My Bags are Packed...

Today is the big day… again! My bags are packed and I’m ready to go!  Wow, I should put that to music. Oh wait, someone already did. John Denver to be exact, in 1966. For those of you old timers who may remember it was recorded most often by Peter, Paul and Mary. So though I will be on the plane you can start humming away to your hearts delight! Today is also my in-laws 49^th anniversary. So happy anniversary to the two of you.

We leave today and spend the night in Washington, DC and then leave tomorrow for Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. We spend the morning working with Levi Benker’s ministry in Addis (you can look him up on the Internet) and then we will purchase goats for Project 61. That night we will deliver the goats and then the next day we will slaughter them and provide a special meal to the children there.  After that each day will be spent with different organizations until we reach Warancha, an orphanage where we will spend the remainder of our time.

I will be blogging in detail each and every day about the experiences we encounter and the people we come in contact with. I expect both will be amazing. I am excited to get to know this team better and to see where God leads us. My prayer is that we are all open to his guidance and that we are willing to follow his call. I also pray that the team is not overwhelmed by the sights, sounds and smells of Ethiopia but can walk into this as people loved by God and be able to share that love with all we encounter. I hope we can separate tour “Americanism” and just walk in as people. And I hope we can do that quickly so we can love fully and completely in where they are and not spend time evaluating the differences. Instead, I hope we see all we encounter as God’s children completely the same as we are just born into a different place.

We are not there to give of things. We are there to give of ourselves. So let us go in the peace that God has gone before us, he will be there with us, and he will guide us every step of the way. Two days from now I will be in a country I have never seen before in a Continent that I have grown to love. I can’t wait for the journey to begin…