We are not going to be houseparents at Village of Hope.
I know, I know. It`s Dave and I, so no one is super surprised that we are changing out minds. But believe me when I say that this was not a decision I wanted to make. Other times we`ve left the mission field we`ve come running back to Canada determined that God wasn`t really calling us into missions. This time nothing could be further from the truth. We are called to missions. We called to bring orphans into our home and raise them as our own. We are called to adoption. We aren`t done in Guatemala yet.
As you know, we rented a beautiful home and are now spending more than three hours a day on focused language study, each. We take a chicken bus to the market and buy groceries, we have to light our stove with a match, and we have to buy clean drinking water and bleach our vegetables before we eat them. We are living the Guatemala life, and we LOVE it. We`re a bit lonely right now because we`re still settling in, but we want to live here for a long time.
So why aren`t we going to be with Village of Hope? Well, it comes down to God guiding us away. We have spent the last month trying to find an organization which we can send finances through in Canada, because Village of Hope is an American ministry and can`t process donations for us. (We live in support, and can`t stay on the field without financial donations from churches and individuals who believe in us and our ministry.) We believe that God leads through finances, and when we have been on the path God wanted, He has always abundantly supplied for our needs. So for the past month, we have been stepping out in faith and making paying for things out of our saving, believing that God will provide a way for support to start coming through to us again. But that door has stayed shut.
This past week we began to wonder if God was giving us a moment- a moment to think about what we were really going towards with Village of Hope. There had been some red flags, and we`d begun to realize that at Village of Hope it was not going to be the way we imagined. We weren`t going to be allowed to be a real family with these kids. This is not because Village of Hope doesn`t want us to be a family, but because of the requirements of the government for the care of the kids in the houses. We were realizing that the requirements and restrictions were too much, and that they were going to negatively affect our existing family. We want more children, and we realized that we were about to basically sacrifice the child we already have for the sake of having more children.
Today we wrote to the directors of Village of Hope, and told them what we were thinking, and that we weren`t sure we were a good fit. We weren`t sure if we should continue towards becoming houseparents. They agreed that they also had their doubts if our vision was the same as theirs. Our hearts are for giving orphans a home and parents, but we want to adopt, and we wouldn`t be able to do that through being houseparents. To go into that position with expectations like that would only frustrate and disappoint us. We "resigned" our future position with their blessing. We have the utmost respect for both the directors, and the ministry of Village of Hope, and we know that although the Lord has used Village of Hope to keep us in Guatemala, that this is not the ministry He wants us to work with.
At this point we don`t know what that means for us. But we know that God has been giving us words and visions about Guatemala. We believe we were called here, and we believe that Village of Hope was a part of the plan to direct us in the way we should go. Life following God isn`t always in a straight line, but that doens`t mean we`ve lost the path. We will be in touch with the YWAM bases here in Guatemala and see what opportunities there might be for us.
We don`t know what we`re doing now, or how all this is going to work out... but we have not lost our vision to stay as missionaries, and we know that God has a plan in all this. We`re just trusting, waiting,... oh, and practicing our Spanish flashcards...
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