to Journeying.

What an exciting journey it has been lately.  I never expected that I would be "here."  It is good though, so good.  Nearly 5 months ago I began working at Youth Unlimited.  Our focus and drive is to create faith-forming experiences for youth.  It's been such a blessing to be a part of what He is doing in youth.  It's good and I feel like I can see kingdom coming to earth.


And in just a couple of weeks I will head to Uganda and Kenya for a time.  I will be journeying with Stacy (who I toured with) and we will be going to see our kids from the Choir.  It has been about a year and a half since I have seen them.  While I'm trying to prepare myself for taller/older kids, I'm just not quite sure how to do that.  I picture them as the day we parted ways.  And I've seen pictures since, but that doesn't fill the in-between time of relationship.  


I'm envisioning our reunion.  To be welcomed into a country so far, so foreign to me, yet greeted by family.  It's surreal.  


I'm preparing to go.  Preparing not just my suitcases and gifts for the kids, but my heart.  I'm ready to pour out and love on these 23 beautiful children who so deeply impacted my life.  My biggest hope is that going and being there with them, they would know that I am there for them.  That I journeyed halfway across the world because I just wanted to spend time with them.


I'm reading the book "Love Does" by Bob Goff and this part fit my heart so well.  "I think a father's job, when it's done best, is to get down on both knees, lean over his children's lives, and whisper, 'Where do you want to go?' Every day God invites us on the same kind of adventure. It's not a trip where He sends us a rigid itinerary, He simply invites us. God asks what it is He's made us to love, what it is that captures our attention, what feeds that deep indescribable need of our souls to experience the richness of the world He made. And then, leaning over us, He whispers, 


"Let's go do that together."