Blessings

Posted on January 23, 2016

We are very excited to announce that were able to purchase our airfare surprisingly early! We’ve clearly been blessed. Everyone loves a good blessing story, so here it is….

If you missed our blog post from last July, we came back from our 2015 mission field experience to some serious challenges – flooded basement, dead water heater, dead furnace, busted main water line, needed new tires then slashed one of the new ones … big time money we didn’t have. Honestly, we were pretty discouraged and not sure we’d be able to go back this year. We haven’t recovered from those things financially yet, but decided that God was still calling us to go to Poland. We continued putting our normal money aside for ministry and sought other means to begin repaying our home expense debt (like getting rid of satellite TV service… we really don’t need 200 channels!) We also began fundraising right away, knowing that we may struggle this year more than usual to save the 50% we pay out of our own budget. We reasoned that God has always provided in the past and if he does close the door on this year, we can always put our savings toward our debt then. So that’s the hardship part, but here come the blessings.

We’ve received some help with a portion of our home expenses.

We’ve had many sales from our Mission Store, enough that it’s been all we can do to keep up with the orders.

We’ve received generous donations from five supporters.

We’ve managed to continue our usual savings contributions and still pay our debt payments.

We had a good turn out for our first Simply Adoorable fund raiser.

We learned that airfare (so far) this year was less than last year.

We “happened” to catch a sudden price drop that put the total within the amount we had collected.

So we jumped. We have our tickets at a savings of almost $1500 from last year’s cost!

And that’s not all! The exchange rate is currently the highest it’s been since we became involved in this ministry, making our other expenses (ministry costs, ground transportation, housing, etc.) a little lower. We aren’t there yet. We will continue to save and still need help. But we are definitely feeling blessed and that God is confirming our calling to go. God is good.