Our Family Mission

By Christie Pettus

What would compel our young family of four to step way outside of our comfort zone and board a plane to Ecuador to spend a week hanging out with a group of orphans? God’s voice. This is our story about hearing God’s call, pushing aside fear to listen, and allowing an unplanned experience to change our family forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781623094003

Book preview

you!

Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do – James 2:18

Chapter 1

I think we should go on a mission trip together as a family.

OK

One simple ok changed everything. This was my husband Ryan’s response to a statement I casually made. It was uttered assuming I would be told that this was just one of my crazy ideas, and we should no longer speak of it. His two letter response to my out-of-left-field-idea started a series of events that led the two of us along with our children, Ethan and McKenzie, to Casa de Fe, an orphanage in Shell, Ecuador.

I was really counting on my husband to say no. He is the rational one. I come to him with crazy ideas, and he refines those ideas to a more realistic vision. I expected a discussion on the amount of money it would take for all of us to get there. He was supposed to talk about how we had never been on a mission trip, or out of the country for that matter, so it would be really irresponsible to take our children into such unfamiliar circumstances. He addressed none of those perfectly normal concerns that were swirling around in my head. It was my idea, so I could not be the one to bring them up. I had impulsively made a statement and there was no turning back.

OK meant we were going to some third world country with our kids. Who does that? Certainly, not people like us. That is what missionaries do. We are just common, everyday believers trying to raise our children in a Godly home- and many times falling short in that endeavor. We are active members of our church, but we are not pastors. There was no way that God was actually calling us to take this trip. This would be the worst recruiting job in history. It would be like hiring plumbers to fix a leaky roof, and in my experience, God is much smarter than that.

But call He did, and for some crazy reason we said yes. To this day, I am not sure why. I look back now, and it seems so out of character for where we were as a family at that time in our lives. There were no deep rooted longings to help orphans. I will admit that I spent very little time thinking about orphanages and the people who ran them. I was not heartless. I could be touched by a story of an unwanted child or pictures of unlivable circumstances, but I had never really felt a call to action in a larger way than maybe writing a check or two here and there. God is funny like that. He can take something so completely off of your radar and, at just the right time, place a burden on your heart that you cannot shake.

I actually blame a dear friend of ours who was the assistant pastor of our church at the time and is now the lead pastor at a church plant in Melbourne, Fl. He took it upon himself, for no good reason, one Sunday morning to pray that Ryan and I would go on a mission trip. I am pretty sure I may have laughed a little when he prayed those words and wondered if he was as smart as I thought he was. At the time, those seemed like wasted prayers. Ryan and I took trips to Vegas for our anniversary and spent hours by the pool of whatever resort sounded fun at the moment when we had the time and money. Mission trips were not part of the annual vacation budget. I will pause for a moment in this story to put some of the people in my life on notice. I am praying that same prayer he prayed for us over you. You have been warned.

Back to saying yes. We did not just say yes to any trip. This was the trip that taught me that people like us do go on mission trips, and God could really care less whether or not we think we are qualified. It was the trip where I learned that I do not only have a responsibility as an individual believer to hear God’s call and live into it, but as a parent, it is my job to teach my children that they also have a calling. It was where I began to learn that God wanted me to take these revelations and teach them to others like me who think they are not called. Matthew 28:19 does not just apply to the pastors and missionaries of the world. It applies to all of us. We just have to fine tune the details of that calling in our own lives.

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

It applies to us the minute we accept Jesus Christ as our savior. I thought I was living that passage. I wrongly assumed that by just being a Christian, I was making disciples. As if Christianity could be obtained by some weird form of osmosis. Surely, just by saying I attended church, others would decide to do so as well. I did not really have to invite them, since it would just be implied that they could come with us any time they desired. It was a watered down form of Christianity, and I was the poster child. Granted, it worked sometimes. I had invited people to church over