#25 South Africa: How it began
You may be thinking right now, Wait a minute! South Africa?! I thought you guys were going to America! Let us explain:
It's been about a year and half since we called off our plans for America. This was accompanied by pain, doubt, uncertainty and a myriad of other feelings. Lianne was still determined to leave to about anywhere as soon as possible, Ramon (fortunately) did not think that was wise. In the past year and a half we have talked a lot. With each other, our family and friends, but also with our pastors, with whom we had a very nice (and fruitful) training. The conclusion was that it would be healthier for us to first learn to settle as a family, and (for Lianne) to learn to be 'ok' with being in the Netherlands. In the time that followed, we focused on our family, on learning to really put down deep roots somewhere, to really be in the now instead of the place where we would soon go next.
But in the meantime, we were still experiencing a sense of some kind of assignment that was waiting ...
During our conversations with the VPE Mission (our sending organization), our home front team, and our network, we kept coming back to the conclusion, again and again and again. We have a huge heart for missions and missionaries and would like to help where it's needed. Missionaries for missionaries as it were. We discussed what we wanted with the VPE Mission and they were excited. They had the same dreams, in which the Body of Christ not only wás one Body, but also carried out their task ás one Body. More cooperation, more networking, less isolation. They saw a possibility for cooperation, so did we, but how what and when was not yet very concrete. And Ramon and I weren't chasing it much either, because we had decided not to be so hasty about it and just check a door every now and then to see if it was open. The feeling of 'must' and 'shall' was gone, what remained was peace and tranquility.
During one of our conversations with the VPE Mission, they said that if we were indeed going to work with them on this goal, they would appreciate it if we as a family also had experience in the mission field. After all, in many cases it is more difficult to help someone solve a problem that you do not know or recognize. They wanted to send us to one of their other missionary couples so we could get work experience and be trained by them. We expressed our openness to this and they would make contact with the couple in question.
It turned out that this couple had been in a village in South Africa since 2014, doing work with children and teenagers.
The VPE Mission was busy. They had conversations with us, conversations with them and then conversations with us again to talk about the conversation with them. Eventually, they were no longer the middle man and we had a Facetime conversation of our own with the leaders of the project: Theo and Jinke (remember those names, you're probably going to see them more often in the near future). I was pregnant with Isaiah around this time and since I wasn't in much of a hurry to leave, we agreed that we would at least wait until the baby was born before making any big decisions.
In August 2021, Isaiah Zion was born. Two weeks later we got the keys to our very first house. A house that needed a lot of renovation, that is. Because that's practical, with a newborn baby.
It was a chaotic time, 4 months of almost non-stop construction (thanks to a lot of dear friends and family), a newborn baby, homeschooling, both of us working. The whole South Africa thing faded somewhat into the background. A human being has a certain amount of brain space that can be used at once. But in January we did a month of fasting with the whole church, praying for direction for the church and for our own families. During this month, South Africa came up and it became louder and louder in our heads: in a year's time, we're going to be there. It seemed a bit unrealistic to us, but at the same time we really believed it could be done. We made contact with Theo and Jinke, discussed it with them and agreed to all pray about it for a while.
At the beginning of May this year, Theo and Jinke were in the Netherlands and we met, with the board of VPE-Zending present.