Crossover Bible Church

The Hodge Family, Ellie and Leah Pickard, and the people of Malawi.

Crossover Bible Church will have a permanent home in the Crossover Community Center!

Supporting Crossover’s Missionaries

by Leah Pickard

Dave and Catherine Hodge became members of Crossover Bible Church in 2010 while Catherine was completing residency through the In His Image program; it can easily be said that had she and Natalie Schaller not joined Crossover we would not have Crossover Health Services today. When Catherine’s training was complete, she and Dave felt a strong burden for the people in Malawi where the population is predominately made up of $1-2/day subsistence farmers. And so, in 2013, Dave, Catherine and their newborn, Charlotte, moved to Nkhoma, Malawi, and have been serving there since. Their family has been completed by two more little ladies, so they now have three young daughters, Charlotte (7), Evelyn (5) and Noelle (3). Catherine works in Nkhoma Hospital which is a 105-year-old, 280 bed hospital, founded by Dutch reformed church South African missionaries. Their 300 employees serve 85,000 in the immediate catchment area and 400,000 when all referring health centers are taken into account. They average 3,400 deliveries a year, with 45,000 outpatient visits and 16,000 general admissions. In Malawi, there is 1 doctor per 30,000 people. Nkhoma Hospital is a rural Christian academic center, training Malawian doctors to specialize in family medicine and general surgery. Catherine also assists in training medical students and nurses, in their own nursing college. Last year, the Hodge family was in the states on furlough and came back to Crossover to visit. During a conversation at Church one morning, Ellie (my daughter) and I were getting the update on all that they were doing in Nkhoma. Before we left, we asked how we could be praying for them, and Catherine expressed a loneliness that sometimes sets in, especially during American holidays. Ellie piped up and declared that we would come to visit them for Thanksgiving that year (it was January at the time), and while I loved the idea of traveling to encourage our friends serving in Africa, I was skeptical about getting all our ducks in a row to make the trip in 10 months. And then COVID-19 hit, and I thought for sure we would not be able to go. But God still did not lift the burden to start the planning process of traveling to Malawi even though we only had 8 months. Once I took that first step in faith towards planning God provided everything we needed! We landed in Lilongwe, Malawi on New Year’s Day 2021, just a month and a half later than we planned, and were in the Hodges’ home an hour later! Nkhoma is truly a beautiful place (albeit a bit hot)! Ellie and I were able to bring the Hodge family and the Nkhoma hospital some much-needed medical supplies. We traveled on a medical outreach and spent a day with Catherine in the hospital. We were able to see Dave’s work with Young Life with students from the local seminary. We were even able to spend a day (and night!) with a friend of the Hodges in her village and worked in her fields for an afternoon (I think that’s the hardest work I’ve ever done in my entire life). It was truly an amazing experience for us to be able to make the vast distance between the Hodges and their church family back here in Tulsa, seem a little smaller. The need for maintaining strong relational ties with our missionaries is critical to their mental and emotional strength as they serve God in a foreign country. I am so glad to have had the opportunity to serve them in the midst of them serving the people of Malawi!

The need for maintaining strong relational ties with our missionaries is critical to their mental and emotional strength as they serve god in a foreign country.

-Leah P.

Leah Pickard is the better half of the Dynamic Duo who loves north Tulsa with their entire being and has dedicated their lives to this community and its residents. She has been married to Justin Pickard for almost 20 years and together they have four amazing kids, Rochelle better known as Ellie (18), Ian (16), Augie (13), and Isaiah (11). She is completing a Master’s in Counseling at ORU in preparation to become a Licensed Professional Counselor because she is concerned about seeing people in her community be healthy physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Her heartbeat is reconciliation and God uses her daily simply through her presence and grace.

To learn more about CBC’s “gather, go, grow, gospel works” model, please go to www.crossoverbible.org.