Where do I even begin? Maybe start with the fact that I still can’t believe we get to do this?! We are in West Africa right now and I get to do this with my husband?! Matt and I will be married 3 years this May. Still babies when it comes to marriage. When we first started talking about going on the race together I tried to find all the blogs about married couples who had done it together. Unfortunately, I was not able to find many. So my hope is that Matt and I can try and be a resource for any married couples that are looking to do this together. Please anyone feel free to ask us any questions. Our instagram handle is adventureisus16 if you are signed up and leaving within a year or you see this a couple years down the road, don’t be afraid to reach out.
Month 1 – Cotê d’Ivoire
Trucker Ministry- We shared the good news with truckers from all over West Africa. This was very close to Matts heart because He loves evangelism and he loves men. Our ministry looked like going to the ports and sharing the gospel with the men. Most of the men were Muslim so we shared in a way they would understand and could relate to. Since Matt has been to Indonesia several times this came very easy to him. For me (Kalyn) it was not the easiest thing because men definitely respect other men more but we definitely came in contact with some very respectful men towards women as well. I am all about people operating in their sweet spots when they can, so it was really beautiful to watch my husband thrive and then share when I felt led.
Lodging- We ended up staying at an IMB compound so Matt and I were able to have our own room. This was a huge blessing, because we could have time alone together at night and in the morning. We also had a place to retreat to if we needed to work something out and didn’t want to do it in front of everyone. We are in Ghana currently as I am writing this and we also have our own room here. This is something that they try to make happen for married couples but it is never a guaranteed thing.
Food- Our team had a very tight budget this month because our original housing fell through and we had to stay somewhere more expensive. Matt and I choose to spend some of our personal money on fruits and veggies this month so that we were eating something other than rice and beans. Our team cooked for ourselves. So we tried to split up responsibilitlies within the group as far as cooking, cleaning and buying groceries. It honestly took up a lot of our time especially since we had 10 people staying there most of the time.This month in Ghana we have a beautiful lady cooking for us. The food here is wonderful and we have really enjoyed the food she cooks us. Some things we have eaten are, Jollof rice and fried chicken. Red Red which is black eyed peas in a spicy sauce and fried plantains. Yam and chicken in red sauce and white rice and veggie stew with a hard boiled egg. Everyday for breakfast we have pineapple, eggs, some type of porridge and bread.
Community- This was honestly harder for us than we thought it would be. Both of us have lived in community several times. Living with 10 people making decisions is hard. Our team times could end up being 2 hours long because we had so many people to go through. We didn’t really have a way to escape, because we don’t have a car to just take off and leave. Everything that we do is in a group. I personally thought I knew how some of the people on my team would operate because of getting to know each other before launch and I was really wrong at times. We have some very different personalities but we are all really learning to celebrate those differences and learn from them. Learning how to communicate better is a life long process, being on the race really puts you on the fast track of learning it in a way you don’t have to do back home.
Married Life- Our Squad is very unique in the fact that we only have 2 males, Matthew and Josiah. There is one male squad leader that will be here for the first 6 months and 1 guy named Nick who will only be here this month while we are in Ghana. If you know Matt at all you know that he loves dudes. He loves bro time. He loved living with 15 athletes at his University. He is an only child, so no sisters. He really didn’t have any close friends that were girls either. This was a huge adjustment for both of us. Matt never knew how to have “sisters” because he was always around guys and now he was surround by a team of women. This was hard for our marriage for several weeks. I was trying to balance spending time with Jesus, spending time with Matt and spending time with the girls. It was hard for me to balance because I had so many women I wanted to be with, but also wanted to make sure I was making enough time for my husband. Since Matt was learning how to hang out with girls, I know that sounds so funny but it’s really where we were at, we just had a lot of things to balance. I was asked at debrief if I struggled with comparison within the women of our team. That is a normal question to ask, and probably would be a struggle for most women since their husband is now surrounded by other women but praise the Lord that wasn’t a struggle for me. The hardest part for me was Matt processing all of this and figuring out this new territory. I am so thankful for the team we haven been given though. One of the girls on our team has a brother so she started messing with Matt like she would her brother early on which made him feel more comfortable. Another girl is a college athlete like Matt and talks to him in sports analogies, and everyone else was very patient and understanding of us spending alone time together. If you are married on the race you get to take 1/2 day off of ministry and stay back and have the house to yourself while everyone else is away. I’m sure most of you can figure out why having that time is very needed and beneficial. Our team leader and team always encouraged us to do this and never made us feel bad about not going to ministry. Praise God for our team. God is always in the details and knows what we need. Matt and Josiah have gotten a lot closer throughout this process and even though don’t have a million things in common they have both been intentional about pressing into each other, and it has been a really beautiful thing to watch and be a part of.
Getting Deeper- When Matt and I got married we had a hard time combining our walks with the Lord. We had both gotten decent at doing it as individuals. Learning to go it together did not come as natural for us as maybe it has been for others. We read in a recent devotional together written by Gary L. Thomas, “Are you a God-centered spouse or a spouse-centered spouse? A spouse-centered spouse acts nicely toward her husband when he acts nicely towards her. She is accommodating, as long as her husband pays attention to her. A spouse-centered husband will go out of his way for his wife, as long as she remains agreeable and affectionate. He’ll romance her, as long as he feels rewarded for doing so. But Paul tells us we are to perfect holiness out of reverence for God. Since God is always worthy to be revered, we are always called to holiness; we are always called to love. A God-centered spouse feels more motivated by his or her commitment to God than by whatever response a spouse may give.” Dang!
If you know me you know that I am a pretty independent woman. I am not an easy person to lead. Matt is younger than me so that makes him feel like it is harder for him to lead me. Let me tell you we have grown SO MUCH in this area just in the amount of time we have been gone. He has really stepped up his game in choosing holiness out of reverence for God and that bleeding into our marriage and how he leads me. During debrief our Mentors, Dan and Ruanne a married couple were very intentional with us. They encouraged us, they gave us words from the Lord over our marriage, and they helped us to see things we weren’t seeing. Marriages all over are under attack even in the small things. Ever wondered why you feel like your spouse says something that they swear they did not say, but you know you heard it? This could be more of a spiritual attack that one might think. The enemy wants to bring division as the very goal of God is to destroy division and restore unity (This is Jesus’ great prayer in John 17). Submitting to the Lord is the true victory (James 4:7) and this submitting creates Unity (4:8) and this is Gods greatest desire for us and for our marriages. We must let the Lord fight for us (Exodus 14:14) because we know not even half of the battle that is surrounding us. Thank you Lord that you fight for us and draw us deeper to you when we lay down ourselves and our marriages! We have had one big fight since being on the field that revealed so much of the battle to us that we just were not ready for. The fight was over something so silly. Something that we normally wouldn’t even get upset about, this really showed us how Satan was trying his best to tear us apart. As we worked through the issue we received an image of Unity that has continually encouraged us since and we are sure it will in the future. It was an image of two ends of rope that could not be tied together. Then in the middle comes the cross and a rope is attached each end of the nails that were in His hands and they reach and tie to the ends of the two ropes (thus connecting the two ends of the roped with the extension of the cross). You are going to reach the end of your rope in marriage. You are going to come the end of what you can bear and handle, but you are still called to unity. At this point the question is, “What will be able to unify you?” You can try to pick up yourself and tie the ends of the ropes to each other, but again it will come untied and the more it occurs the less you will desire to put the work in to tie it again. Or, you can tie yourself to the cross together and to a source that will never break or become untied. “…a threefold cord is not quickly broken” Ecclesiastes 4:12. Choose Jesus, your spouse, and yourself to enter unity and you will be the answer to the prayer Jesus prayed in John 17. Unity is God’s goal of the cross so that must be the banner of our relationships. We are peaceMAKERS not peacekeepers (Matthew 5:9). We are called to create peace not maintain it only. We must go forth to make unity because this is the ministry we all have been given as followers of Christ (2 Corinthians 5:18).
As always thank you so much for your continued prayers and support! We will be posting a blog in the next week or so about our ministry/life here in Ghana!
