I feel like Bilbo. The opening scene finds us skipping around our little shire, happy as larks, eating, drinking and being (generally speaking) merry. Yet the prologue to this story has already revealed that we are being invited on an unexpected journey. Just like Bilbo's companions, we received this "invitation" that really left us more in the dark than informed at first. You have read the prologue, a month has past, and the introduction is now being written, right before our eyes, and we would like to share.
When I wrote my last note, "Prologue Revisited", I really told you everything we knew. That our family felt we were receiving an invitation to "pack the necessities" in essence, and get ready for an unexpected (and completely unknown) journey. In the past month, our story has continued to unravel, sometimes gently rolling, sometimes with almost supersonic intensity. I would like to share with you the introduction to our story.
It begins with me hitting send on "Prologue Revisited" but in order to tell you that beginning I need to tell you a little flashback. When we felt that God was inviting us to "Get Ready", we both felt without a shadow of a doubt that that was to get the farm ready for sale. In discussing it, although we were both in agreement, we wanted to lay out a fleece of confirmation and invite God to boost or seal this conviction in our hearts and minds. We love this farm and wouldn't give it up if we weren't sure He was asking us to and had a plan for our lives. The fleece that we laid before Him was that if He wanted us to sell the house, that He would orchestrate it as such so that when word got out that we were preparing to sell, people would come to us and tell us that they wanted to buy our farm, without us even having to list it. We weren't thinking quickly, we thought maybe, possibly God might bring an interested party to approach us next year, which is how long we knew it would take us to get our house ready for sale.
Within a minute or so of posting my "Prologue Revisited" note on FB I received a private message. This message in essence said, "if and when you move, we are interested in buying your property, please let us know." Um... okay, that was a confirmation for us that we were moving in the right direction. But of course we are humans, going in blind and so we continued to lay fleece after fleece before God asking Him to continue to give us signs of how to proceed here. The next was in the area of our finances. Looking at how God has blessed us and given us equity in this property and through other financial means that is so beyond anything we could have contrived ourselves (we call Him our great Equity Manager), we feel that He has given us this capital not for us to "enjoy" but as an investment to fund our lives and work in the future. But we are not business people, and stocks and bonds and all that jazz make our eyes glaze over. So our next fleece was to lay our capital (or what will be our capital once we sell and pool our investments and savings) before Him and ask Him to show us how it can be used to generate income for our future.
That second week after writing "Prologue Revisited" we were with friends who are savvy business people who also have a complete heart for using their business to generate income for God's work. When we shared our current stage of waiting on God they were both very of one mind of exactly how we could use that money to generate income. With their help they laid out a plan of how they could be part of managing this plan in a way that as long as our capital remained in industry, we would be able to make a regular salary that would go very far in paying for our monthly expenses whatever we end up doing.
With that duck in a row, three weeks after writing Prologue Revisited we then were able to say, God... where are you taking us? What's the plan here? What are you asking from us and how are we going to get prepared and ensure we have the tools to do the good works that you have prepared in advance for us to do? Within days of praying that prayer, Coen and Suria Scholtz arrived in our little rural farming community, 2 miles up the road with two daughters that just hit it off like lemon and merengue with my girls. As we spent a weekend listening to Coen and Suria share their stories and their passion, we were butter in their hands. A couple that also left everything to follow a call that they didn't know where it would lead, but it has led them to amazing heights of service and blessing. Not only did I love their stories, but I loved their persona's. Both Pietro and I looked at each other as we drove away and for the first time in our lives we felt like we had "seen Jesus" with skin on. They awoke a fire and a passion so deep in us that as our pastor said recently, it was like a burning bush on the prairie.
Coen talks about "putting your yes on the table" to be part of God's plan. We both said, Coen our yes is on the table but we don't know who or what we are saying yes to. We know that God is telling us to get ready but we don't know what He is telling us to get ready for. We have figurative tickets in hand to get on the train, but we don't know the destination. In talking with us and hearing our life long passions, strengths and weaknesses both Coen and Suria urged us to come to Zambia and receive leadership training under a man named Christopher Agenbag. They spoke so highly of his influence in their own lives that we were like, if this man impacted your life and ministry, sign us up. Amazingly, because Africa was never on our radar and even when we went home, both thinking without a shadow of a doubt that this is what we were going to do, there was a lot of raw emotion as well, because we are quite seasoned travelers, but Africa is a whole nuther story. And going there with 6 children takes it to a whole new level.
Last Sunday after google searches and you tube videos we sent an email off to a few key people in our lives, asking them what they thought of this. One of these people was Mike Hack, in Africa. That night when we went to bed, I was all of a sudden hit by the realization that we were talking about selling everything, packing up 8 suitcases and moving to Africa for six months to receive leadership training for..... we didn't know what. That made me break out in a cold sweat. So then I started to pray, saying "God... is that what you are asking us to do? Walk into this blind? Take a wild leap of faith and just trust that you have a plan and you will reveal it when the timing is right? If that is what you are asking from us, God, then please give us the courage and faith to do it. But if it's not.... that would be really great. If it's not, could you please show us what we are getting ready for?"
I fell asleep with these prayers tumbling around in my head, and in the morning when I woke up and turned off the alarm on my phone, there was a message from Mike. "Yes!!!!" he said. "Do it!!! Christopher is the best of the best, we all learn so much from him, and when he is done with you I have a job for you." He went on to explain that he has a heart to see a similar training centre to what Christopher runs in Zambia (but it services all of South Africa) set up at the OM base in Italy to service the entire Mediterranean region. OM Italy recently took over a beautiful centre in the North of Italy (I will post a link at the end of this note) and has the vision for mobilizing missionaries to go out into the Meditteranean but needs manpower. And needs manpower that is equipped and wired to understand the culture.
We both just looked at each other with eyes wide and hearts saying.... "of course." I mean, the puzzle pieces just all fell into place and the picture became crystal clear. And for the first time pure excitement charged us. I mean there was always a little element of excitement but mostly overwhelmed by a whole lot of other not so positive emotions, mostly related to fear of the unknown, but THIS? We were MADE for this.
This is not the end of the story, the pace did not slow down after this but the week continued to unravel with machine gun fire intensity as Mike says. But I will share "the rest of the story" for another day. Today I just felt if I didn't start to tell the story, it would run away on me and I would never be able to do it justice. And we need your prayers as we move forward through this obstacle course of preparation. It seems like each day the timeline shrinks and and the list of things to consider grows. We find ourselves routinely feeling a bit paralyzed about how we are going to get "from here to there". So we would love to invite you to be part of praying us through!
Ways that you can support us today. Pietro is meeting with his department this morning first thing. Maybe as we speak. He needs to give a sort of notice without being able to give an exact notice. Please pray for a good communication on his part, and favor and blessing from his boss. They are hiring and training one employee to take Joe's place which has been recently vacated, the suggestion will be to hire two people and Pietro can train them both, one to replace Joe and one to replace himself.
Tonight we will be meeting with the Evangelism and Missions Committee to share our story and request the blessing and support of Salem Church in this endeavor.
Please pray for continued clarity to hear and see and know how we are to move forward each step of the way. There are so many decisions to be made and things to be done that as I said, it can be a bit paralyzing. And the pace of the story is such that I do believe I will be writing alot more frequently :)
No comments:
Post a Comment