Holding pattern

Our silence on here is a good indicator of how crazy the past couple of weeks have been. Between leaving FPO, juggling luggage and packing acrobatics on a daily basis here and trying to get all the errands run, last minute doctors appointments in and goodbyes said, we feel we’ve had very little down time. We are staying with Josh’s parents and while this extra time with them and all the people we so dearly love here, we agree it would have been much less hard on our hearts to have been able to leave for Kenya straight from Virginia when our training was complete. That’s how it used to work, pre Covid. But now with visa issues largely related to Covid, and the requirement of negative Covid tests prior to international travel, everyone goes home before heading to the field.

After 12 days of mad scrambling, Josh finished loading the van with 22 of our 25 checked bags yesterday afternoon (with just a few more to zip shut and load, including our 14 carryons) around 4:00. We had said some goodbyes, run our last errands and I personally felt, right about the time I saw all the bags in the van, that my heart was ready. That’s a HARD place to get! I felt huge relief that we were finished with the packing part of the process. Things felt complete. I ran upstairs to mess with some stuff and came back down. It was around 5:00. Josh and the boys were sitting in the living room and he told me one of the boys had tested positive for Covid. I thought it was a joke, and asked them multiple times to knock it off. Lyn was standing behind me, so I turned around and asked her to tell me it was a joke. She shook her head to assure me it was not. She hustled over to wrap her arms around me and prayed while I cried. We all sat in shock for about an hour and Josh began the process of trying to reach our travel coordinators in Kenya to get flights cancelled. We worked around every possible scenario to try to get us there anyway, but there’s just no way around it. We can’t go right now. Flights have been cancelled, our kiddo gets retested today at 11:30 (our flight departure time…) and we are praying HARD that this first test was false positive.

Please pray with us. We are discouraged, but have not lost heart. We FULLY trust in the Lord’s sovereignty in this. He’s guided us through every single part of this process, in his providential way, and this is no exception. We may never know the purpose for this delay in timing, but we don’t need to know. There’s simply nothing to be done but to lean into Christ and trust. He’s certainly given us ample opportunity for that throughout the entirety of this now 2 1/2 year process. It’s been one delay, one closed “not yet” door after another, but we will press on, eagerly awaiting the day we can join our Tanzania team, and that will be in His timing, not ours.