I've been married to my husband, Michael, for almost 25 years. I'm a mom to a biological son and an adopted son from Colombia, and I'm also a spiritual mom to my adopted son's older brother, who I claim as a son in my heart. I'm bilingual and love to work with and relate to Spanish-speaking children and families. I've been a teacher to students from all sorts of backgrounds and cultures for the last 20+ years. I'm also an author and a certified Biblical counselor. I'm in a new empty nest season in a new location far from where I raised my boys, so I'm definitely in a stage of rediscovering myself, my interests, and my purpose.
My insatiable appetite to learn Spanish began some time during my middle school years when God gifted me with a beautiful friendship with two young ladies from the Dominican Republic who both worked at McDonald's with my brother. Those two young ladies became Christians through our family and became like sisters to me. It's always been a deep desire of my heart to one day visit their country. That desire rekindled within me this last summer while I intensely studied the history of all 21 Spanish-speaking countries for my Spanish licensure exam.
My Dominican "sisters".
I do have pics of us much older than here, but I have no idea where they might be at the moment. This captures the time when we met and grew close, though.
The youth in my new church go to the Dominican every summer to visit Freedom International Ministries, a Christian school that we support and where we have sent our own members as missionaries. This year the church decided to take their first ever adult/family mission trip there. They attempted to take a trip last summer, but the time wasn't right. So they set a new date for spring break of 2025 (March 15-22), and I just knew I had to go. I attended the meeting and signed up shortly after it. We went back and forth over the idea of Mike signing up, too, but we decided against it financially. He seemed a little bummed, but didn't say much about it. As the time drew closer, we found out the team was much smaller than expected, so we started talking about Mike again. God just kept the door open and we realized we are supposed to take the leap of faith and go together on this trip! We now have airline tickets with both of our names on them, and we leave in about six weeks!
We will be staying in the dorm style rooms at the school and will be working alongside other teams that may be visiting during the same week. Mike will be able to use his skills to work with any construction projects going on, while I will be able to use my skills to help out with English enrichment time in the school (they really count on mission teams to make this an authentic English time), and I will be visiting the villages in the afternoons and helping out with VBS types of activities. I'm assuming I'll be able to use my Spanish skills when we go out into the villages. We will also have a day to go to the beach right after we arrive before the week starts.
We would greatly appreciate your prayers as we prepare for this quickly approaching trip, for our health to be in tact, for my stress level at school the week before and after (as I tend to get overwhelmed when I have too much on my plate), for our team to gel together well, for the ability to develop lifelong friendships with the people we're traveling with and the people we will meet there, for all the financial aspects to fall into place, and for God to use us as individuals and as a couple to minister to the Dominican children and families, to the school staff, and to our mission team and the other mission teams that will be there. I also have developed a heel spur that can be quite painful at times if I'm not careful, so I'm praying that I won't aggravate it while there.
If you'd like to give financially to this trip or just to Freedom International Ministries, please let me know so I can let you know the best way to do that.
