New Season, New Day

It's been awhile since I have blogged.  I have several items in my drafts folder that I'll hopefully finish up and hit the PUBLISH button on soon, but this one seems to be the most pressing at the moment.

2013 has come in with a bang! While I had plenty of plans of making LOTS of changes this year, a brand new job was NOT one of them! This is what I get for telling the students of Tennessee they must be willing and able to up and go, to uproot, wherever and whenever God speaks to them as the pursue the Wild Goose Chase of following Christ!  Been there done that! It was easy to challenge them to this as, in my mind, I had already done that and it wouldn't be asked of me again anytime soon! If you don't think God has a sense of humor then you don't know Him all that well!

Just days after preaching that message to the students of Tennessee I had a staff meeting at Convoy of Hope where my team was told that the internship department would be shutting down indefinitely, but with hopes to one day revamp & start again, but that it would at least be a year if not yearS! I was told that if I felt called to Convoy of Hope that they would find a spot for me, but that it would likely be administrative in nature.  I was given the holidays to pray about the opportunity.  And pray I did as well as check out every opportunity on the goag.org website to see if God had written on that wall for me! Sure I could go to Africa and tell people about Jesus, I could stay in the US and do the same, I could fight human trafficking, I could teach English in Thailand again and share the love of Jesus with my Buddhist friends there, heck, I could dust off the masters degree and put it to good use! Unfortunately my heart was not fully in any of these! My friends tried to help me, well, what DOES your heart want to do?!  I difficulty replied, "Lead the Convoy of Hope interns!" God had forgotten about me indeed!

I scheduled a meeting to let my AGWM boss Dr. JoAnn Butrin know how God had forgotten me and that there was no place for my heart, so I was going to the garden and eat worms! To my surprise she did not seem to share my sentiment! She mentioned she had already been thinking and praying about where I should land.  I figure this meant God must've known before hand that this door was going to close for me! Weird huh?  She put somethings on the table for me to pray about and consider and off I went for Christmas break.

Over Christmas break I headed to Ft. Worth Texas to help with the launch of new fundraising endeavor for Convoy of Hope at the World Missions Summit 3.  There I got to hear from some Amazing missionaries and spend time with some of my favorite people on earth, my former COH interns! I took each of them to coffee and we talked about their relationships, their futures, and how God had changed their lives during their internship, and we laughed quite a bit.  One night after a midnight trek to In n Out with this Motley Crue I sighed knowing that my heart and passion and the call of God on my life wasn't just to missions, but it was to the next generation of missionaries.  Since this was no longer an option at Convoy of Hope, I had to GO and see what door God would open up for me next.  So at 1am I sent my resignation letter.

God has given me the desires of my heart by opening up a new door within AG World Mission's International Ministries.  I will be joining the team at Sustain Hope, where I will launch an internship program and go out into all the world and share Jesus and help the developing world do just that, DEVELOP.  Evidently I'm going to be learning a lot of new things, one of the first emails they sent me was about taking a bee keeper class?! Talk about Wild Goose Chases! I'll also be dusting off the masters degree and putting it to good use internationally, so stay tuned!

I'll keep you posted on the changes and happenings! I'm still a missionary.  I'm still fundraising!  You can DONATE right here My account # remains the same 294171.  My email address has changed.  I can no longer receive email at mbking@convoyofhope.org (something about not working there!?!) I'll be using my personal email from here on out.  It's just easier! marybethking77@gmail.com  Please make these changes in your contacts info! I'm still going to be globe trotting with students in tow, developing nations and developing the next generation and maybe even developing some pictures along the way if they even still do such things!

Here's to many more photos like this one in African villages!