“Why am I doing this? Am I out of my mind?” are frequent questions that I end up asking myself. Why would Amanda and I leave our jobs, friends, family and dog for a year at least. The reason I say at least is I have a feeling that this adventure will last much longer than a year. Amanda and I are on a journey, a journey to find God and to bring hope to people who may not have any.
Amanda and I were on the fast track to the American Dream. We got married right out of college and we both were blessed with jobs in a time when it didn’t seem like anyone could find work. Like most college grads we had college debt. We lived by the motto to “live like no one else so that someday you can live like no one else (Dave Ramsey)”. We paid off our college debt in under a year and all we could see were dollar signs. I even sat down and figured out that if we saved at a reasonable rate that we could retire by the age of 50 and live quite comfortably. So there we were, young, dual income, entirely debt, free and God completely derailed our American Dream train (refer back to the fast track reference at the beginning of the paragraph to get the pun).
Shortly after we had gotten out of debt and began to look to the future, it really struck us. There has got to be something more than just working towards retirement. Maybe it was the all of the freedom that being debt free has, but we felt there had to be something more than just working to help ourselves climb the ladder of success, and just make charitable donations here and there. There was something more, something bigger than us, something so much more exciting. This is where our journey starts.
(To be continued)
