Action Steps...

Earlier in our marriage, Debbie and I were all about taking action. On our honeymoon we began the pursuit of buying a hotel in the Bahamas and within a year sold all our stuff and moved to Florida so we could negotiate with the owners. Granted, the negotiations fell apart since the owner was in prison in Miami for money-laundering and the rest of the owner's family were, well...let's just say they were not negotiable. BUT - we still took action!

We decided to leave Florida and move back to So. Cal and within a year we joined forces in Orange County with seven other couples and helped plant a church.

After several years of this, we prayerfully decided to take our ministry on the road and move to South Africa to do missions training.

While in South Africa we discovered we weren't able to have children and couldn't adopt there, so we moved back to California to pursue foster/adoption. Within six months of our return we had three beautiful kids in our home. While stepping into the foster/adopt process, we developed a ministry at a rescue mission training groups about local and global mission opportunities.

This is how our lives have played out from the beginning of our marriage. Action steps have been our standard operating procedure through life. Since our return from South Africa and the brokenhearted ending of the foster/adoption process, we've both been sedated...stuck...not able to take action like we did in the past. This could be just a stage in our lives needing the kind of introspective thinking that demands less action and more processing. I'm willing to accept this right now, but quite honestly don't know how long I'll last. I've taken some thoughtful steps towards doing something innovative a couple of times this year, but so far it still feels pretty slow going. Not bad, just slow...and for a guy like me, slow just doesn't work.

I started working at a university earlier this year with the hopes that I could at some point plant a campus at the rescue mission I was serving. I still think that could work, but the position I had was too demanding and allowed little to no time to think outside the box of tasks I was responsible to complete each week. So I left the university.

I now am doing hospice care again and background work on television. I'm thinking of some ways of including some of the New Life Program participants at the rescue mission in the background work. My thought is, if I could get the production companies to use these participants, maybe they could pay in philanthropic ways and be able to right off this production cost. This way the participants get some outside work exposure and experience, and the production company gets a tax right off.

I know all this is pretty far out there, but this is the kind of thinking that has provoked our action steps in the past. I've no idea if and when such possibilities will present opportunities to take action...but I'm prayerfully watching for any sign of hope calling us to jump!