Our names are Faith and Truman. Jesus is using our journey to prove his faithfulness. This is our story.
Faith: Truman and I are both the eldest, both rebels. After high school, Truman joined the military and I went to New York. I was raised in a broken home—my father abused substances and us—so my mother was the one who took us to church. I accepted Jesus and wanted to follow him, but when you are eighteen and you go to New York… well, you know.
I met Truman once he was out of the military. We started a restaurant together, but didn’t manage our money well and soon ended up in debt.
I went back to church because I was desperate. We had reached rock bottom financially and Truman and I were on the brink of divorce. Finding God again saved our marriage, though it was a few years before Truman consented to join me at church. I’ll let him tell this part.
Truman: Yes, Faith kept asking me to come to church. I told her I would rather go to brunch. It wasn’t until I started seeing behavior in my kids which reminded me of how I was raised that I realized I needed to make a drastic change.
That first Sunday, I sat in church dumbfounded. He’s talking to me! I thought. It got me to come back, and the next week, it was the same. Completely different topics, but the pastor was still talking directly to me. It wasn’t until later that I learned everyone had been praying for me for years.
Faith: Our family went on our first overseas trip to Mexico a few years later. On the last day, I looked at Truman and said, “What do you think?” He responded with, “I could do this.” We talked with the couple who had hosted us, expressing how much we loved the work. “Everyone probably has the same reaction,” we said.
“Um, no,” was the bemused response. “Actually, your reaction is uncommon. In fact, if you liked it this much, you should look into living overseas.”
That began our interest. And the first step, our new mentors told us, was to get out of debt. Luckily our church offered Financial Peace University. Even with that, it would take us seven years to be fully free.
Truman: Meanwhile, I met with a friend. “We want to move our family overseas!” I told him. “We’re going to South America.”
“There are hundreds of thousands of Christians in South America,” he said. “You can’t go there.”
That’s about when I started to realize that my dream of driving all the way to the tip of South America in nothing but a run-down van was probably selfish. In fact, I had a lot of misconceptions about overseas work that my friend corrected. I thought I needed to have more training.
“You own a restaurant, right?” my friend said.
“Yes.”
“So you feed thousands of people on a daily basis? There’s a need for that. And you’re a good business person, right?”
“I have to be.”
“There’s a need for that too.”
Through that conversation, I realized God could use what we already knew in places where His name was not known. I went home and told Faith we were going to the 10/40 window. She balked.
“We’re not taking our children into the most dangerous area of the world!” she said.
Faith: We continued to pray and research. Part of our training was taking a 13-week class about the world and the current reality of overseas work. Then, in 2015, a devastating 10.0 earthquake struck Nepal.
“That’s it,” Truman said, “we’re going there.”
“Nepal has never been on my list of places to visit,” I said. I did not want to go live in the freezing cold mountains. (Joke’s on me—our city is mostly jungle!)
Around that time, we hosted a series of YWAM trainees. One girl was waiting for her flight to arrive when she started asking us what we were going to do in Nepal. “Have you considered the tourism industry?” she said.
I told her that before we ever owned a restaurant, Truman and I had been interested in trekking.
“I know some people,” she said as she stood to leave. “I’ll put you in contact with them.”
A few weeks later, Lady messaged us. We fired back about a million different questions, which Lady answered in painstaking detail. After a Skype call, we decided to come and stay for a month… and immediately fell in love.
So there it was—we were going to Nepal.
I’ll spare you the details of the years-long process to get here and skip to our first week, when I seriously doubted whether we had made the right decision. Within the first few days, I was in the hospital with severe back pain. I knew this was a spiritual attack, and I remember telling Jesus that he had to heal me, because the doctors were lost.
I woke up completely pain free. I even jumped around the room and twisted, trying to aggravate my back, but the pain was completely gone!
At the same time that I was in the hospital, we were trying to buy a truck. We needed $17,000. The day after I got out of the hospital we got a call from a supporter—they had raised exactly that amount in one night!
The Father was confirming our calling.
Moving our family to the other side of the world was hardly simple. Adjusting to a new culture and language is no cake walk. Still… God comes through. As uncertain as everything is, he has never failed us before, and he will not fail us in the future!
Pray with us:
– For our visas to come in.
– For our family as we adjust to our new home.
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*names have been changed*
