Today is a special day. Today I have a special guest blogger taking over this site. My sweet wife Julie is stepping out into the blogosphere for the first time.
Ok, so here we go.
I guess this story goes bac
k to August/September of 2011. As many of you may know, Jason and I were in a transition period at church and we were just beginning our journey at our current church, Revolution Annapolis. I was feeling unsettled and so I started praying for a new opportunity to get involved and get connected. When you have lost something, the best thing to do is to go back to where you started and remember the important things.
I started to pray for an opportunity serve on a mission team, something that I have been doing since I was a teenager. But since moving to America and becoming a mother, other responsibilities had taken priority. Now I felt like I had caught hold of God’s heart and was praying it into being.
But it wasn’t until the early part of 2012 when I first spoke it out loud. It is one thing to believe that God has said something to you about what you should do, but it takes on a different meaning when you tell someone else. I talked to Jason about it and he was supportive and together we agreed that we would be open to the possibility, if it arose.
At the end of February, Jason spent two weeks in Costa Rica with a group of his physical therapy students and when he came back we talked again about the possibility of me looking for a mission trip. To be honest, I didn’t think one was likely this year, mainly because we were planning to be in the United Kingdom for three weeks this summer for my sister’s wedding.
It’s funny how God often has plans that are different to ours.
We went to Revolution that next Sunday and at the end of the service, during the announcements, one of the leaders got up to announce an upcoming opportunity. Yes, you guessed it, the church was planning to send a team to Haiti THIS SUMMER, for a week, to work at an orphanage they worked with last year. I couldn’t believe it. When we got back to the car, Jason and I looked at each other and he said, “Well, do you want to go to Haiti?”
I didn’t know what to think. It is one thing to say, or even believe, that you should do something. It is completely different when the opportunity presents itself and you have to step up. I wanted to go, but if I am truly honest, I didn’t. This trip would be two weeks before we leave to go to the wedding, and what would happen if I went to Haiti and caught some weird disease or something? Aaaarrrrggggghhhhhh!
This was a new step, well, it was a step that I had taken many times before, but it felt like it was a long time ago. One thing is true, I couldn’t deny this was what I had been praying for.
So, to bring a long story to a close, on Friday July 6th 2012, I will be boarding a plane along with a team of people from Revolution church and heading to Haiti – on my own, without my family. I am both excited and terrified at the same time, but most of all I am ready. Ready to go, ready to serve, ready to demonstrate to my girls that mommies do this stuff too, and ready to be used in whatever way I can be of most use on the team.
Over the next couple of days I will share what I know about what we will be doing when we are there, and I will also ask for your help. Jason and I have taken this as a step of faith and are believing that God will take care of all of those needs. You never know, God might want to use you to help meet the needs.
So its out there. I am going to Haiti on a mission trip.
God is good.
Julie