Hey everyone! It’s been a little while since our last post, but we wanted to fill you in on what God has been doing in our lives since coming home from training camp.
Honestly, the last couple of months have been some of the most stressful of our married life, but as we all know, God uses times like those to do some of His most amazing work. When we came home in October, we were faced with two major obstacles. The first was the fact that Denise didn’t have her US citizenship yet. This meant that she didn’t have a US passport, which is a prerequisite for being allowed to go on the World Race. Without the passport, even if everything else came through, we would not have been allowed to take part. The whole process can easily take 3 months. By the time we got her in for her test, it was November 20th.
This, however, was not the only problem facing us. We were also struggling to come up with adequate financing to fund our mission. In late November, we had still only raised $2,300 dollars. In order to leave, Adventures in Missions normally required 60% of your funding have come in; in our case, this would be $16,500 by mid December.
As you can imagine, at this point we were having serious doubts about whether or not we would be able to go in January. It was looking more and more like we would have to put off the mission until at least June. This was absolutely devastating for us! We already went to training camp and bonded with our team. Not only that, but we have felt from the beginning that this is the specific race that God had called us to. To our immense frustration, our only choice was to wait and see what God had in store, and to hope that we would be able to accept His will.
And then, God taught us a little lesson about faith. Denise passed her civics test with flying colors. Not only that, but immigration allowed her to be sworn in on the same day that she took the test. Normally, it’s at least a couple of weeks before this would happen. The passport, which can normally take 2-3 weeks to arrive (even with expedited shipping), came to us in a matter of one week. This meant that by the end of November, Denise was a citizen and had her US passport in hand! At this point, we were getting excited and wondering if God really might want us to go on the January race after all. As the days passed we continued to struggle to make the 60% funding goal, but fortunately, AIM decided to make one extra concession, and allow us to go on the race if we could get our support up to $10,000. With less than one week to go, somehow, God brought it all together. The contributions just came pouring in. We received such generous and unexpected donations from family and friends… they just blew our expectations out of the water. Some of these family and friends specifically told us that they had prayed about how much to give, and truly, God answered their prayer, and ours. By the end of the week, we had $10,400, as well as several generous personal donations which helped us to buy our gear and other personal trip-related expenses. God came through! Right at the last minute, when we were the most in doubt, He showed us His power, and it made us wonder why we were so foolish to doubt him at all.
One of the best parts about all of this is that God worked through many of you to positively impact us, and in turn, will impact people around the world through us. We couldn’t have gotten to this point if it hadn’t been for your generous donations and sacrifice. The fact that you were willing to give up not just your money, but more specifically, the things that money would have bought for you is not just humbling, but inspiring for us. Every donation was an answer to our prayers. Hopefully, when we comfort an orphan in Africa, or bring a girl out of a life of prostitution in Thailand, God will similarly be using us to answer someone else’s prayers. We can’t wait to show you over the next 11 months exactly what God is doing with your donations. Together, we will rise up and shine a light into dark places around the world, and when we are done, we will know that the Kingdom of Heaven is that much closer at hand.
