A New Thing

Starting fresh. A new look. Why ‘this wild journey’? Why blog at all? Well, we are just one family in this great big world. We are one family seeking to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. We lead a loud, chaotic, and messy life. We have 6 children, 10 and under, 4 of them are boys. We homeschool. And we are headed to Africa in a few months. So that makes for quite a wild journey, if you ask me.

On any given day, you can find me juggling babies, toddlers, preschoolers and school age kids–refereeing wrestling matches, fixing meals, cleaning up glue (or other messy things) in random places, tackling laundry, changing diapers, and helping someone with math or writing, all in the same short span of time. You can also find me thanking God for brief and rare moments of quiet, for my wonderful husband who picks up my slack in so many ways, and for a hot (or cold) cup of coffee in my hand:) I am also frequently found on my face crying out to God for his mercy in the trenches of raising these kids. Parenting is so stinking hard! I know I cannot do any of this without Him. I am helpless and hopeless without Jesus. Motherhood has reminded me like nothing else, day after day, that I need a Savior. I am desperate.

So, on this wild journey of life, God has recently placed on our hearts a strong desire to go to Africa and serve as medical missionaries. We are not any more ‘spiritual’ than anyone else for following this call. We know there is plenty that God is doing right here in the hearts of people in the United States. But God has led us to go. We love Him and want to obey Him. Even if it’s wild, even if it seems crazy to take our kids across the world. We believe God is asking us to lay down the comforts and conveniences we’ve grown so used to. He’s asking us to lay down even our own lives, remembering that He holds us all in his hands. We want to give it all to Him, and trust that He is writing our story, that He is orchestrating our days. We believe He is our provider and our protector. Honestly, He is our very life.

“In Him we live and move and have our being.” ~Acts 17:28

While this journey is very wild, and sometimes very exhausting, it is a wonderful journey. I am thankful for this story God has given us. We are blogging so that we can log a bit of our story, and maybe some random thoughts along the way. Maybe we can bless someone with our story, too, maybe just bless you with what God is doing here and halfway across the world. Hopefully most of all, we just want this blog to point people to our wonderful Savior, Jesus Christ. We want to give Him glory, in the good and the bad, the hard and the easy (is anything really easy?!). In raising up these kids, and going on this mission, we just want to glorify Him. So thank you for reading, and we pray you are blessed as you do.

Our wild God is not tame, but he is definitely so good.