After finishing the last Adventures for Kids and cleaning the facilities until 10:30 pm the night before, Terry and I left early the next morning on a trip to the east coast to visit two of our children. We spent a lot of time at first talking about the Adventures - what we liked, what we didn't like and would we ever do it again. We were exhausted, but it was hard not to talk about the kids. We also began reading Jen Hatmaker's Interrupted. We finally agreed to not talk about the kids after we crossed the Mississippi River, because it was so hard not to focus on the Tuesdays of the last few months.
In January 2012, our Pastor had stated that someone needed to move to the Solms area to work with the families we were serving in our Wednesday evening children's program. I looked at Terry and said, "We could do that." He looked at me and said, "Don't you ever say that again." We smile a lot about that. But the spirit was talking to both of us through Jen's book. Sometime after crossing the Mississippi river, Terry looked at me and said, "We need to move to Solms." My immediate response was, "Yes, we could move into the apartments there." We discussed what this would mean and continued reading the book until we arrived at our son's home in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
While there we took our four-year old granddaughter to church on Sunday. She received a memory verse, Joshua 1:9: "Do not be afraid. I will be with you wherever you go." It was a perfect one for her. Her life was in turmoil with her parents divorcing, her dad getting custody and moving to go to school, dad finishing school and looking for work.
The next Sunday, we were visiting our daughter in Chesapeake, Virginia. We went to church with her family and the pastor preached on......Joshua 1:9: "Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid: do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go." Do you think God was encouraging us to follow his earlier leading to move to Solms? We must believe it. Our trip home was spent in talking about plans and marveling over hearing God speak to us in this manner.
Our pastor was excited when he heard and asked us to tell the elders of our church. We assumed they would be excited too, but they were a little discouraging. One elder asked if we had counted up the cost and encouraged us to wait until we had. Another asked us if when we tire of this mission, if the church would have to help us financially. He did not want the church to be responsible for any finances. We assured him we are financially sound.
"Be strong and courageous...do not be discouraged..." We were still too excited to let the naysayers bother us, so we began looking for a place to buy. We had both decided the apartments would not be a good way to use our money or big enough for us to entertain the families. There was only one house available in the area and it needed too much repair. We looked for land and there was none advertised so we began knocking on doors of homes that had large parcels of land. We finally purchased about an acre of land right across the street from one set of apartments where many of our families lived and down the street from the other set of apartments. Thank you God for blessing us so much.
