The excuses that were...

So as I said, I had a lot of reasons to not take this trip. All of these excuses I saw as legitimate, and to tell you the truth, I still see them as good reasons to not go, except that I am running out of excuses that have not gone away. The downfall of my "out" started years ago, but I have just started seeing things happen right before my eyes in the past two years.
At that time, we had our house, an apartment building that was a challenge to run to say the least, my job, and two daughters, one just born. In the middle of this, I was given the opportunity to join a group of guys going to Honduras on a mission trip. I had, until this trip, had little interest in traveling abroad. I was excited to go, primarily because I had heard the stories of the previous trips, and it sounded like a great challenge and a lot of fun. So Charli and I agreed that I would go on the trip. I still had my doubts, with little time and no extra money laying around to do this. But all of that came together. I had few issues with the apartment building while preparing, and all of the funds needed to accomplish this came through. On top of that, the trip was an entire week spent on a high like I have rarely felt, seeing all of my fears surrounding the trip fade away as I walked it out. I was beginning to see what was possible when I committed myself to God. Little did I know that this trip was the beginning of the end of my excuses about taking a larger trip as a family.
I still had my reasons to not take a bigger trip. But in the fall of that year I received a call from a real estate agent concerning our apartment building. He had a buyer looking for property in the area. Funny thing is, I did not even have the building on the market. Even better, when the property went into contract, I realized that the buyer was a couple of guys who had backed out of buying the same building a couple of years earlier, and we went into contract for the exact same price as the earlier contract (the prior time was before the fall of the real estate market in 2008). One down...
Without the apartment building we saw the ability to look into selling our house, we had wanted to downsize our house, and move to another part of town. Charli mentioned again that she wanted to do the mission trip as a family. We decided to put the house on the market in a rush since the home buyer stimulus was going away soon and we had little hope of selling without that to bring out buyers. But the end of the stimulus came and went, without a buyer for our house. We were disappointed, but decided to just stop trying so hard to keep the house in perfect shape, and leave it on the market. Charli had also heard about Crossroads DTS, a mission training for families, and wanted me to look at it with her. I still had several good reasons not to go yet but agreed to take a look. I really liked what I saw and was getting excited, and decided to be so bold as to tell Charli that I was interested, and made a promise to her and to God that if I could unload a couple of responsibilities I was willing to go. The next day we received a contract to buy our house.
With the house out of the way we were almost there. We found homes for our cats and dog, my job provided just enough time when combining vacation and leave, and my dad worked out a deal for us to have an apartment to stay in until we leave, rent free. Needless to say I had run out of tangible reasons to not go, and was getting more excited that the opportunity was there. For a long time, I had wanted to make this happen, but as I often see, God provided in a way that I could not have ever imagined.

Getting started...

So we have decided to take a step, a huge step in our walk of faith. To take a trip that, not so long ago, I would have considered to be crazy, even irresponsible. My place at that time seemed to be as a worker, a person who goes out and does my job to support my family. A trip like this would be a risk to our stability, our safety, our ability to make ends meet. I had a lot of pride about always being able to take care of things, not count on anyone else, I was going to make it on my own. Needless to say, my feelings about this have changed, but not because I decided to make the change, I have seen event after event happen in my life that have given me reason to trust that as long as my plans are focused on seeking God with all of my heart, we will be taken care of.
The thought of this trip was not my own, Charli has has this on her heart as long as I have known her. She has been persistent in holding on to her dream. I have had many reasons to believe that this was not the path that we should be taking. There were the couple peices of real estate that I was not able to just leave behind, my job that I needed to be at, and my fear of risking the life that we had built, even worse, risking anything when it came to my kids. All of those excuses have slowly began to disappear starting a couple of years ago. I will get into the details of our story in future posts, but for now all that needs to be said is that the excuses have been removed from our lives.
So we will be leaving for Colorado in April. And when I start to have doubts about what we are doing, all I have to do is look back to see how crazy I might be to not take this trip. I hope that you follow along with us to hear about all of the great things that brought this together, and hear what happens in the future. I have heard it several times from several people, "wait until you see what God has planned next".
As I go along, I am adding stories as they happened in the past, just to tell the story of how we got here, so the dates on the posts are not when they happened at this point.