Jim Taylor

I was born in 1946 and grew up in Arizona where I roamed the desert country learning to hunt, prospecting for gold and exploring the mountains with my Dad. After High School I joined the Army and spent almost 2 1/2 years in Korea and Japan. Some time after I returned home I ended up in a Pentecostal tent meeting on the Maricopa Indian Reservation and there in the dust of that tent I gave up running from the Lord. Shortly after that I fell in with a group of Jesus People ... the hippies who were preaching on street corners and in coffee houses ... and not too long afterwards myself and a friend ended up overseeing a coffee house near skid row in Phoenix. It was called "The Open Door".

Within the next few years I married a beautiful young girl named Twyla. I was working as a block layer and attending Bible School but life was exciting. For the next 38 years we pastored churches, hunted many States in the West including Alaska, did Missionary work in Mexico, and raised 2 beautiful and talented daughters. During that time we also raised goats, cattle and horses. Twyla worked for the Missouri Department of Health, while besides pastoring a church I was a Contributing Editor to The New Gun Week.

When I was 64 both Twyla and I felt we were to make a big change in our lives. We ended up selling most everything we had and moving to live in the African nation of Mozambique. We had been invited to join Iris Global, and did so in 2010. For the next 6 years we had the adventure of our lives. The book "JOY IN THE WILDERNESS" is the story of how we came to move to Mozambique, our life there, and a lot of what we experienced. For those that read it I hope you get the feel of a little of what we felt during those years.