California Story: The Beginning

The picture on the right is all of us standing on the state that we are from.
In the left, we're all in California. :)

California. Sometimes God has plans that exceed our wildest dreams!

I grew up on missionary stories—giant tarantulas in glass jars, pictures of small huts in jungle clearings, exclamations of God’s sustaining grace in all situations. Missionaries ate around our dinner table and spent the night. I saved up my “Jesus money” (tithe :)) for the offering at our annual missions conference that would go to help a missionary’s special project, and in high school I started helping support missionaries financially.

When I was little, I wanted to marry a pastor and move to an exotic mission field. :) And for as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to go on a missions trip.

My youth group went to Brazil the year before I graduated high school, but God closed the door on that opportunity for me. Maybe I can go when I’m in college… But the reality of college for me saving money for 2 years and attending a community college part time while working part time. Reality was 40-hour work weeks during summer breaks.

And then another reality hit me the Spring of my junior year: the summer after I graduated might be different. Perhaps I would have a loan to pay off…but if I didn’t have another school semester looming in front of me, the time crunch wouldn’t be there.

So I prayed. And I put the BJU summer missions teams link in my favorites and visited it often, reading the weekly updates—and praying I would be them next summer.

School began again—my senior year! It was a tough semester, but God’s grace sustained me, and when the “Mission Team Organizational Meetings” took place in October, I was there. We could choose three teams to visit and get information about. I went to Australia first, because I was sure that was where God was taking me. My one criteria was English-speaking, so I didn’t even bother to investigate anything overseas except for Australia. The second meeting I chose to attend was Alaska’s, mainly because the Alaska team goes out every year and so I knew about it even though camp work wasn’t high on my list of interests. I could attend a third meeting that night, and looking through my list of options—and not ready to go back to the dorm and open the books—I choose California. A meeting about California would at least be interesting, right?

I walked back to my dorm with doubt forming about Australia—were some of the things they mentioned what I really had in mind?—and with interest forming about California.

Each team had preliminary meetings during the next few weeks. The California team’s meetings were the only ones I had open availability too; for Australia’s I would have had to find a sub at work (not an easy task). It’s interesting to see how God planned even that out! As I attending those meetings, my interest in California and church planting grew. About a month later, I knew: I was a part of the team going to California! But I didn't know this was only the beginning of what God was planning to do...