The RV

And we are starting off 2017 with a huge answer to prayer!

God has provided an RV for us to use while traveling on our support raising journey!

From Joanna:

As Mark and I were looking toward what it would take to travel the country with our family one of the things we talked about was traveling in an RV.

A few things that we knew:

1. We would be on the road for over 6 months

2. We would move to homeschooling our girls

3. Our girls work best when they are on some sort of a routine schedule (bedtime, nap time, etc)

4. Amidst all the traveling it was important for us to keep our family culture as much as possible

At first we were kind of just joking about how much fun it would be but the more we thought about it the more it became something that we really thought would work well for our family.

One morning after doing my quiet time I was sitting reading The God Ask by Steve Shadrach and read this:

After a long and brutal battle, the great French general, Napoleon, had finally conquered a highly prized Mediterranean island. He and his generals were sitting and drinking, savoring the victory, when a young officer came up and approached Napoleon. When the general asked the man what he wanted, he looked straight at Napoleon and said, “Give me this island!” All the generals began to laugh and mock the young man, until that is, Napoleon asked one of them for a pen and paper. To their utter amazement, he wrote out a deed to the island, signed it, and handed it to the bold, but lowly soldier. “How could you do that?” one of his generals asked, “What made him worthy to receive this great island?” “I gave him this island,” Napoleon replied, “because he honored me by the magnitude of his request.”

The paragraph before that one had talked about how we can’t “out ask” God for anything. He owns it all. Do I trust Him enough to ask big and could I “honor Him with the magnitude of my request” I stopped right then, didn’t even finish that chapter, pulled out my journal and wrote a prayer to the Lord asking for an RV. I wrote out my prayer of why I thought an RV would work for us, how it would help keep our family together during this time of traveling, not because we don’t want to be in host homes, but because we know that Satan can attack our family and doing what we can to keep our family united was important.

As I got to the end of my prayer I wrote “So Lord, I pray that someone would let us borrow an RV, or give us one, or that we would find one for…” and then I paused… dare I put a price on it? If I put a price on it and everything we look at is over that price is it really an answer to prayer? And then I remembered who I serve, so I choose to honor Him with the magnitude of my request, “that we would find one for $15,000”. Now, keep in mind that we had been doing some research already at this point and we knew that to find a used size C (one of the smaller ones) would probably cost us about $30,000, so I was really going out on a limb here.

That day when Mark came home for lunch I said “surprise! I put a price on the RV!” I shared with him what I had been reading and how I was challenged to “ask big” so I did. Later that same day, a little bit before 2:00, I got a text from Mark that said “they’re asking $15,000 but will sell it for $10,000 to family or someone in ministry”!!!! And the story doesn’t end there! Later that week as we were sharing that huge answer to prayer with someone, they offered to buy the RV and give it to us for the time that we needed it! So, not only did God answer one of my prayers, He answered all three! And each one in such a specific way – even going above and beyond what I had asked.

This answer to prayer was such a confirmation to us that we are on the right track. Praise the Lord!

#prayer #RoadTrip #RV