I cannot express to you how absolutely excited I am to watch God move and watch Him put things together before our very eyes. Some of the coolest things have happened since we committed to move to South Sudan…things we never saw coming.
One thing that I feel just screams, “God is ALL OVER THIS” is our camper. Yeah, seriously!
We bought our fifth wheel last October, mostly with the hope of selling our house, making us more mobile for raising support, and untethering us from our home and possessions so that we would be that much more ready to move to South Sudan when the time came. We also hoped to really intensively save money, pay off student loan debts, and shed a lot of ourselves. Well, God’s plans and timing were quite a bit different than ours (as they usually are); we didn’t end up selling our house, and with Blaise’s accident at work, we haven’t been able to save a penny. However, God has had much bigger plans in the works that we couldn’t even imagine.
While we had been moving nonessentials into our camper and redecorating since late last fall, we really began our official move in April. (Read The Jonah Months and The Book for the story on the painful process of letting go and making the move into the camper.) But it wasn’t until early May, when we received official word from Every Village that the long-term missionary program in South Sudan had been approved and that we would be living in the village of Nasir, S. Sudan full-time (versus Kampala, Uganda), that things quickly began to fall into place.
As we dialogued with Every Village about this new program and what it would look like, it quickly became clear that we would be going through a training program prior to moving to South Sudan as missionaries (thankfully). And where is that training program going to be held? Houston, of course. And where are we going to live while we are in Houston for 6-7 months for training? Our CAMPER, of course!!! The conversation with Every Village actually went very much like this…
EV: Well, you guys will be coming down to Houston for training before moving to South Sudan.
Us: For how long?
EV: We’re thinking it will probably be around 6 months, maybe a bit more to account for the holidays.
Us: Okay…
EV: And it’s perfect, because you guys already have your camper, and you can just bring it down here and live in it during training!!!
Us: [speechless at God’s sovereignty and foresight] That is perfect!
We bought this camper long before we ever knew this would be in the plans, but as God puts the puzzle together piece by piece, we now see that He was really just preparing us for this…this move to Houston! Because of our home-on-wheels, we will not have to find an apartment and pay an outrageous amount of money in rent, we will get to take our home with us and remain in our comfortable, little space for this season of life, and we will still have the opportunity to use our camper life to reach out and minister to others in the campground in Houston. We bought the camper, unbeknownst to us, for such a time as this. We didn’t know that this would be the plans, but God did.
Is our God so amazing or what???