Why Travel?

I was given the gift of hearing two stories of parents going through one of the most trying times imaginable, the illness of a child. To most parents it would be the worst possible thing to have to go through. The first story was of a mother who has a little girl with Autism and many other serious health issues and the other is a family with a child named Elliot who was never supposed to live one day but lived 99 days. It is amazing to see how both families persevered through life and trusted that God would lead them through it.
There was no choice in either of these family’s lives, but to hope, pray and trust that God is in control and has a plan.
Once again it is a story that helps me to know that our choice is to spend time as a family. We don’t know how long we have on this earth. We have to do what we can to make memories and to do the best we can for ach other.
We were born with the traveling adventure in our blood. This is something, which is hard to explain – it’s just there. It’s something that happens to us. Maybe it’s even who we are. It’s not entirely rational or logical or explainable. It just is.


We have always been intentional about our own lives and our kid’s upbringing. We have listened to people talk about how great it would be to give their kids the education of living in another culture, but no one seems to actually carry through the dream (unless they are missionaries). We agree that the experience of living somewhere different, of living a life other than middle class suburbia is a great idea – so we are just going to do it! We want to show our kids something other, other than the “norm”. It feels like a gift we can and want to give them.
In many ways “the trip” will not be too different to our living here. We will just be our family doing what our family does! Only we’ll be in different locations. Instead of inspiring our kids through books, we will be living the story. Instead of a summer camping holiday, they’ll spend winter swimming in the ocean and hiking through the jungle. Instead of not buying toys here, we’ll not buy souvenirs there. We’re hoping to have the opportunity to serve at an orphanage on our travels. We will go and “be us”. We don’t think we will change the world, but we do hope to make a little bit of difference to people we meet along the way.
We love learning and learning takes many forms
. We love history. We can’t wait to walk on old cobbled streets, climb turrets of castles. We love language. It’s exciting to engage, to communicate, and to cross barriers, to understand. We have had fun learning how to do that in the past.

We love creation. Jungle and beach walks, sunsets, collecting things, shells, rocks, discovering geckos and bugs, snorkeling, fishing and scuba diving. We are learning to see God in all these things.

We want to bring to our kids’ attention the needs of the world. Of course we don’t need to look past our own community to find people we can serve, and our kids do take part with us in meeting the needs we come across. But there is also a bigger picture. And while you can see some of that bigger picture on a television screen, there is something about smelling the smells, seeing the sights, hearing the noises and actually interacting with real people that we hope will plant seeds in our kid’s lives that will grow with them and help lead them to a life-purpose outside of themselves. Although we talk about the conditions most people live in today, most kids do not understand. They do not understand *hunger* or *orphan* or *naked* or *homeless* or *war*. We cannot tell our kids what to do with their lives, but we can choose what we show them and pray that they will be even more grateful for the blessings they have and be moved to share with others, to live their lives for others.
Instilling gratitude in our kids is one of the jobs we have always tried to be aware of. We want them to be grateful for the country that we live in and the friends and family that we love. We also want them to be aware that there are many other people who do not know the blessing of freedom and peace.
Part of me is scared, that what we are teaching them will one day make it easier for them to move far away from us and I won’t see them often. But the other part knows that spending this time with them will also bring us closer as a family. Hope, trust and faith, these are the things that I continue to learn more about.

This Christmas we will be traveling to Honduras. We will be visiting an orphanage where we will learn another hard truth. The truth about God's little ones that are homeless and without a parent to take care of them. I know it will be hard to see in real. To see what we see on t.v. and I know we will once again fall in love with another culture of people and another country.