The Lagging Clock

The clock in our dining room is having some battery problems, and as a result, it keeps lagging behind.  Gabe has re-set it (and attempted to revive it with new batteries) two or three times now, and each time, initially, it seems to be doing fine.  Then it relapses into slo-mo timekeeping.

It's a little irritating.  I am one of those people that checks the clock habitually, and without having an accurate timepiece on hand, I feel discombobulated.  But a part of me is wishing that I could lapse into slo-mo time, too, and stretch out the minutes just a little longer.

As any of you who have ever undertaken a life-shift in some way can probably relate, I feel like Gabe and I are living in this odd twilight zone of neither completely here nor there.  We're here in body and duty, but "the future" is definitely not here.  The calendar hanging on our wall has appointments and notes all the way up until April 23rd, and after that it's just blank.  We're excited to discover what's on the other side of that date, but we also feel the weighty significance of what will transpire between now and our departure date.

This photo is of the street we live on in the springtime.  I took it last March as the plum trees burst into bloom.  I love the annual week of plum-blossoms.  It's a week I didn't fully appreciate until Gabe and I got married and we lived here on Larch.  We'll probably catch plum-blossom week this year, but I don't know when the next time will be that we might see it.  That unknown seems to be looming over a lot of things right now.

It's worth it to entrust those little pleasures and treasures of life - coffee dates with friends, drives and stories with Grandma, laughter from our one-year-old nephew, peaceful evening walks around this neighborhood where we've made our first home together - into the faithful hands of a God who so kindly gave us those treasures to begin with, since we can't cling to them AND go do what we believe we're called to do, but it is a little painfully sad to release them.

I don't wish to change things.  I am delighted to get to walk into this approaching next season.  I just wish that reality could conform to the clock on our wall for maybe just a little bit.

Decisions and Dates

After talking, praying, processing, and talking some more, we've decided to accept the teaching position in Thailand for the duration of the 10 month school year.  We emailed our acceptance to the school's administrative team this week, and we bought our airline tickets this morning (see photo above)!

We're accepting this position for several reasons:
1 - it easily allows us to minister/work in two of our five ministry focus goal-areas: orphanages and education.
2 - it will be in close proximity to organizations that could expose us to another ministry focus of ours: supporting human justice
3 - it opens these doors without seriously subtracting from our savings.
4 - we see opportunities, goals, dreams, and circumstances seeming to align and we believe that the hand of God is at work in it all.  He seems to be indicating that it is now time to "go for it."

At this point, we have set aside $14,000 to put toward the cost of this trip.  We've been putting together an estimated expenses list (including airfare, medical insurance costs, re-establishment costs in Thailand, DTS expenses, etc), which will exceed our $14,000 savings, but we're excited that at least three of our five areas of focus will be accomplish-able (is that a word?!) without tapping into our savings too much.  For the 10 months that we are teaching, we will have our housing provided for, and we'll make a small salary to cover every-day living costs - and, hopefully, also our monthly medical insurance bill.

After the 10 months of teaching, our desire is to attend the New Zealand YWAM Marine Reach Discipleship Training School with a medical focus, which would start in July of 2016 (and allow us to meet our fourth ministry focus).  We've been able to communicate a bit with the current DTS leader this week and are encouraged by our interactions with him.

We'll have a 4-month gap of time between the end of the school year and the start of the DTS, and that will allow us a little "flexible" time - our goal at this point would be to focus on human-justice-related volunteer work (if we haven't been able to devote a lot of time to that during the school year), and stop in the Solomon Islands on our way to New Zealand to see our sister's family who live there. We also might be able to use this time - depending on finances and if we have money to leave Thailand - to visit some of the organizations we're familiar with that are using their businesses to serve people and share the love of Jesus.

A possible back-up plan for those four months (if we are still short on funds before we have to pay for the DTS) will be to try to either earn money in Thailand through teaching English or spend the time in Australia working under their Work and Holiday Visa program, which would allow us to seek temporary employment for up to 1 year in Australia.  Ideally, if we live frugally, working during those four months would provide the remaining finances we need to complete the Discipleship Training School.  Basically, we're just open to adjusting our plans during those months, and willing to work hard to meet our future financial needs, or to jump into any opportunities the Lord may open.

Regardless, it's exciting to see plans appearing to begin lining-up... Of course, we're trying to hold onto these plans loosely and allow God to come, direct, and work among them, but it seems like we're starting to move forward with this "vision time!"  (Although, I have to admit, I've personally been struggling a little with accepting it as "real" - that we're moving toward our long-term goals.  It feels like we've been operating in this location and mode of life for so long!  We've even pursued opportunities to go elsewhere in the past 3 years, and for many different reasons, none of them have happened.  It seems like too much to hope for that in a couple of months we will be stepping onto on an airplane with a one-way ticket, and spending close to 2 years on this adventure.)

But, it IS starting to feel more real...  Because the other news in our life is that Gabe was hired to work as a tax-preparers receptionist for the tax-prep season - which is a little bit of a bittersweet transition.  He's worked for his boss - who has become a close friend - for almost 3 years painting, and it feels like the good-byes are already starting, and that life is already beginning to shift into a new gear.  This job will provide a stable schedule, an opportunity to learn new skills, and obviously financial help from now until we depart, and this is a blessing as we will need to coordinate our schedules to plan our move to Thailand and because we'd like to continue steadily socking away money into our trip account.  At the same time we've also been SO blessed by Gabe's current boss, and it's hard to see that season come to an end.  We know that this is just one of many relational changes as we head East, and that reality is sobering.  It also acts as a signal that the transition OUT of the status-quo for the last 2 years is underway.

We will be sending out a mailing in the near future with more details and an invitation to family and friends to support us and this journey - both through financial gifts and also through prayer backing.  If you would like to receive such information, please contact us!  You can email us at gabedanikwood(at)gmail.com, or send us a message on Facebook, or text us if you happen to have our number.  We know that this next season in our lives is a big undertaking, and we would so appreciate knowing that there is a community of people who are standing behind us and encouraging us as we step out in faith.

Background Scenery

This weekend I was explaining to some of my family about the photography rule-of-thirds.  (If you're not familiar with it, you can check out THIS link for a quick overview.) When you follow the rule of thirds in an effort to frame your subject AND include scenery, it makes both the main subject and the background more interesting to the human eye.

I think, before too much time elapses and I start posting about current changes and events on this blog, I should briefly summarize the "background scenery" behind the subject of Gabe and I "taking on the world."

Both Gabe and I have been interested in and consciously making decisions moving toward doing overseas work in a capacity that allows us to serve humanity for about the last 10 years.  Obviously, we did this separately before we met and got married.  We had both done some "preliminary" (i.e.: short-term) stints in places like Uganda, Mozambique, North Africa, Europe, India, Central America, and East Asia before we even started dating, so one of the ongoing conversations in our relationship has been about "where" and "how" we'd like to work overseas... not "when" because we both just assumed that it was a given!

However, we also wanted to prioritize our marriage, being involved as a married couple in a home community here in the states, and make sure we had a solid foundation working together as a team before we launched into cross-cultural ministry - so when we got married two years ago, we knew it would be at least a year before we were ready to pack up our bags and chase our dreams of living and serving overseas.

As we continued to talk about our options, we found that we had an abundance of opportunities before us.  One of the funny things about being willing to serve and minister to others is that there seems to be no shortage of places where we could go and things we could do.  We realized if we didn't start choosing a direction, we were going to suffer from paralysis of analysis.

One of our desires in doing ministry cross-culturally is that we do it together.  We want to do something that we both find interesting, challenging, and valuable if we are able.  Obviously, we know God is ultimately the one opening and closing doors, but if we were going to choose, we wanted to choose something that we both have a passion for.

We've found there are five basic areas of common interest that we have that seem to lend themselves toward overseas work:
1 - serving and working among orphans
2 - educating and equipping children
3 - operating a business as a platform for serving
4 - meeting medical needs
5 - supporting work that combats human trafficking

As far as a specific location where we want to work, we found we didn't have a lot of common experience, and therefore couldn't both speak from an informed perspective as we tried to identify geographical directions.  Gabe has spent time in Central and South America, Central and Southern Africa, and Eastern Asia.  I've spent time in Europe, Northern Africa, and India.

As we talked and dreamed and shared about places we'd been and organizations we'd worked with, we had this crazy idea to take a trip and spend time serving and visiting places together.  We knew that if we were going to do something like this, we wanted to be sure to spend sufficient time in a place to really feel like we got to know it - the organization, the people, the needs, and how we could see ourselves operating within that ministry.

Simultaneously, we've had a lot of conversations about how to purposefully prepare and equip ourselves for doing ministry together.  Gabe participated in a YWAM DTS after high school, and he's felt like much of his foundational understanding of God and ministry and prayer comes from that season of his life.  I haven't done anything like that, but I've often thought about how encouraging it would be to take a short season specifically set apart for learning about God within a community of people who are also pursuing that end.  We decided it would be beneficial for our long-term goal of overseas work to undertake such a season together.

And that brings us up to the current status:  we're approaching our target savings for undertaking some kind of cross-cultural "vision seeking" adventure.  The timing seems reasonable and good - we don't have kids that we'd be uprooting, don't have careers that we can't walk away from, don't have a mortgage or debt that keeps us tied to a paycheck, and as far as we can guess, we don't have siblings that will be getting married in the next year or so!

So, it's time to act: I've given my notice to my employer that I will finish teaching winter quarter at LCC and not continue my contract after that.  Gabe's given his employer the heads up as well.  We've done some research, found some options based on various factors, and now it's time to make a decision.

Option A: Complete a DTS in Chaing Mai, Thailand
Option B: Complete a DTS with a compassion/medical focus in New Zealand
Option C: Go work for a school year teaching English to kids in Thailand prior to doing option A or B (or an unknown Option D, should such an option develop while we're in Thailand!)

We're praying about it this week, and hope to have peace about a decision soon.

Feel free to join us in prayer for wisdom!