40 Days of prayer, and God speaks...

...and this is where he is leading.

To the Navy.

Rob is working right now to become a full time chaplain in the US Navy. It's a lot to digest, I know, and the path that God used to get us to this point is not a straight one, but obscured and full of blinding curves and huge boulders and tree roots and mud puddles. But here we are.

And both of us feel a release from the current ministry at which we are serving, which is only by God's hand, because we both have said that we would like to stay here and serve for life if that is what God chose. It is, however, not what God is choosing.

We will be putting our house on the market in the next couple of weeks. Please pray that God would bring a buyer, and soon. That would be a miracle in this slow market.

Our families and our church have been wonderfully and most confirmingly supportive, and they are even excited for us.

Should everything go as planned, Rob will enter the Navy as an officer (because of his post-graduate work and pastoral experience) and he will leave for 13 weeks of officer indoctrination and chaplaincy training. We plan to be out of our house by then--June, and the kids and I will put our household in storage, and then live for a few weeks here and there with family in both IN and OH. Maybe even MO. It will be a long time for us to be without our husband and father, but it must be done, and we will make the best of it and I think the kids will actually enjoy the adventure of it all.

Next up on our agenda:

Rob must complete a 6-hour physical with a military doctor. (I can't even imagine what kind of poking and proding will be going on for 6 hours.) Then he must complete a physical fitness test where he has to run, do sit-ups and do push-ups, all within prescribed time limits. After that, the Navy will fly him to Wash. DC where he will receive his rank from congress. In May, he will take the oath of office, and in the middle of June, he will leave for Rhode Island for training. Oh, and he is missing about 5 post-grad hours, so he took a Feb class at Bethel, and he is taking one in March as well. Sometime in the midst of all that he will also meet before the board of the National Association of Evangelicals to receive his chaplaincy license. Oh, and sell a house and pack up a church and pack up a house and prepare to be gone for a long time. And still not know exacly where we will be commissioned. We should know before he leaves for training. We actually get to pick our top three locations, and they will TRY to match us up with one of those three. No guarantees, of course, it is the military.

I feel like we are preparing go to the mission field. We're both excited and up for the call. We feel a distinct sense of peace about this decision and opportunity, and that it could only have come from God, because we would not have chosen this on our own. But when every other door has closed...sometimes God leads that way. And now that we have been walking in that direction for several weeks, we are thankful that God is the one in charge and not us, because we feel that this is what God has been preparing us for all along.

Please continue to pray for us: finances and provision, our Pathway church family who is undecided about what they will do, the selling of our house, the packing up of our family, and that God will put us exactly where he wants us. God bless!!!