Randomness

It is five in the morning and I have been up for an hour and cannot sleep so I thought I would put down some random thoughts going through my head while I am up and the house is quiet. :) I never knew my heart could be in two places at once. Although I am very happy to be here and have my babies with us again.... my heart can't help but ache and feel like big peices of it are still over in Africa. At the same time... I feel like my heart is here in Iowa, at Real Life, in the ministries we have going on here. I really love each place with a deep love and feel so incredibly blessed for both. I am very excited about the longing in my heart to be back in Africa. We had a great trip and fell in love when we were over there, but I was wondering if when we came back I would feel like it was a nice trip but not the place for us to move our children and our entire lives.
We were sitting in the Amsterdam airport and all of a sudden I just burst into tears, and it was such an intense feeling of wanting to get the kids and move there that I was overcome. I thank God so much for breathing more and more love into my heart for the people of Africa. It is a feeling I sometimes don't even understand. Wherever He leads us , I want to follow with a joyful heart.

I am so excited to put all of our pictures from the trip and some videos as well into a presentation. We are having the leadership from our church over tomorrow night to tell them all about the trip, and I am SO excited!! :) Brian doesn't want to me to put up all of the pictures yet because he wants the church as a whole to see them together, so if you don't go to our church, sorry, you are just going to have to wait to see those sweet sweet kids faces. :)

Thank you all so very much for your prayers. We for sure felt them on our trip and they really mean so so much to us. We know and have experienced the power of prayer, and it is awesome knowing we have such wonderful prayer warriors over here.

When we were at the house of some of our new friends on the trip, she felt like God had given her a word for us. It was a very powerful word and much appreciated. After she gave us the word she told us something along the lines of how when we stepped off of the plane on U.S. ground we were official missionaries. Tears came to my eyes when she said that. It just sounded good. :) We thank God for this incredible opportunity in our lives and are so humbled by His goodness. Please keep us in your prayers and the process of raising support is going to be starting. This is all new to us, and we are excited to see how God is going to work in all of it!

I will blog more about what we actually did on the trip in the next couple of days. I should probably try to lay down a get some sleep before the kids wake up for the day.