Our Journey into Missions (Pt.3). Basic Training
That weekend in Mexico at the orphanage never left my thoughts for very long. When I met Julie I had been sponsoring a little girl in Peru through World Vision. I had never met her and only had a small picture of her and a story. I always wondered what her life was like. Shortly after Julie and I married, my sponsored girl dropped out of the program and I chose not to continue with World Vision. Going to Mexico gave me a glimpse of what it might have been like for her.
As my time in the Air Force was coming to an end, the Vineyard was starting a discipleship school at a ranch in the mountains of California about an hour away from our church. It was to be a communal living experience where we would spend time maintaining the ranch while studying and practicing the lessons of the bible. It was April 1984 when the school started and I was scheduled to be discharged from the USAF in June of '84. But as fate would have it (God's timing?), when I tacked my unused leave (vacation) time onto my military discharge, I was released the day before the opening of the school.
The school was a big transition for Julie and I. We were the only family participating officially in the school. All the others were singles or couples. Julie, myself, and our two girls lived in a 13'x13' room and shared a bathroom with a couple we met at the school, Steve and Tanya. I can't imagine what they thought of us living just the room next door. My family came from a nice home on the military base and downsized to fit into the "room". All of us in the school lived communally. We shared kitchen and living space, worked together during the weekends and off days keeping up the facilities, and studied during the afternoons. Pastors from other churches would come for 2 or 3 day stays and train the 15 or so students at the school during the week. And a couple times a month we would travel down to the greater Los Angeles area to do practical ministry. 1984 was the year of LA Olympics and we were given opportunity to hand out tracks to the attendees, to pray for people on the street, and to assist local churches with their ministries.
On day as we were traveling through Saugus, California after a weekend of ministry to a local Vineyard church, as we were leaving town, we had a defining moment. Saugus was home to "The Largest Swap Meet in California." So being Mothers day and married to an avid thrifter, we decided to stop at the swap meet to see what it had. We parked and went into the grounds for barely a half hour. As we walked out, we couldn't find our truck. It had been stolen. It had nearly all our personal belongings, our clothes, my daughters favorite blankets, a brand new guitar, and many other items. We were devastated and lost in a city we did not know well.
The interesting thing is that I really didn't want to go to the swap meet, but thought Julie did. I knew how much she loved thrift stores and wanted to bless her. She really didn't want to stop this day as we had a long weekend and she just wanted to get home to the school. I didn't respond to my gut feeling of not going, instead I encouraged her. She didn't mention to me that she wanted to go straight home because she wanted me to feel as if I was doing something nice for her. Looking back, we both believe that we were not listening to God's warning. Listen to your gut was the lessen here. We became a little more sensitive to that still small voice in our hearts after that. Not that we always get it right, but we have learned to talk it out now when we have a check in our gut.
The School wound down around in September of '84 and there was to be a month break followed by a month long trip to the Philippines. During the break, we packed the belongings we had left after the truck incident and moved ourselves up to Salem, Oregon where my dad had a business. During that month of settling in to a rented house, neither Julie nor I felt that taking our family to the Philippines was the right thing to do and we did vocalize it. So at the end of the month, we returned to California to express our conviction to our leadership to bow out of the trip. Although disappointed, we were released from the trip and our spiritual basic training came to an end.
Upon returning to Salem, Oregon we started a Vineyard church homegroup with the goal of it becoming a church. It eventually was relocated to Clackamas, Oregon just outside of Portland. I took some additional training and got a job. Julie and I then made a plan. Our long term goal (20+ years) was to end up in missions, but our short term goal (20-years) was to eventually start our own business. By being self employed, we could control our income and hours a little more than if we worked for someone else. Work was a means to an end for us. We wanted to help the local church while building a nest egg that could help us in the future.
From the beginning of our missional thinking, we determined that we weren’t very good at asking others for support. For us we felt it would be much easier to spend a number of years working and raising our family, then investing in income generating investments so that we could have our own support. Our plan was to work for someone else for five years. At the end of those five years we would evaluate whether we could become self employed. If so, we would start our own business. Owning our own business gave us certain tax advantages that we couldn’t get as an employee. Which meant we could earn less or save/invest more for the future.
I won’t get into the specifics of how we generated enough income to do what we do, but I can tell you that we are not rich. We’ve never made a ton of money. We have lived relatively frugally paying cash for most items and not feeling like we had to keep up with others who had bigger homes or nicer cars. Julie and I had always had our eyes on the goal of having time to serve in the church and save for future missions. Ten years after we started our small heating and air conditioning business, a friend of mine asked me to pray about taking a short term “exploratory” trip to Nicaragua with a small team of church members. I was in the middle of a project that had some critical sign offs so that I could begin to sell some construction lots and I didn’t think I could go, but I could pray about it. A year earlier our pastor took a trip to Nicaragua it investigate the possibility to sending teams in the future. My friend Steve was leading the follow up team to our pastors trip. It was late 1999 and our project was dragging on to get County signatures. Then Steve asked me if I would go as he had to make a deposit on plane tickets. I took a step of faith and said yes. If I had to back out, someone else could use my ticket, I reasoned. The next month I received the signatures and I was clear to make my first “real” short term mission trip.
As my time in the Air Force was coming to an end, the Vineyard was starting a discipleship school at a ranch in the mountains of California about an hour away from our church. It was to be a communal living experience where we would spend time maintaining the ranch while studying and practicing the lessons of the bible. It was April 1984 when the school started and I was scheduled to be discharged from the USAF in June of '84. But as fate would have it (God's timing?), when I tacked my unused leave (vacation) time onto my military discharge, I was released the day before the opening of the school.
The school was a big transition for Julie and I. We were the only family participating officially in the school. All the others were singles or couples. Julie, myself, and our two girls lived in a 13'x13' room and shared a bathroom with a couple we met at the school, Steve and Tanya. I can't imagine what they thought of us living just the room next door. My family came from a nice home on the military base and downsized to fit into the "room". All of us in the school lived communally. We shared kitchen and living space, worked together during the weekends and off days keeping up the facilities, and studied during the afternoons. Pastors from other churches would come for 2 or 3 day stays and train the 15 or so students at the school during the week. And a couple times a month we would travel down to the greater Los Angeles area to do practical ministry. 1984 was the year of LA Olympics and we were given opportunity to hand out tracks to the attendees, to pray for people on the street, and to assist local churches with their ministries.
On day as we were traveling through Saugus, California after a weekend of ministry to a local Vineyard church, as we were leaving town, we had a defining moment. Saugus was home to "The Largest Swap Meet in California." So being Mothers day and married to an avid thrifter, we decided to stop at the swap meet to see what it had. We parked and went into the grounds for barely a half hour. As we walked out, we couldn't find our truck. It had been stolen. It had nearly all our personal belongings, our clothes, my daughters favorite blankets, a brand new guitar, and many other items. We were devastated and lost in a city we did not know well.
The interesting thing is that I really didn't want to go to the swap meet, but thought Julie did. I knew how much she loved thrift stores and wanted to bless her. She really didn't want to stop this day as we had a long weekend and she just wanted to get home to the school. I didn't respond to my gut feeling of not going, instead I encouraged her. She didn't mention to me that she wanted to go straight home because she wanted me to feel as if I was doing something nice for her. Looking back, we both believe that we were not listening to God's warning. Listen to your gut was the lessen here. We became a little more sensitive to that still small voice in our hearts after that. Not that we always get it right, but we have learned to talk it out now when we have a check in our gut.
The School wound down around in September of '84 and there was to be a month break followed by a month long trip to the Philippines. During the break, we packed the belongings we had left after the truck incident and moved ourselves up to Salem, Oregon where my dad had a business. During that month of settling in to a rented house, neither Julie nor I felt that taking our family to the Philippines was the right thing to do and we did vocalize it. So at the end of the month, we returned to California to express our conviction to our leadership to bow out of the trip. Although disappointed, we were released from the trip and our spiritual basic training came to an end.
Upon returning to Salem, Oregon we started a Vineyard church homegroup with the goal of it becoming a church. It eventually was relocated to Clackamas, Oregon just outside of Portland. I took some additional training and got a job. Julie and I then made a plan. Our long term goal (20+ years) was to end up in missions, but our short term goal (20-years) was to eventually start our own business. By being self employed, we could control our income and hours a little more than if we worked for someone else. Work was a means to an end for us. We wanted to help the local church while building a nest egg that could help us in the future.
From the beginning of our missional thinking, we determined that we weren’t very good at asking others for support. For us we felt it would be much easier to spend a number of years working and raising our family, then investing in income generating investments so that we could have our own support. Our plan was to work for someone else for five years. At the end of those five years we would evaluate whether we could become self employed. If so, we would start our own business. Owning our own business gave us certain tax advantages that we couldn’t get as an employee. Which meant we could earn less or save/invest more for the future.
I won’t get into the specifics of how we generated enough income to do what we do, but I can tell you that we are not rich. We’ve never made a ton of money. We have lived relatively frugally paying cash for most items and not feeling like we had to keep up with others who had bigger homes or nicer cars. Julie and I had always had our eyes on the goal of having time to serve in the church and save for future missions. Ten years after we started our small heating and air conditioning business, a friend of mine asked me to pray about taking a short term “exploratory” trip to Nicaragua with a small team of church members. I was in the middle of a project that had some critical sign offs so that I could begin to sell some construction lots and I didn’t think I could go, but I could pray about it. A year earlier our pastor took a trip to Nicaragua it investigate the possibility to sending teams in the future. My friend Steve was leading the follow up team to our pastors trip. It was late 1999 and our project was dragging on to get County signatures. Then Steve asked me if I would go as he had to make a deposit on plane tickets. I took a step of faith and said yes. If I had to back out, someone else could use my ticket, I reasoned. The next month I received the signatures and I was clear to make my first “real” short term mission trip.
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