A few weeks ago I had never been to Pennsylvania. Today, I am sitting in my new “home” which is parked in PA. It’s a long story. Maybe I should back up a little. Where do I begin?
Ever since Doug and I have known each other we have talked about missions together. Before we had children, before we were married, before we were even engaged we dreamed about working in South America. On our wedding day we had big dreams and imaginations of moving to Brazil within a year, but God had different plans. By the time we reached our first anniversary we had a 6 week old baby girl and plans to move to Kentucky. On Nov. 3rd 2012 we arrived in KY with no house and no job… just us with our 9 month old baby girl and a strong belief that God was guiding us. (We stayed temporarily with Doug’s parents.)
Fast forward 2 years and a little more.
We now have two children. We have moved 4 times. Doug has worked as many jobs. We have had a couple car accidents. It’s a miracle from above that we are all still alive. We have become members of a wonderful little church in eastern KY. We have made amazing friends who have become like family. KY has become “home”. We are talking about Brazil again. We are making plans for Brazil. God has been teaching us to TRUST him. Over, and over, and over. Again, and again.
So, it’s Feb/March 2015. Doug’s current job of working as a waiter at Bob Evans isn’t going well anymore. His boss made a new rule that no one can work more than 25 hours per week. (I blame Obama care for that.) Yet they still want him to work 5 days a week (just 4 or 5 hours at a time.) with a 40 minute drive to work each way, it’s just not cutting it anymore. So for the trillionth time in the last few years we are job hunting AGAIN! The economy in eastern KY is dying a little more each year and work is hard to come by.
In the end of 2014 we got passports for our whole family. Now we are wanting to get Visas. In our jurisdiction they no longer do mail in passports, so we have to drive to Washington DC to get them. Doug was only scheduled for one day in a whole week so he took that day off and we decided to take a road trip right away instead of waiting until he had a new job and couldn’t take the time off. Since we were driving ALL THE WAY to DC we decided to visit Doug’s brother who lives in PA and since we were going all the way to PA and we might as well go to NY also and visit a cousin of his who lives there. Oh and stop in West Virginia on our way home and pick up the motorhome we had bought the week before. (That is another story!)
The trip was wonderful. We spent the day in DC riding the underground subway (a first for all of us.) and enjoying city life. We went to the Brazilian consulate and applied for our visas without any trouble. We were told that unless there was any issue we should receive them in the mail within 10 business days. Then we went on to NY. What we didn’t realize was that Doug’s brother Phil lives on the boarder of PA just a few miles from Maryland. His cousin in NY lives on the far other side a few miles from Canada… not exactly neighbors after all. It was worth the LONG drive though. We had a wonderful time with these wonderful people.
After a day and a half with them we drove back down to PA and spent a couple days with Doug’s brother Phil and his family. While we were there Phil’s boss offered Doug a full time job starting immediately. Doug told him that we were making plans to leave the country and it could be within a few months’ time but he said, “no problem, you’re hired anyway”.
After a nice visit we headed back to KY taking this young man with us. :-D
His parents graciously allowed him to come and help us with the move into our motorhome. Back in KY we got busy, sorting, packing, selling, cleaning and trying to get moved into our motorhome. We had just a week and a half so Dean (Bryan) could get home in time for school to start again. We prayed, thought, prayed some more, talked with our pastor and prayed some more. Finally we made the decision to come to PA. So on April 6th (well actually it was REALLY early April 7th by the time we got in.) we arrived at our new home.
Doug won’t say we moved to PA he says “we temporarily re-located for work”. It’s still in our plan to go to Brazil as soon as God opens the doors. We like to dream and make goals and time areas, but as we have learned in the last 4 years, God’s ways are not our ways. We really don’t know when it will be.
Anyway, now you know how I ended up in PA. Oh and you should know we got our visas!!!! They were in the mailbox the day we got home from our trip. Thank you God.
Maybe I will post more pictures soon:-D
