Introduction: Too Young to Be Sent?

When God called Jeremiah to be a prophet, Jeremiah had the perfect excuse. “Ah, Lord GOD,” he said, “I surely do not know how to speak, for I am only a child!” God did not agree. “Do not say, ‘I am only a child.’ For to everyone I send you, you must go, and all that I command you, you must speak. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you” (Jeremiah 1:6–8).

Most of us have used Jeremiah’s excuse at some point. I’m too young. I don’t know enough. Someone older should do it. Somebody else will.

This book is about six people who heard God’s call while they were still young and did something about it. None of them was famous when they started. Some were poor. One was a weaver’s teenage daughter in a Welsh valley. Most of them were told, by somebody, that they were too young, too ordinary or too unrealistic. They went anyway. After His resurrection Jesus said to His friends, “As the Father has sent Me, so also I am sending you” (John 20:21). These six took Him at His word.

Here are the six people you will meet in Sent, the fourth book of They Were Young:

David Brainerd, an orphan who came to faith at twenty-one, was thrown out of college, and spent his short life travelling through the forests of colonial America to live among the Native American peoples there, while fighting a darkness in his own mind.

William Carey, a poor shoemaker’s apprentice in an English village who came to faith as a teenager, taught himself languages at his workbench, and grew convinced that the good news of Jesus was for the whole world, India included.

Mary Jones, the daughter of a Welsh weaver who saved for years and walked a very long way to buy a Bible of her own, and whose story helped give the Bible to millions.

Amy Carmichael, a Belfast teenager who stopped in the rain to help an old woman, heard a verse that changed her life, and went on to rescue children in southern India.

Eric Liddell, a Scottish runner who would not race on a Sunday, won an Olympic gold medal anyway, and then left fame behind to teach in China.

Jim Elliot, an American college student who wrote in his journal about giving away what you cannot keep, and who went to Ecuador to tell an isolated people about Jesus.

How each chapter works

As in the earlier books, each chapter begins with a moment, a decisive scene in that person’s young life, and then pulls back to tell you how they got there and what came after. The rest of the life is told more briefly at the end.

After the story come three short sections. In Their Own Words gives you a few lines the person really said or wrote, with the source. Think It Through offers some questions to wrestle with, alone or with others. Read More on Ochorus points you to the person’s own writing, or their biography, if you want to go further.

These stories are true, and we have tried hard not to add anything to them. We have not invented conversations or made up scenes. Where the records are silent, where historians disagree, or where a famous story has grown in the telling, we tell you.

A word about being sent

It would be easy to read these stories and think that being sent means going somewhere far away and doing something dramatic. Some of these six did. But look closely and you will see that all of them started small, in a workshop, a village, a rainy street, a college room. They prayed, they learned, they said yes to the next thing in front of them. And every one of them paid a price. We have not hidden the cost, the mistakes, or the people they hurt along the way. Being sent is not a way to become a hero. It is a way of following Jesus. “Let no one despise your youth, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (1 Timothy 4:12).

For parents, teachers and youth leaders

These stories are written for readers aged about thirteen to seventeen. They include illness and early death, depression, a wartime internment camp and a violent death in Ecuador. All of this is handled honestly but without graphic detail, and wherever a chapter touches on despair it points the reader to a trusted adult.

We have tried to tell these lives without turning the people they went to into a backdrop for someone else’s adventure. The Think It Through questions are meant to open conversation rather than settle it. You do not need to have read the first three books in the series to use this one. Each chapter stands on its own.