The Widow's Spare Room on Maple Street

In 1987, Margaret Fielding of Decatur, Georgia, cleared out her spare bedroom and told her pastor she could host one missionary passing through town. She bought a secondhand quilt from the Goodwill on East College Avenue, set a glass of water on the nightstand, and waited.

That first guest was a Bible translator headed to Papua New Guinea. He mentioned Margaret's hospitality to a colleague. Within a year, she was hosting a missionary every month. Within five, churches across DeKalb County were calling her the unofficial welcome committee for anyone in full-time ministry. Margaret kept a spiral notebook by the phone — by 1999, she had logged over three hundred names.

She never planned a network. She never launched a nonprofit. She cleared out one room.

When Margaret died in 2011, missionaries from fourteen countries sent letters to her family. A church planter in Senegal named his daughter Marguerite. A seminary student she had housed in 1994 was now a dean at a Bible college in the Philippines.