We'll Go... But Where?

We tried to start the application process in November 2010, but our situation was unique. Because Daniel's adoption was so recent, the organization asked that we wait to begin the application process until Daniel had been home with us for a year.

During those months of waiting, while we continued to work on our family adhesion and on debt reduction, we also prayed for God to show us where He wanted us. We felt like we were being given a clear calling to Europe, but we wanted to make sure that was God's will and not just our own personal desires.

After much prayer, we felt a strong attraction (can't think of a better word right now) to a couple of countries in particular: Norway & Germany. However, from all the research we'd recently done, it didn't look like there were any positions available through our organization in either of those countries.

In July of 2010, one year after Daniel joined our family, Zack and I attended a 3-day expo with the organization. We were there with many others interested in going overseas. We tried to stay open-minded about the WHERE in our going process. When it came time to meet with leaders from each geographic area, we had two time slots to fill. We knew we both wanted to go to the European break-out session. We decided to split up for the first session, and then meet up in the Europe meeting.

Shortly before those break-out meetings, we were given a list of all the positions that were currently available. They were split up, primarily by continent. It was a big list. We were told that there might be others as well, and some of those on the list might have already been filled.

We had about 30 minutes to look over and pray about this before break-outs began. We went through the Europe list. We saw a few other interesting positions, but nothing that stood out to us. We continued through the listings for other continents, but didn't see anything that seemed to fit our skillset or the calling we felt we'd heard so clearly.

And then Zack flipped back through the European list once more. And we realized he'd missed the first page.

There, on the top of the sheet, was an open position in Norway.

And thus began our pursuit to get to Norway.

The expo was not a guarantee that we would be hired. Everyone went through interviews there that would determine whether or not the organization wished to pursue you as candidates.

A couple of weeks after getting home, the call came in: we could begin the candidate application process.