Linda Thomason Mosley spent her 36-year career with the U.S. Postal Service helping people get messages to one another. After she retired, she set out to spread her messages about her faith.
"I had wanted to be a missionary for a long time," says Mosley, 74.
Mosley retired in October 2009, and the following December, she heard a speaker at Immanuel Baptist Church in Little Rock share stories about his work as a missionary.
"Well, that kind of rang a bell," says Mosley, who had many years before told her son that she hoped to go on mission trips when she retired. "We had a new missions pastor who was taking a group to Ghana the following May."
Throughout January and February she asked that pastor about what happened on mission trips.
"I said, 'Do you just pray and walk?'" Mosley says. "Then one Wednesday night I asked him again, and he said, 'Well, Linda, why don't you go with us?' And I said, 'Well, I can't afford that."
The pastor called her a few days later and told her there was funding available through the church if she wanted to go.
She bought new luggage and updated her passport and in 2010, she went to Accra, Ghana.
"I looked down at my feet, in Africa, and I thought, 'God has worked in my life amazingly," she says. "He wanted me here."
In 2011, she went on another mission trip, to Mumbai, India.
"I wanted to go. God prompts your heart and tells you if you want to go or not, and somebody donated $500 or $600 for my trip, and that's why I got to go," she says.
During her travels she sat with people in the poorest areas, sharing her beliefs and hopes for the future.
Mosley has also been to Cairo where she visited the pyramids and saw the Nile River. She went to a museum full of gilded chairs and cabinets and noted the juxtaposition of homes with dirt floors on the opposite side of the river.
"I've been to Israel six times," she says. "The first three times, in '85, '86 and '87, my husband was with me, and then in 2014 I went with the church. In 2016 and 2018, a small group from church went in and we street-evangelized."
On one trip she went to Amman, Jordan, and she also saw Petra, the "Rose City" in Jordan, where, according to the Bible, Jews hid from the Antichrist.
"The buildings were so tall, and I don't know how they did it without the equipment we have today," she says. "You ride a horse down there because it's so narrow and rocky."
In Israel, she went to the Western Wall.
"We would pray and put notes in there," she says. "I prayed that God would help me be more like Him and that He would put people in my pathway and then I could tell them about Jesus and what He had done for me."
Mosley didn't grow up in a church. She started going in her 20s, initially seeking comfort and support after she and her first husband divorced and she lost custody of her son.
Years later, in 1990, when her then 21-year-old son was killed in a motorcycle wreck in Texas, she leaned into her faith again.
Eighteen months after that, her second husband was diagnosed with colon cancer. He died in 1995.
"I'm still here and I'm not interested in anybody else," she says. "I always compare them to him."
Mosley enjoys talking with people, though, about her faith and about other things, too.
At the post office, she was often assigned to the "window," where people would drop off letters and packages and buy postage.
She started her job at the post office on Halloween 1973, first as a clerk at the old office on West Capitol Avenue.
"My brother introduced me to my second husband, who also worked at the post office but at a different station than the one where I worked," she says.
She later got a job at the same station where her husband worked.
"I had to be there at like 5 a.m. It was excruciating," she says. "So then I went to work at the window," she says. "None of the other clerks liked working the window so they always stuck me out there and that was OK."
Mosley grew up in Little Rock, at 23rd and Spring streets downtown. Her mother was a homemaker and her father delivered laundry. She graduated from Little Rock Central High in 1967 and did a stint as a dental assistant and another as a PBX operator before getting a job with the postal service.
She is active still at Immanuel Baptist, studying the Bible and sometimes volunteering to serve meals or prepare for Communion.
Through church trips over the years, Mosley has seen the ruins of castles throughout Europe, watched the Oberammergau Passion Play in Germany and heard a sermon at the top of Mount Sinai in Egypt.
"I haven't been in a while," she says, "but if God calls me I will go."
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