Emily Keyes grew up on the family farm in upstate New York where every Sunday of her childhood, barring weather or illness, she attended the Baptist church her ancestors had founded. High school valedictorian, she was, as World War II ended, a bright student at a state Normal School. Her classmates looked ahead to lives of teaching, marriage, children, church work. But Emily refused the humdrum. She felt the optimism and shared the faith that sent American missionaries around the globe in those early years of peace. Africa called her. The Congo would be her home. Her remarkable journey into an awakening continent and the unexpected costs of her service are told here chronologically in poems and letters she wrote as she lived. It is a collection of three voices: the poet who struggled to choose God's path, the professional missionary, and the funny friend who maintained a decades-long round-robin correspondence with two friends who enjoyed every pleasure in life she denied herself. Through it all, she refused to concede that hers was anything but a life of joy.