In just five days the five members of my family will be leaving on a jet plane for England. We plan to live at The King’s Lodge, a YWAM base, for about six months. We will be serving that base as staff members, preparing for multiple mission trips during this summer. We think it is likely that our family will be going to the Philipppines during the summer, and we hope to help lead a number of other families to do the same. We did a similar thing this past year and began our journey into world missions in the summer of 2006, when we volunteered at the YWAM base in Kona, Hawaii.
Helping other families participate in global missions, long- or short-term is one of the goals of our ministry, FJ Ministries. 
It means a lot of time packing and unpacking, changing of schools, time away from family, a different standard of living, missing baseball season, dramatic weather and cultural changes, and the like… So, why do we do this???? Let me tell you part of our story….
Less than two years ago we were doing the American dream. I worked as an attorney for a large corporation (and had been for about 10 years), my wife worked for the public schools as an occupational therapist, we had all our grandparents within 20 miles, and our kids were playing soccer and T-ball. We looked great on the outside – large, beautiful home, two newer cars, stylish clothes (at least I thought so), and we went to a nice, big church where we taught and served.
Unfortunately, like many things in America, we were more style than substance. We had a surface glitter, but underneath we were dry, brittle and fearful. We were quite possibly headed for the reality for most American families: a broken home, shattered dreams, and tattered lives. I say most American families because even though the divorce rate is some where between 40 and 50 percent, even more marriages that don’t end in divorce are held together only in appearances, not in the heart.
Praise be to the God of the universe, who loved us enough to keep calling after us. He kept urging us to follow our hearts into missions. That made little sense to us, given our “success” and given the fact we had three young children. Most mission work we knew was designed for adults and for those trained in seminary, medicine, science, or construction. We also had grandparents eager to spend time with our kids and didn’t see how we could step back and spend more time getting seminary degrees and the like.
Little did we realize that God’s infinite imagination always makes a way to do what He plans. God gave us a reality check about the condition of our hearts and showed me a vision. Yes, a vision. I was Jonah, about to be thrown overboard. But he had a whale of a plan for us if we would only trust Him.
There were definitely some moments where I thought the waves looked better than the whale, but, praise God, I was delivered from my senses into His. Now, some 19 months later, God has shown us a great many thiings and helped us fall more deeply in love with Him.
We know that there are many people out there just like us, looking for something more than what the false promises of the world have delivered. So, we formed FJ Ministries to help show others how they really can fit into global missions no matter their place in this world or station in life, participating by facilitating, going, short- or long-term, giving, praying and more. And, we have learned the truth of the saying that a family who prays togther stays together. Additionally, we have learned that a family who rests in God’s plans for them will be blessed by God’s plans for them.
We hope that more and more families will jump off the merry go round of style over substance and find God’s purpose for their lives, not sacrificing their hopes and dreams to the worship of money and success but offering their bodies as living sacrifices to the only God who can truly save and is worthy of worship.
Please keep us in your prayers.
