How this Trip became possible.

First I would just like to thank God for making this trip possible. I would like to share how He has provided and continues to provide for our every need.


When this opportunity was presented to us, we immediately thought we would love to go. After our initial reaction we began to wonder how would we ever afford to take all 4 of us somewhere where the average full price ticket, at the time, cost around 1100.00 dollars. We wondered about my job, and if I was suppose to go even if it meant becoming un-employed. We wondered about our house, Will it sell in time? or are we going to have to make the house payment while we are away. We wondered about all of the bad things you hear about happening to missionaries as they are away. Really we began to wonder and stress about a lot of things that we had no answers to. So, we Prayed. We prayed that God would reveal to us, first off, whether or not we were suppose to go. We then prayed that He would provide for all of our needs and prepare us spiritually and physically for taking the trip. This list of needs seemed to go on and on and on, but as you will soon see God has been and continues to be faithful. We knew that if we KNEW we were suppose to go then God would provide everything we needed.

He has given many examples in the word of how he prompts and provides. He prompts Abraham to go and sacrifice his only son Isaac, Abraham obeys and God provides a ram. He prompts Moses to lead Israel out of Egypt and provides a way for them to leave by bringing all the plagues, he provides a way out through the red sea even though the egyptian armies are right on their tails, He provides manna when there is no food and the list goes on and on and on. And just think thats all within the first two books of the Bible. Every time God has prompted he has provided, that's just how he rolls. That is one of the reasons our God is so Awesome.

So, What needs did we have, you ask? Well lets start with the the need to know whether or not we were suppose to go.

We got confirmation that we were indeed suppose to go very shortly after being asked. I went to work one day and decided that it was time to ask for the time off. I called the section mananger and asked him if I could meet with him first thing in the morning. We scheduled a time to meet. When we met I was almost expecting to be told that I would have to decide between this trip and my job. During our meeting he said "I'm not sure this one is going to get approved, I mean to have a specialist out for more than a month is pretty big." He asked me, "What is going to happen if this isn't approved?" I told him that I did't know for sure. He said he would have to talk to his boss about it and that we would have to get H.R.'s approval too. So, I wasn't too sure about it and thought that I would probably find out in a couple of weeks, but to my amazement the very next day my employer allowed me to take an unpaid leave of absence, pretty much without hesitation. We also had people at church come to us and say "We knew you guys were gonna go just as soon as we heard about the trip", without us telling them anything. After these events took place we were 99% sure we were suppose to go. So, we started taking steps to prepare. Our pastor told us the first thing we needed to do was start sending out support letters. We had no idea how to write one of these letters, but guess what. God provided one. We have a couple in our church that has been involved in the mission ministry for a very long time. Dave and Dee have been all over the world and have had to go through this process many times. Guess what they had. They had a copy of the support letter they used and allowed us to use it in any way we wanted. So, we customized it for us and we were ready to get copies made. I began to call copy companies and ask them if they would be willing to donate two sided color copies to our cause. One company said We will donate 25 copies, at $.39 per side that was about $20.00 worth which we were very exicted about. The only thing was we wanted to send out about 100 of these letters and we were working with a very limited budget. So immediately after we went to the pick-up our first 25 letters we started to drive around to find another store that said they would print each flyer for $.39 which was a pretty good deal, but we were still hopeful for a miracle. We pulled over to a gas station and looked in the phone book for the address of the store that had offered half-price copies. In the phone book we found 2 locations for this store and I couldn't remember for the life of me which one had made that deal, so we began to drive to one of them to talk to the manager. On the way we saw one of these stores, only this one was not even in the phone book. It was a new location so we pulled in for whatever reason and as I walk in I see a man behind the copy counter who looks strangely familiar. "Jeremy, right?" he says to me. Turns out I went to Junior and Senior high school with him. We talked for a little bit, I told him what we were doing and he gladly printed off 100 copies at no charge. Totally God!!! To be continued....