The Team... From front left around table clockwise...

Don, Jim, Sheri, Hugh, Milt, Val, Erin, Scott, Megan

T-minus 10 days and counting…

Way back on February 20th Milt and Val hosted a Belgium Waffle Dessert Social with Valare and Eddy from the Belgium church. The gathering was to pray about and discuss taking a team from Chantilly Bible Church to the church in Diepenbeek, Belgium to serve. The idea was to go and help with painting the outside of the church building and, if God raised up an appropriate team, some more physical work in the church building, as well as building relationships between our two churches.

My oh my, God has been providing since that day. Over the next couple of months our team formed up with nine of us committing to go, praying, planning and discussing what spiritual gifts were all represented that could be used. Our team now is made up of Milt & Val, our gracious guides in this adventure, Hugh, Jim, Don, Erin, Sheri, Scott and I. We love that our team is made of married, single, men, women, younger and… um… life-experienced. God has brought together such a cross-section of us, and yet we laugh together, get excited about working together, share our varied experience and learn from each other. It’s such a picture of the body of Christ coming together for one purpose, just being with these people is a blessing.

As we all discussed our varied gifts, talents and passions, the ideas started flowing. Then Milt and the Diepenbeek church worked together to come up with our schedule for the 11 days including painting the outside of the church, building a new Sunday school room, prayer walks, outreach and hosting an American BBQ for the village. Milt and Don will be preaching Sundays, and members of the team will be teaching in a home group, women’s bible study, and doing some one on one meetings with members of the church.

There are so many wonderful ideas and opportunities it was tough to decide what to include and what not to. What we’ve come up with is an active schedule, pray that God will provide all we need!

So, as I said, we are 10 days from leaving for Belgium. Some really exciting things have been happening, including raising up countless brothers and sisters in Christ to be lifting us up in prayer, and most if not all of our funding as of this posting. God has been generous in the prompting of His people for our needs!

Be praying for our team that we will be organized and complete in our final arrangements to go. We have much to pack and coordinate taking with us! We have family and home details to get covered as we leave.

Pray that we will be wise in all we do in Belgium. That we will serve with the hearts and wisdom of Christ. That we will be bold and generous and sacrificial… but that we will also be wise in taking the breaks that we need to maintain our health and strength.

Most of all pray that the Lord will be honored by all that we do.



Recent Happenings:

Adopted by 1st and 2nd graders at CBC:

Our team has been adopted by the 1st and 2nd grade Sunday School class at CBC. They were very excited to hear that we will be building at Sunday school class while we are there, and decided to gift the collected offering over 4 weeks to our team before we go to take for that classroom. Part of our team went to the class and told them about the work we will be doing and showed them pictures of Belgium, the people, the church building, and the food. It was a lot of fun... you never know what kind of questions you'll get from this age! "How do they cook their steak?" Um... Val?

Our Final Full Team Meeting:

We had our final full team meeting last night at Panera. We got into God's word, prayed, laughed, planned, discussed all those little details like when to meet at the airport and how we were getting there. It's hard to imagine that the next time we all get together we'll be at the airport!

From Left to Right: Val, Erin, Scott, Meg, KatieRose & Lydia (Scott and my girls who came along for the food and dominoes), Don, Jim, Sheri, Hugh and Milt.

Keep us in your prayers!