.:Encouragement from God :.

.:Encouragement from God :.
One of the issues Andrea and I have asked people to pray about is the student loan debt that we have. The debt is mostly from Andrea's degrees (we have been able to pay for my tuition through the military - they paid for 100% of my tuition while I was in and the G.I. Bill is paying for me to go to seminary). The main problem with this is that Andrea and I have been feeling more and more that God is calling us into international missions. If we are being called to international missions then we would seek to be selected by the International Mission Board (IMB) just before I finish my degree here in Louisville. The IMB has a policy that the people they select should not have large amounts of debt (for obvious reasons). This has been a big discouragement for us recently (trying to think about how we would work at paying this off when we are struggling to pay our bills right now).

Anyway, I said all of that to tell you about this encouragement that we got a couple of weeks ago. On Monday I had asked Billy to pray for us in this situation (along with others) and pray that we would stay encouraged in spite of the seemingly impossible mountain in front of us. Well, on Tuesday night, in my Missiology class, my professor just happened to mention (as if out of the blue) that he had a student at a previous seminary that felt a call to international missions yet had over $50,000 of student loan debt. He said when he checked up on the guy a couple of years later he learned that God had gotten rid of the student loan debt and that the student was now serving on the mission field in Nicaragua!

God used that story to really encourage Andrea and me to keep trusting Him - even when the road ahead appears to be blocked. We know that God is able to do the impossible; we've already seen it done by Him just getting us to where we are today.

Please continue to pray for us to stay encouraged and to remember that Jesus told us that "if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you." (Matt 17:20)

Thanks again for your prayers!
ChadB