into my old way of life.

After uni, I went to another city – Sheffield, where I started training as a nurse. Before I went, I prayed I would make some real Christian friends there, and it was great when I found out that three of the other girls in my group were committed Christians. That was a wonderful answer to prayer. Their friendship meant a lot to me – and still does. We would pray together, study the Bible, discuss how to make our faith relevant to our work as nurses. All this helped me get my faith back into line, and made me want to be a more serious, committed Christian in all aspects of my life.

After training as a nurse, I went to Iran with O.M. (Operation Mobilisation). There I met Peter, who became my husband. After the Iranian revolution in 1979, we went to Karachi, Pakistan, got married there, and stayed for 14 years as missionaries with Interserve. Now we’re back in England, still working with Interserve, and have 2 sons in their twenties.

I have always loved taking photos – ever since I can remember. As a child, I was forever asking my father to let me use his old Kodak Brownie camera. As soon as I could afford it, I bought my own. After a few years, I sold that and bought a Pentax Spotmatic SLR, that I kept for about 25 years. I was still using it till two years ago, when I bought an Olympus digital camera, and just love the way I can now “enhance” photos on the computer.

As part of our work with Interserve, Peter and I produce Scripture calendars that are specially designed to be given away to non-Christians – people who would not normally read the Bible. As we choose the photos and Bible verses for our calendars, we have Muslims particularly in mind. I love the English Lake District and Scotland, so many of my favourite photos are of the lakes and mountains of those areas. I like sunsets, silhouettes, birds, water that sparkles, misty scenes, autumn colours… For our calendars, we don’t want just Western photos though, we look for photos from the countries of the people that our calendars are intended for. That’s what first attracted me to PhotoMission, because of its international flavour.