life in Mercyville

family missions together

we love missions, near us or abroad. My husband gets to travel all over, loving on orphans and encouraging those called to serve in hard places - he loves it. I have opportunities to travel abroad speak to women, teens and teach children God's truths - I love it. Nothing tops getting to do this as a family. We know this is a tremendous blessing!

Taking our children with us is huge for us. We have been asked, "But what can you REALLY do when you have your children with you?" My answer: be a family.
Many that we have the opportunity to serve are not surrounded by healthy families. The children we get to love on do not see many outside dad's and mom's just getting to be dad and mom. The women I share with are often wives and moms - in need of encouragement.

Our children get to serve by playing - tough job, but somebody's got to do it!
When in India our son played cricket, soccer, and just got to be himself. He couldn't communicate because he doesn't speak Tamil and the children didn't speak English. In Costa Rica the boys speak Spanish. Thankfully for boys grunts are universal and sports are an automatic connection.

Man Time with boys - playing soccer, devo time & ice cream!

Our daughter loves to hold the little one's. In India, most of the time there was a child on her hip. In Haiti, she smiled, held them and played. In Costa Rica she smiled, held them and played.
playing & loving on the little ones

If you have been thinking of going on a family mission trip - stop thinking and start planning. It's not as easy as going solo...but the worthwhile things in life are rarely the easy ones!

2 comments:

  1. Merissa!
    Loved reading about what your family does in missions!

    We have had the privilege (as a family of 5) to do various mission trips, but we are also a family of long-term missionaries.

    Our most memorable short-term trip was to Peru in the summer of 2009. After working together with an ex-street person who runs a slew of children's shelters in various slums on the outskirts of the capital, we headed up into the Amazon. There we worked with a YWAM team going 36 hours up the Amazon river (after a flight up to Iquitos from Lima). People came in dug out canoes from the whole region to the wee village where we ran a training for 5 days solid all day on biblical storytelling, called Simply the Story. Some of the those folks came 5 days by canoe!

    We all speak Spanish and from that we went into a tribal language for those not first language Spanish speakers. The kids played, swam (Yes ... in the Amazon!!), played all kinds of games with the local kids and also helped us bring the teaching by taking small parts in the training and leading small groups. Kids ages at the time 16, 15 and 12.

    We had all learned 16 Bible stories for the trip. One day, when a man fell down 7 feet through the floor of the stilt house and badly hurt himself (ankles, spine and neck), we knew that medical facilities and help was unavailable. God told me to tell the Eutychus story (from Acts 20, where the guy fell out a window). I exhorted the alarmed believers that we needed to pray for the brother and commit him to Jesus, eat lunch and go back to the training. Just like Paul did in the story. My middle daughter knew that story and told it. We prayed for the guy and went and had lunch and headed back to the training. A little later the guy walked in completely well. The place went ballistic as previously he could not stand nor sit nor move because of the pain.

    It was a life changing summer for the family and the 45 attendees of the training were SO glad for the training and thankful they could now tell the Bible stories to others who could not read them.

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  2. Thank you for sharing...what an impact for those present to see the power of prayer. I love that each you learned the stories to tell to those who could not read! I am checking out your site & links.
    ~ Merissa

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