BIG news so I’ll jump right into it- as of today I am FULLY FUNDED! (It takes a few days to show up as such on my blog but I get email updates and know that I hit my goal.) I had to raise $4,600 to be able to serve in Thailand this summer and God provided me with all of it! HUGE thank you to everyone who donated, bought from my craft store, or participated in my campaign with Keys for the Journey. I’m blown away by everyone’s generosity and how God has provided for me. He is so good!
I remember the day I first started looking into The World Race. It was a Friday in January 2018 and I was online, thinking about future careers and colleges, trying to figure out what I wanted to pursue. I was clicking and clicking and learning and still feeling hopelessly lost. Then I remembered a note I’d written in my phone, to look up The World Race. I went to the website, started scrolling, and my heart started pounding. This is it, I thought wildly. I need to do this.
I was looking at Gap Year trips, at all the possibilities, all the places I could go and the people I could serve. My mind and heart were racing. I read and read and I felt this excitement and adrenaline and then-
I saw the price. And I felt my whole body deflate. There was no way, no way in the world, that I could raise that much money.
But I kept reading. I kept praying. Some note on the FAQ page talked about believing wholeheartedly that God would provide. I started to trust that He would.
I determined that I wasn’t being called to Gap Year; God was leading me to study aerospace engineering at the University of Texas. But I knew deep in my heart that I was still called to missions, still called to the Race. I looked at other summer mission trips for a bit. But I knew. This was God’s plan for me, and He would make it happen.
And He has. And I’m rejoicing in the knowledge that He provided here, through everyone who supported me, that He worked in all of you just as I hope He will work in me in Thailand. We’re all called to be the hands and feet of Christ.
Now, I get to go do His work in Thailand. I get to serve the poor, the children, the lost, and everyone around me. I get to live out the call to share the Gospel to all nations and to be Christ to others. I’m praying that He will prepare me to do this, but I know He will, because our God is good.
I’m praising Him right now and realizing how real this is about to be. This is it. 15 days from now I’ll be boarding a flight to Atlanta, going to training camp, meeting my team, and then leaving America for the very first time. I will be doing mission work for the very first time, but I’m not scared. God will provide in this chapter just as He has already.
So thank you so much to everyone who helped me get here. If you’re still feeling called to help out, plenty of my teammates can still use some funding- you can see who they are by looking at the little options menu and clicking “meet my team.” But most importantly please be praying for us as we prepare to go to the field and serve!
I feel so blessed and honored to be here and to be able to share this journey with you. I‘m planning to blog at least once a week (from my phone like I’m doing now to practice!), though possibly more, once I’m there and to share all about it! If you’ve got Instagram, I’ll share plenty of photos on my @katiegoestothailand account, where I sold crafts I made to help fundraise. Now it’ll be a bunch of photos about my journey! Thank you for being a part of this with me and I CANNOT WAIT to write from Bangkok!
