God, You're Halarious!

We want to catch up with you all. As you saw by our last post, we were discouraged, tired, and drained from our support raising - I think our last prayer email to our support group really said it best:

Colossians 2: 6-7 “So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in Him, rooted and built up in Him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.”

Hello Everyone,

It’s been a while since we’ve written to you on a Monday morning. Hope all is going well.

As we’ve probably expressed to most of you, our support raising has pretty much hit a wall. The last we talked, we took a support trip out to WI to talk to family and friends about supporting us in our ministry in France. Since then, however, we have not seen support come in. Honestly, it was super frustrating to do all the work involved with that and then not see the fruit. However, we thought just to buckle down and work harder. When we saw nothing come in, we thought we’d take the holidays to re-evaluate what’s going on.

We contacted our mission board and the lady that is our contact/support person at WorldVenture. She looked through our presentation, analyzed our pool of donors and looked at our method and pretty much said that we’re doing everything as we should be. We’ve been praying about what God is trying to teach us and what our future is going to hold with no obvious response either way.

That said – we just don’t know where to go from here. It’s really difficult to talk to people and raise support, when we’re not fully convinced that is what God wants for us, but on the other hand, we have felt lead to this ministry for the last 3 years and it’s hard to believe that God would be telling us “NO” after everything so obviously pointed to “YES” for so long.

We have been praying and praying and searching God’s word for SOMETHING to let us know what God’s will is, but for now we are completely content with whatever He wants us to do.

If you could please take some time this week to pray for us, that would be wonderful. We have been praying that God (because He doesn’t need us in order to do whatever He wants) would give us 11% more to show us that France is where we need to be. Please pray for that.

We will be spending this week in DEEP intentional prayer about our ministry (wherever God brings us) – I’ll keep you updated on where that brings us!

Thanks so much for all your continued support – please feel free to write back any response – we want to hear from you.

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Well.....we took this week to intentionally pray that God would specifically show us where He wanted us to be and what He wanted us to do. We honestly have to say that we were at best doubtful that we would be doing any long term missions work. However, God had different plans for us.

Today, I was at work and Phil B. (our menor/recruiter through WV) stopped by my office. He had heard that we were discouraged in our support raising and had a proposition for us. He told us that WorldVenture has just started something called Journey Corps which are much like what we were planning on doing at the OIKOS house. They have two locations: Paris and the Ivory Coast. He said if we would be willing to go to Africa, we might be able to go sooner (with the money we've raised). We could totally consider it, but I just put it to the back of my mind.

Later on that day, I sat down to look at it and calculated how much support it would be to go there - it's EXACTLY an 11% increase to our current support - JUST what we were praying for!!!!

When Steve picked me up and I told him, all he could say is "God, You're Halarious"!!! He does work in mysterious ways.

So...here we are - back on the support raising train, refreshed and ready to raise about $2,400 more a month - if you can, please partner with us! We're ready to see what the Lord has got in store. Check out the center and some of the opportunities through this program here.

Isaiah 40:31 "Those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.

Thanks for sticking with us!