The Beginning

Isaiah 42:12 says "Let them give glory to the Lord, and declare His praise in the coastlands" and in the Message it states, "Make God's glory resound; echo His praises from coast to coast".  As a family, our desire has always been to glorify God in our home.  Please understand, we are very imperfect at this.  There are days I can't think of any way that God was glorified in me or our family.  But what I am so very thankful for is grace.  That His mercies are new every morning.  EVERY morning.  Glorifying God takes being completely covered in His grace.  And He continues to cover us each day, each minute, as He leads us on.

At this point in our lives, we have felt His leading into missions.  Which is sometimes ironic to me, because at one time, I was completely terrified of being called to be a missionary.  Stay-awake-at-night-heart-pounding terrified.  But God, in His mercy, slowly changed my heart to understand Him more.  And I began to change from fear to excitement when it came to missions.  We are now ready to go where God is leading.  And right now, His finger is pointed north.

My husband, Ryan, was a youth pastor for many years.  Almost 2 years ago, we sensed God leading us to something different and stepped down from youth ministry.  We moved back to Ryan's hometown for an "interim" time to see where we were headed next.  Knowing that we wanted to pursue missions but not knowing at all where that might be, we did research and Ryan read books on missions and we prayed.  After looking at some websites for mission agencies we were familiar with, we came across a place called Echo Ranch Bible Camp near Juneau, Alaska.  It looked interesting, so we prayed specifically about that and continued to sense God's confirmation in that area.  Money for plane tickets showed up in our mailbox after I began praying that somehow we could visit Echo Ranch.  We visited this past July and continued to receive confirmation after confirmation that this was where we were to be.  Our next leg in this journey is to serve at Echo Ranch for the summer.  More specifically, for 6 months from April-October to include their spring and fall retreat seasons and the summer camps.

Which brings me back to that verse in Isaiah.  We find it extremely fitting for this adventure that God has us on.  While we aren't big Message Bible readers (we're kinda ESV people around here :), I absolutely love the words used.  "Make God's glory resound; echo His praises from coast to coast."  We want to make God's glory resound, which is actually a synonym for "echo".  We are serving at Echo Ranch Bible Camp, whose motto is "Echo God's Glory".  Echo Ranch sits directly on a coast: Echo Cove and Berner's Bay.  May we make His glory resound.

www.echoranch.org