The Plan
Michelle and I inquired about working as Relief Dorm Parents at Dakar Academy, a Christian boarding school in Senegal, about 1 1/2 years ago. At the time we were very excited but not very well prepared to just get up and go. We tried our hardest but in the end we were unable to pull it off in time to be there by August of 2003. We were heartbroken but not totally broken. After some time of healing and eventually making other plans (of course) we began to feel God pulling us back to this same idea of going to DA. It was just about that time that we received an email from the director of the school once again inviting us to work there. We began praying about it but we were very torn because we already had plans to go to Brazil where my parents are missionaries to visit and possibly look into working there as missionaries as well. God really began dealing with us and showing us that He wanted us to continue pursuing the idea of going to Senegal. Heartbroken once again, because this meant another change of plans and not seeing my parents, we knew what we needed to do.
We began looking into it further and everywhere we looked God was opening another door. He is amazing! So we just kept following Him even though we doubted many times. He did not doubt or flinch... He knew what He was doing. We were able to have our home church (Redeemer Lutheran Church Of Fridley) be our sending organization which was a real blessing because we were on a very tight schedule. We then needed to sell our car which we just bought about 1 1/2 years ago and buy plane tickets. Another couple of miracles were needed. God is always faithful to us. A wonderful young lady from our church does a lot of traveling for her job and had close to 200,000 Worldperks miles. She offered to let us use those miles however we could to get us to Senegal. As it turns out Northwest Airlines does not currently fly to Senegal so we decided to use the "miles" to pay for the flight from Toronto to Lisbon and we could pay for the flihgt from Lisbon to Dakar. This would reduce the cost by about $2000. When she tried to do that the lady told her that the dates we needed were "blacked out." She tried it online and got the same story from the website. We were so disappointed because we were banking on this to save us a lot of money. We put it in God's hands and decided to go ahead in obedience. The next night at 11:00 p.m. the young lady from church called and said "I don't know what happened but it is working!" We now have our tickets and our total cost for 2 tickets from Toronto to Dakar was $1500 with taxes. Praise God! We are believing God will help us sell our car and not lose too much money on that.
We began looking into it further and everywhere we looked God was opening another door. He is amazing! So we just kept following Him even though we doubted many times. He did not doubt or flinch... He knew what He was doing. We were able to have our home church (Redeemer Lutheran Church Of Fridley) be our sending organization which was a real blessing because we were on a very tight schedule. We then needed to sell our car which we just bought about 1 1/2 years ago and buy plane tickets. Another couple of miracles were needed. God is always faithful to us. A wonderful young lady from our church does a lot of traveling for her job and had close to 200,000 Worldperks miles. She offered to let us use those miles however we could to get us to Senegal. As it turns out Northwest Airlines does not currently fly to Senegal so we decided to use the "miles" to pay for the flight from Toronto to Lisbon and we could pay for the flihgt from Lisbon to Dakar. This would reduce the cost by about $2000. When she tried to do that the lady told her that the dates we needed were "blacked out." She tried it online and got the same story from the website. We were so disappointed because we were banking on this to save us a lot of money. We put it in God's hands and decided to go ahead in obedience. The next night at 11:00 p.m. the young lady from church called and said "I don't know what happened but it is working!" We now have our tickets and our total cost for 2 tickets from Toronto to Dakar was $1500 with taxes. Praise God! We are believing God will help us sell our car and not lose too much money on that.