While we were in church one day ("Mission's Sunday"), a missionary, Roland Ashby, was giving the message. It was about passion, birthing compassion, then turning into a mission, or ministry, or marriage, or whatever the end result would be of that particular passion. So I'm sitting there thinking, "Man! It's been SO long since I was passionate about anything!"

     So this whole internal dialog begins about this sermon (which is, by the way, a lot of how God will tell me something). I remember being so passionate about doing outreach to nomadic youth and hippie kids. How I'd weep over them in prayer, or cry whenever I'd read a passage that God showed me was his heart for them, or heard a song lyric about reaching the lost. "The lost," was always this hippie-kid people group that I'd been a part of before I was saved and had returned to for outreach and ministry. Never anyone else.

     The last outreach trip we took in 2003, felt like closure. That passion I once had was gone. It felt like God was closing a door and about to be doing something different with us. I felt it'd be international. God showed us that several times and we felt it had been pretty confirmed. At that time I thought it might be India or Thailand, but we were never really sure. Its just that those places were where all our other friends, who did ministry to the hippie-kids, were going.

     After that 2003 trip we were living in California and then I got pregnant. God told us to go back to Texas, get out of debt, and take care of our family. We settled in for a time of working on ourselves as a family. We paid off about $31,000 dollars of debt over a 3 year period. And this was what we'd been doing when I was listening to this sermon. In fact that Friday's paycheck was going to be the one to pay off our very last debt. But playing house and working for 3 years is not very exciting. We've always wanted more than the American dream for our family.

     I felt sad that I no longer had this passion for anything ministry related. Of course I'd felt it for my husband and child but not recently for anything else. Which was fine because my family was all I needed to be focused on for that moment. But the moment had changed. We were about to be out of debt and were ready to know the next step. The next step was to start saving money, but for what? A house (which we NEVER really wanted) or a move into something bigger.

     Back to the internal dialog at church. As I was thinking about all the past few years, that I just mentioned, The question was asked, "What are you passionate about?" The answer was very easy, travel. Ryan and I love to travel. Ryan even leaned in at that moment and said the same thing, whispering it into my ear. But let's be specific, where would we want to travel to? I couldn't decide. There are so many places I'd like to go and see. So this is where I feel like God came into play.

     I felt He helped to narrow it down for me with this thought, "if you were to be terminally ill, knew you would die in a month, and could only go one place, where would it be?" The answer, when phrased that way was very easy, I'd go to Europe, France in particular. I felt God say to me in the Spirit, "GO THERE."

     "What? France? I mean, I've ALWAYS wanted to go to France, ever since I was 5. I even did a little French class for gifted kids when I was in Kindergarten. But doesn't every little girl want to go to France? Plus, why do I want to go? Do I want to go to sit and eat Brie' and grapes or to do ministry? Is Europe a verifiable 'mission field?' Aren't mission fields 3rd world or Asia or Africa? Who'd take a western civilization serious as a mission field? Seriously, is that even why I'd want to go?"

     So I'm having these thoughts and the next thing that happens in service is Doug Pitman, the missions pastor, gets up to give a missions report. Guess where the missionaries are? Europe, of course, Austria specifically. So now I'm thinking, "well Destiny Church thinks Europe is a mission field." Then they have us all stand up to pray. I'm not "emotional" at all. Especially about spiritual stuff. I really don't like being told when to pray (or lift my hands or whatever), but I do it anyway. So they pray for the missionaries, then for Austria, then for Europe. When they began praying for Europe I began to cry, involuntarily. It was just like what use to happen with hippie kids. It was freaky! I didn't know what to think. I told Ryan later and he got really excited!

     A week later Ryan had his own encounter. In church they were praying for San Antonio and he battled not having the desire to pray for that city. He asked God what he thought and saw a brief little vision of Jesus over his shoulder standing on the European continent motioning him to come over.

     I continued to cry over Europe, especially when I tried to talk about it to other people. I asked God if this desire was truly from Him or if it was my own, since I love the place so much. God's response was, "Why wouldn't I send you somewhere you loved. What makes you think you'd have to hate it for it to be My Will. I want to send people with a heart not with just an obligation."

     So we began to act. After looking into long-term residence visas we saw that we needed two things, an income and health insurance. First we got passports and started learning French. Then, through the grace of God, Ryan got a work-from-home (home meaning anywhere we want to live) computer programming job (making more than he was before) and we bought private health insurance.

     Another thing we did was sought out wise counsel. We first met with our pastor, who encouraged us to pursue it. We then met with a missionary couple, Ron and Cristy Bishop, who's daughter, Dori, we knew well (she's our age with young kids Isaac's age). She and her parents had lived in Europe for years and both agreed that France was a good fit for us. They all said that we were sorta French in some of our attitudes, thinking, testimonies, style, and just overall way of being. After that we again met a couple of times with our pastor and missions pastor, together and separately.

     As things began to take shape we sought God more and more about where we should be looking at in France to go. After all its a big place and He must have a more specific place in mind. We watched every travel show on Europe and France that we could find, saving them on our DVR and burning them to DVD's to watch with others. The more I watched the more I felt drawn to the North. It was an odd and uneducated preference, after all, we had never been there. Later Ryan was in church, again trying unsuccessfully to pray for San Antonio, this time when he asked God to help, he couldn't shake an image of a map of Northern France. So we now had a sharper focus.

     We also found confirmation in other things from our past that could all point in this direction, like Ryan taking French in college. The craziest thing was that 5 years before all this, I had a very prophetic dream that was all set in France. At the time I looked at the French location as symbolic, not literal. No one I knew could interpret it at the time I'd had it. Which is odd because the church we'd been going to then had been getting into a dream interpretation ministry. Everyone I took this thing to said it was from God and it was important but they couldn't interpret it for me. So I wrote it all down and held on to it for years and every once in a while I'd pull it out if someone claimed to have a dream interpretive ability.

     When all this France stuff started happening, I remembered the dream, and I pulled it out again. This time, of course, it gets interpreted, by a friend of ours (Rachelle Cassano), at a birthday party that was at her house. This is what she interpreted from this dream.

     The dream was 3 parts with distinct beginnings and endings. The 3 parts were 3 ministries, one from the past, one in the present (relative to when the dream actually occurred), and the other was the future. As soon as she said that it all began making sense. The middle section of the dream I had always understood because it was concerning the church where we were going to at the time I had always understood the meaning of it but the other 2 parts were a mystery. The first part was the ministry where I was saved and the main character of that segment even looked like the lady who ran it and I wondered how I couldn't see it before. The third part was Destiny, the church where we're going now. Let me just tell you about that part. Rachelle didn't know all of this she was speaking in general and I was able to read in between the lines and see the specifics.

     So in the third part of the dream my cruise ship (that had been taking me around all through the dream), docks in Normandy. I go ashore and take a shore excursion into the East of France near the German border into a forest. While in the forest I was being pulled in a horse drawn carriage through these amazing tall trees that offered all this shelter and peacefulness. The carriage stops in a plaza full of ancient Roman ruins that had been over-grown by lush green ivy. We all get out to eat and I'm just feeling totally refreshed and at peace.

     She said this ministry is an old one that maybe started in World War II (because of the landing on the beach at Normandy). Destiny Church was started not only during World War II, but because of it (thats another long story in and of itself). She said the tall trees were strong leadership that would offer covering and healing. (That hit a nail right on its head!) The plaza symbolized that it was full of older more conservative aspects (because of the Roman ruins) but it was a powerful and wonderful past and that everything was still very much alive and growing (because of the ivy growing over it). The last bit was that in this place I would be nourished and filled with the word (symbolized by the food I ate in the plaza). This just all SO describes our church.

     So here is the really weird thing. One of our tall trees, AKA missions pastor, had us read this book about vision, written by the guy who started YWAM ( an international mission's organization, Youth With A Mission). This got us all jazzed about missions and we'd flippantly say, "Oh wouldn't it be fun to run off and join YWAM." Soon after we'd finished this book we met a family with 3 kids that had done YWAM for like 20 years or something. Listening to them got us all stoked up too.

     So I checked on YWAM's site to even see if they had any bases in France. They had several but only 2 that did DTS (which is what you have to do before you do YWAM), one was in the South the other in the North. God had very recently told us that we'd be going into the North of France so I clicked on the base in the North. When I saw the name it floored me, "Le Gault La Foret," in English, "the Gault Forest." All I could think of was that my dream had ended in a forest in North Eastern France. It just all seemed like God so we applied to that YWAM base and began talking to their DTS leader. We quickly were talking like old friends.

     I found tickets in November to Paris from Houston for all 3 of us for about $1600, a VERY cheap price. This was August and I knew that waiting for too long would lose us the price. So we needed to know what too do. We got prayer at church and felt God telling us to go. We had a meeting with our church's elders the next day and decided to wait until after that to buy the tickets. The next night we met with our elders.

     It was an amazing meeting. We shared with them the vision God had given us for France up to that point, along with our testimonies and some of our history in ministry. When we were done with our little presentation our pastor, Dave Bell, said, "Wow, that was awesome." He dissolved our nervousness instantly and set the tone for the meeting. It was universally agreed that God was all in this and that we should buy these tickets. We received several words about the trip being fruitful and that we'd be "spying out the land." The next day we bought the tickets.

     We began immersing ourselves and our son in French, checking out books, CDs, and DVDs in French. I plowed into a Rosetta Stone Language computer program we had bought for me to learn French. Ryan did all he could in between work and family time to read and practice the French he had learned in college.

     In September Ryan's company was having a workshop in Los Angeles and was paying for his ticket to California. With their permission, we took advantage of the free ticket and came out 2 weeks before the workshop to Northern California. While there we talked to many of our friends who, as it turned out, were all themselves preparing for their own moves to Europe. It would seem we'd been swept up into a mass exodus of sorts being orchestrated by the Holy Spirit. Some of them, who'd been to Europe already had a lot of wisdom for us and had great reports of God moving in Europe.

     We also spoke with our old pastor from Promised Land Fellowship in San Francisco, Michael Brodeur. It was awesome how everything he had to say corresponded directly to what our church leadership in San Antonio had said. He was even able to expand on some things that they had brought up.

     A couple weeks after we'd come back from our trip to California God gave Autumn a vision. One Sunday during a church service (of course) God gave her a vision of a coffee shop outreach in Paris. It was called Lumière, which means "light," in French and also has connotations of "wisdom and enlightenment." It would be a ministry to young adults, young travelers, and students and would also have partnerships with local churches, Catholic and Protestant, in order to direct people interested in pursuing Christianity. The ceiling would have LED lights hung in different lengths and covered over with a black see-through fabric to imitate the night sky. The black is France and the lights are the Christians in France shining through the dark. It will be a covering for all who walk in the door.

     Later that same day we hung out with Jamie Taylor, a good friend and Starbuck's manager. We told her about the vision and she was quick to jump on board and volunteer her services for whenever we get it going. She has long had a love for Europe and had been there several times. When we were talking about the cafe at a later time we had an even more specific leading about it having a Bed and Breakfast above it to minister to traveling missionaries and pastors, but it would also be a business to help support the cafe by having tourists pay to stay there.

     Well the time came to go to France and as the date quickly approached I was on the phone continually talking to all the people in France we'd be going to see. The trip was going to be two weeks long. The first 4-5 days would be spent at the YWAM base in Champagne, then we'd have a stay in Paris, then onto Bordeaux to stay with a college friend of Autumn's (Rebecca Bateman), and the trip would end in Normandy where we would travel back into Paris the last day to fly home. So as we made arrangements I quickly discovered that we would not have enough money to get our own room in Paris.

     I figured our YWAM friends would know of someone in Paris that we could perhaps stay with. Indeed they did. We got permission to stay with Jean-Claude and Isabelle Serex. And guess what, they were working on a coffee shop outreach in Paris. This was beyond exciting, to see God give two different directions and then find out that it all might fit together from the beginning even before we knew anything about it.

     Our stay in France was wonderful. We fell in love with all the YWAM people we met. Felt God confirm us being there and over all were really made sure about our footing. We also had fun visiting Autumn's friend in Bordeaux, Rebecca, and getting to meet her fiance, Guillaume. After that we made it to Normandy, despite the train strikes in Paris, and stayed 2 nights at a really nice Bed and Breakfast there, Les Mas Normand. We enjoyed driving around and seeing all the WWII monuments as well as visiting the Mount Saint Michel.

     After we came back we began again working on our French and looking into visas. The leadership at the YWAM base in France decided that it would be best for us and Isaac if we did a family oriented DTS, called a Crossroads DTS, that would start July 1st in French-Switzerland instead of there with them in September. So we applied there and were accepted. And now here we are. Taking classes, doing work duties, and loving being in community again. We will be here in the lecture phase until September and then will go and do field outreach to Romania and Bulgaria. We will come back to the states November 14th to spend the holidays, enjoy our churches missions conference in January and then we await the arrival of our 2nd child, due February 14th. After that we want to move to France to pursue God's calling for us there.

     If you have made it this far and read all of this, thank you so much for caring. It means so much to us to know that people are interested in us and care about what we are doing. Be blessed!