Please Pray
Sarah and I want to share with you something that is heavy on our hearts right now, and ask for your prayers for our family. We try to stay away from calling every matter "urgent" and every need "pressing" in respect to our family's needs, but if there is a time and place to use this language, it is now.
A day after leaving Boston for a two-week Christmas break with family, we learned that we have fallen about $4,000 short of our support-raising goal this year, so The Boston Project will not be able to pay our salary for at least the month of January, and possibly into February (this amount is equal to about 1.5 months of our family's salary - see below for more details*).
Honestly, we know that God can and will provide for the plans that He calls us to, but this feels more like a punch in the gut (in the sense that we feel like the wind is knocked out of us). In just a matter of days, we have gone from buying a home to not being able to buy groceries.
This is bringing up many different questions and concerns for our family. Of course, we are concerned about our basic living expenses - things like rent, heat, food, and electricity. Without income for over a month, we are looking at the possibility of going thousands of dollars into debt just to live. We have already frozen our family finances, and are not spending on anything not absolutely necessary in anticipation of the coming year.
The part that is probably even harder for us right now is understanding where God is leading us. We are just finishing a year of prayer and seeking God about the future of our family and ministry (as we shared about in our last newsletter), and are in the final days of a 40-day media fast to focus our prayers. Through this all, we believe that God is calling us to stay in Boston and purchase a multi-family neighborhood ministry house to expand the ministry of The Boston Project. Needless to say, we don't see how this vision lines up with our present reality.
In so many ways, we saw God working to put things in place for this move within the first few months of 2009: Boston housing prices are the lowest in years, interest rates are incredibly low, and there are many great potential properties that we have been looking at through the last few months. Now with this news, everything is very uncertain, and we are questioning what God is doing through this.
We want to thank you for your fervent prayers for us in this season. In particular, you can pray for us in the following ways:
- Please pray that God would provide for our immediate financial needs - I admit it is hard for me to see how this can happen, but I do believe God can even bridge this $4,000 gap in our family's support-raising.
- If we do need to go without pay for a period of time, please pray that God provides through other ways for our basic needs. Pray that we will be able to humbly depend on others in our time of need.
- Most of all, please pray for understanding. Ask that God will show us what He is doing through this situation for our family's future ministry in Boston. Everything seems a bit fuzzy and upside-down right now, but we are trusting that God is doing something that we can't see. Pray for patience when we need it, and that we will be sensitive to hearing God's voice in it all.
* A brief explanation of how our family's financial support works: Our family's annual salary of $36,000 is made up two parts: About a third, or $11,000, comes from program revenue through Boston Project. The majority, or $25,000, comes from individuals, families, and churches who give to The Boston Project on behalf of our family. This year, we fell short of our family's support-raising goal by $4,000, but The Boston Project has still paid us our full salary. For obvious reasons, the ministry can not continue to pay us with money it does not have. So for now, we are facing the possibility of not being paid at all for the month of January and part of February, since $4,000 is equal to about 1.5 months of our salary.
