From There to Here

About a month and a half ago, I had an appointment with a doctor. After talking with her for a few minutes, I asked her where she was from. She was clearly African, but I couldn’t place the country. Turns out, she was from Kenya! We engaged in a reminiscent conversation about Kenya and life over there, and the fact that the world is such a small place. She shared that she was opening a hospital over there to give back to “her people”. I was excited to come home and tell Daniel about our conversation and the coincidence that my new doctor was from Kenya. At this point, that’s all it was, a coincidence and a neat conversation. Over the course of the next month, Daniel and I become to be disgruntled with “life”. At one point, Daniel even shared with me that “he feels like a slave to life, to the chase to get ahead, the nice cars, nice house, better job, etc”. He said he was just ready to leave the US. We joked about moving out of the country, but it wasn’t a real possibility, just conversations to relieve the stressors of the reality we were living. So one Sunday night, I started looking at mission opportunities online, just to see what was out there. I looked up my old school in Kenya, where I’d always wanted to go back and teach. I prayed to God that I was frustrated and didn’t know how people “got into the mission field” because there were SO many organizations and I didn’t even know where to start. So I just closed my computer and went to bed. I had a doctors appoint early the next morning. That Monday morning, I met with the same doctor I had met with the previous month. She started the appointment asking how life was. I proceeded to tell her that it wasn’t great. We were struggling. Daniel’s unemployment had run out. His student loan money was on hold. And he had just been let go from his practicum through school. So we had no income, no way to pay our bills and just a bleak future. She just shook her head and said “Alicia, I just wish you weren’t my patient so I could talk to you about something!” So, I proceeded with… “Doc…you’re fired!” No seriously. I fired her. At this point, she said that she had prayed for a miracle yesterday at her church. Her pastor said that so often we pray for little things, but that we serve a BIG God and we should pray for BIG things. So her prayer, was that God would bring her someone to open up and run the Psychiatric ward at her new hospital. She asked me if I thought that Daniel would be interested in heading up the program, and if we would be willing to move to Kenya. My jaw dropped. I told her I needed to talk to Daniel about it and we agreed to meet for lunch on that Friday. I went straight home and shared everything with Daniel, not sure at all what to expect. His answer was “let’s GO! I’m ready!” He was so excited and it was torture waiting until Friday.
The lunch went great and everyone hit it off so well. Daniel handed her his resume, and she promptly folded it up, put it in her purse and said “Tell me about why you love Africa and your relationship with God.” It was so neat that THAT is what she wanted to know about! The conversation flowed effortlessly and we made plans to go to Kenya in December to check everything out. So…that is how we got to where we are now. Fundraising for a trip to Kenya, which will most likely turn into moving our family across the world to serve Him and be His hands and feet.