Adventure

The definition of the word “adventure,” in the words of a family friend, is “an undertaking with an uncertain outcome.” As I type this I am currently en route to one of my biggest adventures yet: a semester-long internship in Wales.

Why Wales?

As a third-year student at FIRE School of Ministry in Concord, North Carolina, I had the opportunity to choose somewhere in the world to do an internship for my upcoming fall semester. I knew from the beginning of my time in school that I wanted to go overseas for my internship, but as the semester approached I was at a loss when it came to deciding on a location. None of the places I considered going really interested me. India, Cameroon, England… Any one of those options would have been an adventure, but I wanted to know if there was a particular place that God wanted me to go. Last January I felt like the Lord told me that at the end of the spring semester He was going to begin to open up a door of opportunity, which encouraged me to keep looking when none of the places I explored seemed to fit. And He was faithful to that word.

Putting the pieces together

At the end of May I was talking with some friends in Indiana about how my internship search was going, and when I mentioned that England was a possibility they mentioned that if I decided to go to England I should make sure to visit Wales, too. (Wales is part of the United Kingdom, on the same island as Scotland and England.) The more we talked about it, the more the country caught my attention as a place I was interested in visiting.

God began confirming that this was His plan in various ways. The first was that my friend Chloe’s parents (who live in Wales) had visited my small group last March, and when I was listening to them share about their lives I thought that it would be really neat to get to know them better, perhaps in some kind of mentoring relationship. Three days before I talked to my friends in Indiana about Wales for the first time, I had just journaled this desire again. I just hadn’t realized that going to Wales was a possibility with my school, which is why I didn’t pursue it back in March.

Over the last two months God has continued to confirm this by providing the first of my trip finances before most people even knew that I wanted to go, a place for me to store the rest of my belongings rent-free for the semester, the opportunity to visit a place I have wanted to see, Bristol, England (where George Müller had his orphanages in the 1800s), and prompting someone to pay for my plane ticket which was purchased less than two weeks ago!

The internship

I will be interning with Greg and Erin Lee doing a variety of things, including volunteering at an outreach in Swansea August 14-17, serving in the main fellowship of believers and the different branch locations, being involved with children’s ministry, youth ministry, and serving in the mission shop. I will be living with the Lee’s for the remainder of August and then living with my friend Chloe’s parents until I return to the States on December 5. I am looking forward to the many adventures that await me there!