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Some interactions change your day. Others have the potential to change your life for much longer.

Michael Clary had hit the end of his rope. The 35-year-old church planter from West Virginia had been in Cincinnati for close to 18 months. Other than the local director of missions, he hadn’t known anyone in the city when he arrived. After slowly and surely putting together a core team, an admittedly poor leadership choice threatened to tear it all apart.

For many exhausted homeowners in Kokomo, Ind., working around the clock to clean up their homes, Southern Baptist Disaster Relief (SBDR) has been a welcome reprieve.

Worship service at First Baptist Church, Washington, was cut short Sunday when a tornado associated with a powerful line of storms came speeding toward the church. Pastor Josh Monda quickly led his congregation to shelter in the basement then, with another member, returned upstairs to be sure all church members were out of harm’s way.

When the Baptist Convention of New England (BCNE) came into possession of an old church building in Worcester, Mass., earlier this year, the staff knew exactly what they wanted to do with it.

Chaplain Parker Thompson can tell you the exact moment—more than 60 years ago—he knew he was where God wanted him as a U.S. Army chaplain in the Korean War. With the war’s end in sight in the summer of 1953, fighting grew furious as the two sides hammered out an agreement over the transfer of prisoners of war.

At first chaplain Charlie Clanton found it difficult to look at the severely burned young soldier lying on an Army gurney on one side of a makeshift medical evacuation station in Vietnam. His almost black face had been charred beyond recognition by a Viet Cong grenade launcher attack.

For Glenn Stringham, senior adult pastor at First Baptist Church Fayetteville, Ga., honoring the community’s military veterans is a personal mission. As a Vietnam veteran with 22 years of service in the U.S. Army, Stringham knows the life of a veteran firsthand.

When college students return to Staten Island over Christmas break this year, some of them might cross paths with Frank Primiani, a resident and Hurricane Sandy survivor who benefited from the work of Baptist students on Spring Break earlier in 2013. But they won’t find the same “Frank Primiani” who met those earlier student volunteers.

Mary Ann Watts already knew North America needed Jesus before taking her first mission trip. But it wasn’t until her first trip to Seattle to help a Southern Baptist church planter in 2009—the first of four such trips—that she realized how vast the needs were in some parts of the continent.