Wherever you are, whoever you are with, may your celebration of Christmas and your awareness of God’s plan to save those He loves transform your heart and cause ripple effects in all those around you.

It’s significant. As a team, we step out in faith, some traveling across oceans for the very first time. It is a big deal with lots of preparing and lots of money, team conference calls, and coordinating. We don’t do it to “give back;” we can’t possibly serve for essentially a week at a Chinese orphanage and come remotely close to giving enough to warrant the phrase. We go for relationships, to enter into life with people–the children who are alone in crowded rooms, the women whose lives are about caring for children so that they can become someone else’s son or daughter, and the men responsible for leading and making decisions that change other people’s entire worlds. We go so the bridge between us can get a few more planks. It’s what He is about, so it’s what we want to be about too.

On February 18th, registration opened up for our next trip scheduled for October 7th-18th, 2015. 3 hours later, registration was closed. In just a few hours, 11 women who had heard about the trip and prayerfully considered the trip opened their hands up and said yes, jumping right on in there. We have room to take 15 people total, but I closed registration with those 11.

Why?

Because we need a few good men.

I have served alongside women on previous teams who are 110% present. I’ve seen God use those women to meet the needs of those children and caregivers in such specific ways. Sometimes I have gotten to be a part of that, and sometimes I have gotten to stand back and simply watch God’s hands around someone using her as His instrument.

But, there is something men are able to do there that women simply cannot. In the orphanage of 300 children, there is not a single caregiver there who is a man. There are men on staff there, but they are the directors, the executives. The ones charged with the daily role of feeding, changing, wiping noses, calming the crying child? They are all women, a good number of whom grew up there themselves. The staff is amazed when a team of Americans is willing to come across the world to build relationships and serve alongside them. When that team has a few men, their amazement is multiplied, more questions are asked as to why we are there, more smiles are exchanged, more pictures are taken of the foreign men who were willing to play with children…and God’s work is magnified. All because a few good men said yes to being used by Him on a team full of women.

If you want to learn more about the trip, email us, and we’ll reply with more details for you. If you think your husband or your son or your nephew may be interested, send this link to him and tell him you think he’d rock it loving orphans and those who care for them.

Our first team conference call is next week. If we don’t get a few good men to join us in the next week or so, we’ll open those 4 remaining spots up for other women.

We can’t wait to see who is on this next team.

More to come. But, for now, just have to share just a little bit of all this goodness.