So recently we sat down and got all of our expenses figured out along with the support money that has come in. The last two days I've been deliberating about whether or not I should post this blog. You see, for the most part we've kind of shied away from asking people for money for this trip. From the outset we knew these months would look significantly different than your average "missions trip."
A huge part of the premise for our trip was to learn how to walk by faith better. The bible says that the righteous walk by faith and so we left our jobs, schools etc when we felt Him leading us to commit. Between the 5 of us who took off in January, we technically had under a hundred dollars in our account combined…now there was a bit more that had been raised that just wasn't in our accounts yet, but in the end we didn't have near enough to pay for our airfare. We knew we were suppsed to be here even though we didn't quite have the money to be.
Throughout our time, God kept blessing us with donations, encouragements and prayers. We've been blessed on this trip in an abundance of ways. Throughout these past months God has brought us back to the basics of living by faith which really has more to do with resting in His faithfulness.
We've never done a trip quite like this one before and weren't sure what we were going to be looking at expense-wise. However, we figured we would live frugally and see what happened. We expected to maybe spend about $4,000 a person for the three and half, two country trip. All told with the five us that left, we'd be looking at around $20,000 as a team.
Unfortunately for us, Ben decided that there were some things he needed to head home to face and so he took off early. Financially this brought our team goal to around $18,000.
In the end, after a bit more travel than we anticipated and Nepal costing more than we assumed, we came out around $14,000 spent as a team. If you break that down, about $6,000 of that went just for airfare. That means that the four of us remainng spent approximately $8,000 total ($2,000 each) for the past three and a half months including everything but airfare. After doing some math, we figured out that we spent about 60% of the normal world race budget for the same time period. All in all that's pretty good!
In the end it looks like this:
We've spent approximately $14,000 total on this trip for everything.
We've had generous people and churches donate $9,000.
I can't tell you how thankful we are for those of you who have invested in this trip with your time, prayers, encouragements, finances and emails. You've made our lives and the lives of others richer in the process.
Where do we go from here?
Well, each of us are grateful for the opportunity to do what we've done these past months. We didn't start out by sending mass emails or support letters and we aren't really planning on finishing that way. Our plan is to head back to the states and find a way to pay off whatever debt we have to AIM over the summer. We have no problem with doing that and like I said at the start, I've been debating even writing this blog. The truth is most people shy away from opening a blog with this sort of title and even fewer will read this far down. However, what has swayed me to write this is that there were a number of people who wanted me to contact them before I left with a support letter. We've had a couple anonymous people ask our financial department about our situation and I figured that those of you who have been following us may want to know where we're at. If you'd like to help us out we'd be honored and blessed in an incredible way. However, I didn't write this to put you in a position or for us to get out of one. I'm just trying to be faithful to His leading and rest in His faithfulness.
