Three Minute Thoughts: Trust

Three Minute Thoughts is a new series of blog posts that I (Sarah) hope will challenge me to write more frequently. It was inspired by others bloggers who do Five Minute Fridays–but if I gave myself five minutes, they would probably turn into fifteen! I hope you are encouraged as I continue to verbally process through life.

 

At the core of fundraising is the issue of trust: trusting God to use other people to sustain our finances and lift us up in prayer for the next two years. This has been hugely challenging to my faith as I consider the great unknowns of the next few months (and beyond). But recently, lessons in trusting God have been coming from another source entirely: my aching head. For the past week and a half, I’ve been plagued by ongoing headaches of varying types, sometimes quite severe, and if you know anything about me, you know that I’ve immediately jumped to conclusions such as, oh, brain tumors, aneurysms, strokes. Which triggers my anxiety, which in turn goads my heartburn, which I of course assume is a heart attack… and on and on. I know as I write this that I can be the lamest of hypochondriacs (I really do need another outlet for my drama), but here you have a glimpse into the sad workings of my inner thoughts when I am not trusting God with my health and my life. I know I am not alone in this. It’s not where I want to be, but the frustrating thing is that I have not known how to repent from it, which literally means to turn away from it, to do a 180 and walk the opposite direction. I want to do that, but how can I get there?

These ongoing headaches (don’t worry, they’ve been improving) have not allowed me to ignore my trust issues with God. While with fundraising I can focus on other things and distract myself from the fear and vulnerability of it all, these headaches have given me minute-by-minute opportunities to either 1) worry, or 2) pray to God and ask for his help and peace. And so in the small moments of feeling pain in the middle of the night, I cry out to God, “Oh Lord, help me to trust you in all things. In this moment, help me to trust you with my health. You’ve given me this life on earth, and one day you’ll take it away. I am worried because I don’t trust you to be sovereign over this situation. Please help me to do what feels impossible: to turn away from my worry, and to instead trust you.” And what felt impossible a week ago is now, day by day, minute by minute, becoming real.

I am grateful that God is our refuge and our help. When we’re discouraged and shackled by even the smallest of things, he uses those moments beautifully, bringing us encouragement and freedom.

“Lift your eyes and look to the heavens: who created all these? He who brings out the starry host one by one, and calls them each by name. Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.” Isaiah 40:26

A home away from home…literally.

So what is this BFA place, anyway?

How convenient that you asked! 🙂

BFA is short for Black Forest Academy. It’s a grade 5-12 school located in the Black Forest region of Germany, a short drive away from both France and Switzerland. BFA has been around since 1956, serving the children of international Christian workers and business families whose children do not have other viable educational opportunities. Around 350 students attend BFA, with over 200 in the high school alone. About 50% of BFA’s high schoolers are boarding students; these students represent over 50 different countries! How amazing is that?! The BFA boarding program is a really special place, a home away from home for a remarkably diverse, yet incredibly unified, group of high school students.

So why do students choose to attend BFA? As mentioned before, many students at BFA don’t have other good options in the countries where there parents are serving. I’ll use myself as an example: in 10th grade, my parents lived in Central Asia. Our local international school only offered classes through 9th grade. So when I entered 10th grade, the only options available to my family were to 1) homeschool me, 2) send me to live with extended family in the States, 3) leave the field entirely, or 4) send me to BFA. After a lot of conversations (and many tears on my mom’s part), we chose BFA. It was the right choice for me. I made so many friends and was able to take part in clubs, sports, Student Council, and Advanced Placement classes. For me, BFA was a safe place to have a “normal” high school life, form lifelong friendships, grow deeper in my faith, and experience a deep sense of belonging as I lived alongside other Third Culture Kids. (Oooh, another strange term. That’s a post for another day!)

Living apart from one’s parents is never really ideal. But for hundreds of families every year, BFA is a home away from home for their high school-aged children. Keane and I are so excited to join the staff team that makes it possible for these students to live and learn in a safe, fun, Christ-centered environment, and indirectly support Christian workers around the world.

It Takes Two to Tango: Raising Support to Go Overseas [Updated!]

A number of people have been asking us how they can financially support us over the next two years. This is a wonderfully encouraging question, because you know and we know that the next two years at Black Forest Academy will be dependent on the monetary gifts of brothers and sisters. We are really hoping this blog can primarily be a place of sharing about what God is doing in and around us, educating people about Missionary Kids and the experience of growing up overseas, and staying connected with lots of people while we’re living on a different continent. But right now, we’re in support-raising season, and so here we are, feeling a little self-conscious and hesitant as we write about different types of support, including that most awkwardly, emotionally triggering of things, money.

But first, for the non-triggering thing–PRAYER! I would really appreciate your prayers as we start making this big transition. Many of you know that I grew up overseas, living in four different countries within a ten-year time span. Since 2003, I’ve been putting down roots in the Chicagoland area, and I have a feeling that moving overseas as an adult is going to be a lot harder than moving overseas as a kid. The goodbyes, the luggage restrictions, the cultural shifts, the vaccinations. As excited and happy as I am about working at Black Forest Academy, as a missionary kid, I can’t help but have all these other thoughts floating around in my head. I’m a worrier, and whether you’re also a worrier or you’ve got some worriers in your life, you know I need prayer. 🙂 I want to honor God with how I live the next moment, the next day, the next two years.

We also want the next five months specifically to bring glory to God. Whether we’re sharing about BFA, packing our suitcases, or wrapping things up at work, we want God to be honored in our interactions with each other, with those around us, and in our correspondence with staff at BFA and at TeachBeyond. Please pray that the Holy Spirit would convict us of sin, that we would regularly spend time in prayer and in the Word, that we would make wise financial and logistical decisions, and that we would be able to prioritize our time in a way that strengthens our marriage, develops our friendships, and prepares us for BFA.

As for financial support, it is an interesting thing to move to a country with a stronger currency than the dollar! This means that we have to raise much more money to live in Germany than we currently need to live comfortably in Chicago. TeachBeyond has communicated with us that we need to raise roughly $4700 in monthly support, and an additional $8000 in start-up costs. That $8000 will be used to buy plane tickets, a car, and to furnish our German apartment. (Fun fact: Did you know that apartments, or flats, in Germany come completely UN-furnished? You bring your own oven, refrigerator, sometimes even your own cabinets! Thus the $8000 in start-up costs…)

If you would like to give monthly or make a one-time donation, please visit give.teachbeyond.org. The site will walk you through the options of mailing checks, using PayPal or credit cards, or making electronic transfers. If you choose to send a check, please don’t put our names on the memo line; instead, please write Project # 40307.

If you have any questions about anything I’ve shared here, please don’t hesitate to comment or send us an email at keaneandsarah@gmail.com. It is a staggeringly sobering thing to ask people to donate from their hard-earned money, and we want to be as transparent as possible in how these funds will be spent.

Thank you for all the encouraging comments, messages, and emails we have received over the last week. We are so grateful for such a community of people.

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We’ve gotten some great questions about when electronic donations begin if you use the online sign-up option. Here’s the answer! If you choose the EFT (which goes directly from a bank account to TeachBeyond), you can clearly indicate when you want the donations to begin. If you choose to donate monthly via credit card or PayPal, the withdrawals begin immediately; since we don’t leave until August, anything given before August goes automatically into our “Start-Up Fund” account, which is used to pay for the initial costs of moving to Germany, such as plane tickets and buying a car.

Keep your questions coming!

Now you can subscribe!

About two hours after we sent out our initial announcement, we realized we hadn’t added any subscription features to our blog. Oops!! My awesome techie husband fixed that right away. There are now subscription options on the righthand side of our blog. You can sign up for our blog posts, and right under that, you can sign up for our email newsletters, which will come out on a monthly basis. So thankful for the ability to stay connected with people from halfway around the world…

Do you have a blog? Please let us know; we want to keep up with your news, too!