While that statement is very true, it leaves out so much. It does not adequately convey why we would invest months into fundraising projects or studying the country, it's history, people, culture, language, and things like industry and agriculture. It wouldn't explain why my husband would take so much time away from a brand new job or why we would sacrifice half of a month's income to go and work for free. You wouldn't understand why we would leave our three children for 14 days, missing important events for them like dance shows, closing ceremonies for a first baseball season, to come home exhausted, half way through our son's milestone birthday.
While we really did feel strongly that we were supposed to go, simply saying just that does not do any justice to the path that brought us on this incredible journey. So, I want to take a second and share with you why...
It all started with a guy on a mission taking the time, during his trip back to the states, to visit a small community group meeting and share what God was doing in another country not so far away.
We met Anthony at a community group meeting. He was back in the U.S. for a short time and he stopped by to share about all of the amazing things God was doing in Argentina. In the brief time he had, he spoke about his beautiful family, the people of Argentina and all of the amazing things God had done since he and his wife moved to Samuhu in Argentina.
We were so inspired by all that God had been doing and we were deeply encouraged by all of the people whose lives were being impacted through the work that they were pouring themselves into. To say that Anthony's testimony of how God has blessed their mission "inspired" us hardly scratches the surface of how we felt after hearing from him. We left the meeting full of a renewed excitement and determination to follow through with the passion for missions that God had put in our hearts.
We decided, as a family, that we wanted to support this mission, so as a first step we began giving monthly to their mission fund. It wasn't much, but we believed in what they were doing and we wanted to help in whatever way we could, so we gave.
Being missionaries ourselves is something that has been on our hearts since we first committed our lives to serving God. Over the years, we have had multiple people, that didn't know us, confirm what we were feeling by telling us that they believed that God has a call in our lives for missions. We have seen other confirmations in a less supernatural way in the form of field of employment, connections being made, and opportunities popping up.
Fast forward a couple years...
We had the awesome opportunity to be ministered to at our church's Prophetic Commissioning last year. Which is a fancy way of saying we had some wonderful people with incredible prophetic gifts come to our church and prophesy over us. Basically what happens is they fast, pray and prepare themselves to hear from God, what He wants to say to us, and they share that with us. We were so encouraged by what God spoke into our lives! Some of it was things that only He knew were on our hearts, some of it was confirmation of what we have been doing and working toward, and some of it was new, exciting, plans that God has for us. Some of those new things have since happened and some of them are still to come, but all in all, this last year has been a crazy amazing ride!
After our Prophetic Commissioning, we really dug in and started serving more in our church and our community. We also took the first step in our church's mission training program. One of the many things we do as part of our training is go on some short-term missions. When we heard that our church was going to be sending a team down to Argentina to help the people of Samuhu with a building project we got really excited. We knew we were supposed to go and we couldn't wait to meet some of the people and see some of the places we had been reading about in Anthony's newsletters.
Let me take a second and throw in a tiny bit of back story before I continue... After high school, my husband was supposed to go on a mission trip, to Argentina, through the church he was part of at the time, but for various reasons, he did not end up going. So he felt like this opportunity was a chance to go fulfill a call in his life that he really wanted to answer.
We were so excited to be a part of this trip that we emailed the pastor before there was even a meeting date set. We went to the first meeting and honestly felt a little discouraged that we would not be able to take our kids with us, which was what we really hoped to do, but we really believed we were not supposed to walk away from this opportunity so we committed to going, we dug in to start preparing and we gave it to God, not knowing how much of a leap of faith this whole journey would be...
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