As we proceed through our missionary journey, I am feeling ever more convinced that blogging will be beneficial for a number of reasons. Two of which are 1) so that people can understand what we are doing and why we are doing it and 2) it will be good for me to get my thoughts and feelings out in written form. During our January 2008 trip to Haiti, I kept a blog and have looked at it a few times in the months following. It is great to be reminded of the things that happened and how we felt during the events.
Our missionary journey started really with the decision to adopt a child from Haiti. That decision led us to visit him in June of 2007 while on a mission trip organized so that adopting parents could visit the children that they were adopting. Our primary focus was to spend time with our children. While we were there, there were many things that impacted us significantly. I wish now that I had the ability to blog during that first trip because there are certainly things that I would have liked to remembered, but have forgotten. Things like almost being in the middle of a physical fight between people trying to get our business of handling our luggage to passing out for the first time in my life and cracking my head open (including cleaning the wound out with baby wipes and hand sanitizer).
It was that June 2007 trip that started me thinking about becoming a missionary. As we neared the end of 2007 and it became clear that the adoption process was going to take at least another 6 months and, furthermore, I was continuing to look into becoming a missionary family, we planned a trip for January 2008. During the planning stage of that trip, I was looking to stay with a missionary to better understand what life would be like as a missionary in Haiti. I had attempted to contact Troy and Tara Livesay (The Livesay Haiti Web Log) and it ended up that they were going to be recently back in Haiti from being in the States on furlough. They were going to have too many things going on for us to be there. I had also contacted the Baptist Haiti Mission (BHM) to find out if we could stay there. They were not able to have us stay there either. I had given up my attempt to stay with a missionary and just stay at the Visa Lodge in Port-au-Prince (PAP). We had a number of great things happen while we were at the Visa Lodge, as you can read from our Jan. 2008 trip blog. During our visit to BHM, we found a great connection. So I don't duplicate information from our other blog, I will not expand on the events of that day.
When we got back home, we filled out and sent in our application for BHM and we immediately started looking into our church's (Bethlehem Baptist) missionary Nurture Program. I have reviewed the requirements and have been workings towards completing them. As I write this, today is April 1st and I just sent off our paperwork / application to start the process. BHM reviewed our application that we sent in February and has invited us to stay with them for about six months.
I want to put a plug in for Missionary Talks. As I searched the internet for resources about becoming a missionary, I ran across this helpful resource that gave us good insight into the lives of other missionaries. A sincere thank you, David Peach, for your work in helping us learn and decide to become missionaries! You have done a great work for the Lord in His name!
As it sits now, we continue to examine what the Lord has done in our lives leading up to this point and what we have left. Some of the examples of the Lord's work include:
- Pulling on our hearts to have Tina quit working and start homeschooling our two biological children
- Removing our desire to keep our 27' travel trailer (camper) and finding a buyer rather quickly from South Dakota (a great couple - I hope they are blessed by the camper!)
- Helping me to see the wastefulness of having a racecar and selling it quickly for a good price (and selling the third vehicle we had)
- Guiding us to work toward minimizing our dependencies on worldly things (decluttering the house and things we have. This includes activities that took our time up like our 51" big screen TV and entertainment system and Playstation.)
We are now looking toward the future and that includes selling our home. One advantage that we have is that we have been considering moving closer to our church, so whether we go to Haiti or not, we would be looking to move towards Minneapolis. With this comes a number of decisions that have to be made regarding how to leave the States:
- Does this mean selling everything / almost everything that we own now? Garage Sale? eBay? (we have already starting selling some things on eBay) It seems strange, but instead of going through the house and looking at what we think we should get rid of, we're looking at that stuff we have and are determining what to keep.
- Does it mean keeping most of what we have, and if so, where do we keep our stuff?
There are so many things to think about and consider! Since we are in the middle of an adoption we had to determine if moving (more specifically, leaving the country) would present an issue regarding our ability to adopt. We also had to figure out if I quit my job and neither Tina nor I were earning an income per se (aside from the donations through BHM), what affect that would have. We found out recently that all of that is OK. So now we are in the middle of determining what is going to happen with the adoption. Haiti is very difficult to understand. Right now they seem to be applying a 1974 law (they do this off and on) that says that you cannot adopt if you have two or more biological children. I am currently thinking that it is a real possibility that we may not be able to adopt Lou. The adoption process in Haiti is very slow and inconsistent. It appears as if UNICEF is also creating MAJOR issues. From what I understand, they are trying to "fix Haiti" by keeping children with their parents. This is no doubt the best place for the children, but the way to solve the problem is not after the children have been born, neglected and then sent to an orphange. They need to attempt to solve the problem at the source. Their current methods are only creating a backlog of children in Haiti. The children who cannot get out of an orphange cannot be replaced at the orphange by starving and neglected children in the streets. These children in the streets are not surviving. In the end, UNICEF is causing the death of Haitian children by slowing the adoption process down.
There are also issues relating to the adoption that I cannot explain on this blog that are causing us significant concern.
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