Change of Plans

 Imagine waking up in the morning and being so excited to spend the day with your best friend/cousin who is visiting you from Iowa. Anticipating getting a pedicure while the kids play. Excited to have time to talk with no interruptions while someone gives you a foot massage!  All of the sudden you check your voice mails and the Lord puts you on a completely different path, all our plans are shot. No more pedicure, no more going to the park for a extended family picnic and no more lazy mornings eating breakfast together.

This is what happened to Steve and I this past week.  On Monday morning we woke up and were having a leisurely breakfast with my cousin and her family.  I missed a phone call and when I checked to see who it was from, I had three missed calls.  I proceeded to check my voice mails and was puzzled when I had two calls from a girl at International Teams. She was wondering if we were still coming tonight (which would have been Sunday night).  Steve and I had on our calendar the next Sunday evening as our day to show up at training. I then got a sick feeling in my stomach that we had the wrong dates on our calendar.  How could this be? We have had this date on our calendar since training in January and had our plans with my cousin since about February.  Somewhere along the line the date was changed and we never figured that out. We made some phone calls and found out that the training was indeed starting in 20 minutes.

We began packing up our family of five and started saying good-bye to our six houseguests. Why was God taking away our long awaited time together?  (I still don’t know)  I know that He has a reason for all things and I continue to trust in His sovereignty. I do know that through this I have learned that even our best laid out plans are not always God’s plans.  “In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps.” Proverbs 16:9

We have been at training now for a week.  The training is on Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and is very intense. We missed the first day and have spent the rest of this week trying to catch up. I feel we have mostly caught up now, but everyday they seem to talk about something we missed and we just sit there with glazed looks on our faces while the instructor looks at us with pity and gently explains what we have missed. Thankfully, she spent an extra hour with us after class on Tuesday and Wednesday, and we are so grateful for this much needed tutoring.

We will be finished with SLA training on Friday the 12^th.  Please pray for us as we continue to study and learn many new techniques that will help us learn the Teso language.