Our trip to Tennessee

Our family drove down to Elizabethton, TN on March 6th to share in our other "home" church and to get together with friends that we hadn’t seen in a few years.  Oak Street Baptist Church was the church we attended for 4 years while we lived down there for Dan to attend Moody Aviation.  We hadn’t really had a chance to reconnect with the church since we had moved away in 2005 to begin our training with New Tribes.

It was so refreshing to see so many friends and to drive around the town that we had lived in for most of our married life.  We also had the chance to see Dan’s parents again.  They ended up helping us out alot during our visit.  Besides being very busy getting together with people and sharing in the church service, our son caught some bad stomach virus about half way through our trip.  We ended up taking him to the emergency room twice in the middle of the night.  That’s where we were so thankful that Dan’s parents where nearby and could watch Anna for us.  We left to come home a day early so we could get Benjamin back into his own crib and familiar surroundings.  Once we were back home again, we took him into the ER two more times.  He was getting dehydrated and was extremely lethargic and weak and was losing weight.  They finally admitted him and got an IV in him.  We did not want him to be in the hospital, but our son was not getting better and it had been almost a week.  When they took out the IV the next morning, he was like a new baby.  He was smiling again, talking again, eating again.  We don’t know for sure what he had, but we are so thankful that he is feeling better again.  And we are amazed that Anna never caught it- especially since she would take Ben’s nookie out of his mouth and suck on it! 

We don’t understand why Ben had to go through this and why it happened during our trip.  We felt like it was deja vu from our trip to Arizona in November.  We do know that the Lord was using it to teach us- to depend on Him, to trust Him, to exercise our faith in Him.  We spent a lot of time praying!!   We are realizing more and more that once we get to Bolivia life is going to be hard- it’s not going to be an easy adjustment.  We are not promised an easy life, but we are promised that He will be with us and will comfort us when we cry out to Him.  And we are really starting to understand that our babies are in the Lord’s care and that He loves them even more than we can fathom.  A friend of ours gave us a book right before we left for TN called "The Power of a Praying Parent".  We started reading it in the van on the way down and were reminded that our children are truly gifts from God and the best thing we could do for them was to pray.  Boy, did we pray for our babies this past week!