the Lovely Life: The Call

We got "The Call" to go to missions!!

No, really. The phone actually rang, and there was a real person on the other end asking us to serve as missionaries with New Tribes Mission Aviation in Papua New Guinea.

So what does this mean?

Sometime this month, Josh and I will get on a plane and fly to McNeil, Arizona for a week in order to do the evaluation of flight and preparedness. If all goes well there, we will officially be Associates of NTM [New Tribes Mission].

Then, we'll begin raising support, going through our belongings to decide what is going to PNG with us and what is staying in Florida {selling, storing, gifting...}

Once the school year ends, we'll go back to Arizona, this time for two months of training.

After that, we have to renew Josh's green card, and sometime before October 2013, Josh and I will be in Papua New Guinea, serving our Lord as missionaries.

New Tribes Mission is an international, non-denomination mission organization with an awesome goal, one that Josh and I are very excited about: to build mature, self-supporting churches in tribal areas of the world that have never heard the Gospel before. They do this by putting missionaries out among the tribal people, where they then learn the language and culture of the people, who often don't have a written language at all [Papua New Guinea has over 880 different languages!]. The missionaries develop a written language for the people, and then teach them how to read and write in their own language. Then, the Bible is translated into their heart language. The end goal is to plant a church in the tribe; churches that will stand with its own elders to then reach others with the Gospel. This exciting ministry would not be able to function without a large support team on the field, which includes pilots [to transport missionaries and cargo in and out of the villages] and teachers [to teach the missionary kids]. To learn more about New Tribes Mission, please visit their site.