I must say that the best parts of any mission trip I've ever gone on are the deep relationships you form with the people on your team. Those people are some of my most treasured, life-long friends.
This trip, we went with a pretty small team, all people that I'd only talked with maybe a few times before, if that. They were pretty much strangers to me, except that we all attend the same church. I definitely don't look at them as strangers, anymore. In fact, we share a very unique bond now that holds precious memories we built together over our 8 day trip.
First, meet the two men on our team. This is John. He works in marketing at his job, and he's the last in his family to come to the DR. He admits to being a bit skeptical at first about the traveling and the accommodations, but he expressed just how amazing the trip turned out to be and how thankful he was to have gone.
This is Mike (or Michael). You already know him pretty well from my blog over the years. We have always enjoyed traveling together, especially on mission trips and to places that most tourists don't go. We haven't been on a mission trip together since we adopted Juan David from Colombia in 2013, and we haven't really traveled out of the country together since our cruise in 2019 to our three ports in Mexico, Honduras, and Belize. We did go on an excursion in Belize to tour an orphanage and get a taste of a typical meal there, which turned out to be a neat cross-cultural experience.
We didn't think we could make it work out financially for both of us to go on this trip to the DR, but at the last minute, God worked it all out so he could go. We're really thankful that we got to have this experience together. His skills definitely came in handy over the week.
This is Melissa, our fearless leader. She's John's wife, and she's come to the DR with the youth mission trip about 7 times before leading this first-time ever adult/family trip. Her calm, laid-back personality was a big help on this trip. This is a picture of her with the child that her family sponsors, Escarle (who I got the privilege of tutoring over the week). Melissa and John were married within about a month of when Mike and I got married, so we have lived through many of the same life experiences as each other.
This is Sarah, born a month after me. Her daughters are both in college right now, one at Grace College (I graduated from Grace) and one at Taylor University (I went to Taylor Fort Wayne my freshman year). She's a volleyball coach for BCSC (the district I teach in). She's on the prayer team at church, an incredible prayer warrior and very in tune with the Spirit. God gave her some very specific answers to her prayers over the week and made his guidance very clear over a specific child in need of a sponsor. Seeing her sweet connection with God over the week was truly inspiring and invigorating for my own faith. Her faith really touched my soul. I'm eternally grateful for this new friend and our opportunity to talk so deeply over our 8 days of traveling together.
Here we are on Sunday morning worshipping online with the rest of our team, our family at Terrace Lake Church. The moment that our pastor prayed specifically for us gave me goosebumps.
I love how God drew our small team together and bonded us all so well with the connections He knew we already shared. We sure had a lot of fun playing Dutch Blitz late into the night on several occasions!
Our Terrace Lake team also became part of the overall Freedom International team, consisting of Abby (the teams coordinator), about 7 missionary couples with their families, about 3 more single missionaries, and then several year-long interns. We especially enjoyed getting to know Abby as she took care of our team, Ryan as he oversaw a lot of the grounds work that Mike and John did, Kimberly as she taught English to the Pre-K classes who we tutored, Scott as he gave us an educational tour of the neighboring bateys (villages for the sugar cane workers) and showed us where Freedom originally started, and Jacob and Mia, missionaries sent directly from Terrace Lake Church. Taylor Ingram has also been sent from our church, but she was at language school when we were there. With Mike and I still being fairly new in Columbus, we appreciate now having this connection with people like Jacob and Mia. We also got to know several of the interns, Lilly, Grace, and Maria, and hear their stories of how God called them to spend this year of their life serving at Freedom. Their passion for cross-cultural ministry reminded me so much of myself at their age, wondering just where God would place me and how He would use me.
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