Whoa.
2020 has been quite a particular year. The grave and weary have been hand in hand with the beautiful and life affirming. Morgan and I have toiled with job losses, distance from friends and family, wedding celebration cancelation, and illnesses. But, we’ve also begun our marriage and had some wonderful experiences at the start of our adventure together. In the ease and the difficulty, we feel like we are closing out this year with a greater understanding of each other, our values, and our vision for life. We’ve had momentous shifts in our relationship with each other and our relationship with God.
Our aim for the end of the year was to return to Fort Collins, CO, where I could get in-state tuition to finish my degree, and we could find a nice spot to place to put a down payment on. While most of my thoughts were occupied with anticipation for mountain vistas, late night board games with old friends, and my dad’s cooking, something felt off about settling down right now. While winding down one evening, Morgan named this strange, unspoken discontentment we had both been feeling with our plans closing out the year. It was not known that this conversation would be the starting point for something unexpected and exciting.
In the spring of 2019, Morgan and I had the opportunity to travel to Ukraine with a discipleship program (Heroic Leadership Institute) we were both attending. In Ukraine, we got to spend a short time with Jed and Kim Johnson and their organization Wide Awake International (WAI). Wide Awake International is a Non-profit committed to the deinstitutionalization of Eastern Europe's most marginalized children. They seek to bring love, hope, dignity, and improved quality of life to orphans with special needs in Ukraine. Though brief, meeting Jed and Kim, their family and the dedicated and compassionate Ukrainian WAI team was a deeply significant experience. Meeting the beautiful people that they served was life-changing.
It was agonizing to see the plight of the boys WAI is involved with. Being social orphans and people experiencing disabilities, they were a group who were outrightly marginalized, disenfranchised, and stripped of their voices. In complete honesty, it is a brutal and intense ongoing process to comprehend the trauma that these boys have to face every day. However, in the midst of all this, the polarizing palpable presence of the Holy Spirit seemed to be singing love and belonging over them. It was sacred to see God using the people involved with WAI to be physical proclamations that these boys are valuable and deserving of dignity and space to exist.
It would be hard to sum up all the complexities of the social orphan situation in Ukraine in this blog post, so if you would like to learn a little more, here’s a link to a free documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pbOxn0o-m4&t=18m18s
When we returned home Morgan and I couldn’t shake our time there. We couldn’t stop talking about it for weeks. Then months. Then a year and a half. We knew that this was something special. About last March, we had seen that Jed and Kim were looking for volunteers to be live in assistants with WAI. They have been building a duplex that would be big enough for volunteers to live with a number of boys they hope to bring out institutions. The position entails being in community with the boys and as Jed and Kim put it, “Helping them learn how to be human,” as they transition into a wholly different life.
We continued to say things to each other like, “Wouldn’t it be so cool if we could do something like that in our lives? Maybe after I finish school or something?” As we started to question why we felt the previously mentioned discontentment, those statements turned into, “what if?” Could now really be the time, and could God really use us? We prayed, and decided that we should at least get in contact with Jed and Kim.
We feel absolutely undeserving of this opportunity, and we are absolutely grateful to God, our friends and family who have supported us, and the WAI team. In these next couple of months as we prepare to leave, we truly desire to connect with all the people who have surrounded us, and been a part of our lives as we’ve jumped across the country for the last 2 years. It will be crucial to stay in touch with you. We want anyone who wants be a part of this, to join with us. We’re going to need people to support us with encouragement, prayers, resources, and friendship on this adventure. We humbly and graciously ask that if you feel any inkling to partner with us, or just to have a conversation about what we believe God is doing, that you would reach out.
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I'll also include a link here to the Wide Awake website if you would like to learn more about them: http://wideawakeinternational.org/
If you feel led to make a tax deductible donation to our Wide Awake fund you can do so here:
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