“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door.  You step onto the road and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”  J.R.R. Tolkien

I love a cup of coffee, a good book, a warm blanket, and a gentle fire.  I love the smell of spaghetti sauce with an undercurrent of brownies in the oven.  I love piano music playing throughout the speakers in my house. I love to hear my children and their cousins splashing and squealing in the backyard pool.  And I love the scent of the cotton blossom candles I burn in my bedroom. Truth be told, I love being home… where everything is not just familiar, but it’s right.

Home, the place all my little darlings have left muddy footprints, scuffed my baseboards, and knocked holes in the sheetrock.  It’s where we’ve huddled in large gatherings and shared news like college acceptances, new engagements and a baby on the way.  It’s also the place we’ve collected our grieving souls and comforted one another just by sitting together, looking through old photo albums, marveling at how time changes everything yet some things never change. Home is safety; it is security; it is the one sure thing in a world that is as uncertain as ours.

Yet, here I sit, once again, ready to leave.  My soul flutters for far away places.  In my dreams I visit ancient ruins of China and Greece, I swim under waterfalls, gaze at lions on the savanna, and hike precipices to uncharted villages in the jungle.  I have a wandering and also a wondering heart that is not really ever at rest. I am ready to go again and see what the world is like. 

Jeff and I will be taking our daughters (Layla and Charlotte) to Lesotho, Africa in a few weeks. We will live there for a month, and we will be participants in an agricultural training for rural farmers.  Along with farming techniques we will learn how to share the gospel in this setting. We will be students and servants, learners and adventurers, listeners and participants. But most of all, we will be ambassadors of hope.  We are traveling 9,000 miles because we have brothers and sisters overseas who may need to know the American church loves them.  We are leaving our home in hopes to sit in someone else’s home and share a cup of tea, hear their stories, unite in our suffering and glory in our Savior.  We need to be reminded of the simplicity of living without so many outlets and chargers, without having to merge our schedules and share our to-do lists so someone buys coffee and someone else picks up the dog from the vet. 

We are going to work hard but ultimately to find rest. And I invite you to come along, too. 

We ask that anyone who would like to support us in prayer, please do. We need partners who will commit for thirty-one days to place our family on your prayer list and make it a priority to approach the throne of grace on our behalf.  We have lived in Africa before, and we learned early on that the prayers of our people back home were mighty and effective.  Our enemy is not happy when we act in faith and courage, so I am certain he would love to discourage our family and disrupt our plans. But the church of God is fully equipped to fight for us and with us as we charge into the unknown.

Please follow this blog if you wold like to be updated on our travels, hear the stories of our adventures, and know first hand how to pray for us.  Also, we want to hear from you. We would love to uphold you and your family in our prayers as well.  As we leave our home, we take you with us… (we will do our best to keep our feet)…so come along!