Welcome to Outreach

It’s amazing what can happen in such a short amount of time. These last eleven weeks on the ranch have proven to be a combination of some of the most wonderful and yet challenging moments we’ve ever experienced as a family. I look around at the other families around the camp and know I am not alone.

We have had the opportunity of a lifetime to come away and build our faith as a family. Barry and I have experienced a deeper level of healing in our marriage, our kids are experiencing God in ways they never have before and we are being challenged to reflect on our own hearts and learn to be more gracious and forgiving. So here we are, almost half way through our DTS getting ready to embark on the second half of this great adventure: outreach.

The last week of the school we had guest speakers come on share about the Holy Spirit. Their message brought a fresh perspective of the Holy Spirit’s role in our lives and within the trinity. The teaching was wonderful and so appreciated yet, to be honest, our minds were elsewhere. The mental exhaustion of sitting in class, day after day, had set in. Not only that, we were now preparing to pack up our cabins in prepartion for outreach. The ranch had planned a family camp with a local church in town and they would be staying in all of our cabins while we were away. This meant we not only needed to pack for our outreach, but also pack up our entire cabin, move the contents we would leave behind up to the foundations school and clean it as well. With class, trying to connect with everyone before we all left and packing, whew, it was a lot.

During our Monday morning class my heart had drifted to Menno and Janine, the amazing couple from the Netherlands. There was still a chance they could come back in time for outreach but it would have to be soon. (They had returned home only two weeks prior after discovering Menno’s mom was diagnosed with cancer. It was then we had said our goodbyes not knowing if they would return). There absence had definitely been noticed over the last couple of weeks.

Our daughter Freya had had a dream about 7 days prior. In her dream she saw Menno, Janine and their two little girls arriving by the yurt while she stood at the top of the hill nearby. We later learned that two other teenagers on our Mexico team had also had dreams of them returning. This gave our team so much hope but we still didn’t know what the outcome would be.

So that Monday afternoon, we went to class and then headed back to our cabins to get ready for work duty and homeschool. It was then that I was standing near our cabin when I heard Menno’s name called and saw him exiting a car parked exactly where Freya had seen them in her dream. I took off running with tears of joy rising up. They were back! People hurried to greet them and wrapped them. They were soon overcome with people laughing and crying. It was such a beautiful moment.

The days that followed came and went quickly and before we knew it it was Friday. We spent the entire day packing up the rest of our home and cleaning as best we could. The plan would be to leave the following morning at 2:45 in hopes to make it to Tijuana close to 6/ 6:30. Packing took longer than we thought and it wasn’t until almost 9 pm before we were done. Many of the older kids spent their last hours running in the field star gazing, laughing and soaking up every moment.

Two forty-five came all too soon and we were up with a start filling the two vans as quickly as we could. An early morning ride down a 9-mile bumpy road is maybe not the best way to wake up but it sure does the job! By 6:30 we arrived at the airport to see a massive line up had already begun. The line up seemed to move slowly but after 40 minutes we finally made it through. We arrived at the gate to find that it was delayed but no matter. We had made it!

The flight was a short 2.5 hours to the city of Durango, Mexico. Upon arriving we met some of the amazing YWAM team, Pricillia, who is from Durango and Gwendelyn, who is orginally from the US. We shoved all of our luggage, plus 18 people, into two vehicles and headed back to where we would be staying for the next two weeks. Another page in our adventure was finally beginning!