A Big Change

I've been wanting to blog about this for awhile, but when I sit down to write about it my brain freezes up. Somehow it is easier to write about mundane, everyday activities than it is about the big things that are going on.

Things are beginning to fall into place for our big change. For me, our garage sale last weekend was the first tangible evidence of a process that has been going on in our hearts for quite some time. Last year Dennis was finishing up his master's degree at Heritage. For his final credits he chose a missions "Perspectives" course. His main desire was to get his degree finished up so we could stop doing all this travelling back and forth to classes and get on with our life here.

During Dennis' course it didn't take long for God to awaken a desire in him for foreign missions. In fact, during the second class they showed a DVD clip of an unreached people group responding to the hearing the Gospel for the first time. Dennis came home that night and said to me, "I don't know what we are still doing here. We need to go." It was very cool that God had prepared my heart for that moment. Many different times over the past year or so I had been thinking similar thoughts, so when Dennis came home that night I was ready. I told him that I had been waiting for him to say that.

That's how it all got started. Much prayer and discussion ensued. After that we both knew that we would be disobeying God if we did nothing about this conviction. We have made our decision to leave KLBC this August (yes, in about 2 months) and move to a little town called Durham to train with New Tribes Mission Canada for two years. After the training is over our desire is to go with NTMC to a remote people group and learn their language and culture. NTMC places a huge emphasis on relationships- friendship, helping with village projects, assisting with medical needs and generally demonstrating God's love for tribal people day to day. The ultimate goal is to know the language and culture well enough to share the Gospel with them, disciple and train new believers, plant a culturally relevant and thriving church, and equip the church to reach their neighboring villages and tribes.

Obviously a decision like this has not been made without a lot of prayer and consultation with others. I've really been noticing that every Scripture I read, every sermon I hear, many of the books that I read and even comments that are made seem to be all pointing in the same direction- GO.

We are really excited and also a little scared about this change and all the possibilities in the future. I'm sure I'll be posting much more about this as time goes on. Please pray for us!

P.S. A challenging read is "Don't Waste Your Life" by John Piper. Watch out!