Blog » 12 Days of Testimonies, #5
Guest Blogger
During our 12 Days of Testimonies, we want to bring people's stories to life, to show how one trip has impacted them. Some people go, are radically changed, and continue to change the lives of those around them... These are their stories:
Sumer Yates.
In 2009, we knew that God was calling our family to a big change, but we did not know what it was. I had read a great deal about Uganda and we were considering the possibility that God was calling our family to move there. When I went on my first Visiting Orphans trip, it was also my first time to go to Africa and I signed up for a trip that went to both Uganda and Ethiopia. I honestly, did not even want to go to Ethiopia, but there wasn’t a Uganda only trip available.
Uganda was beautiful and all that I had imagined, except that I imagined that my heart would have felt a stronger pull to stay there. I expected our vision for the future to just be laid out before me as soon as I stepped off the plane. I wrote in my journal, “God I am still willing, but I do not feel like this is where you want me to be.”
We left Uganda and went to Ethiopia for a few days before returning back to the States. On one of our last days there we spent Ethiopian Christmas Day with the children who lived in the landfill in Addis Ababa. I had told my husband before I left that going to the trash dump was the one part of the trip that I dreaded the most. God works in mysterious ways because standing there that day with those beautiful children, the trash dump became a place I wanted to return to over and over. God put a love for those children in my heart immediately. He gave me a fierce devotion to them and a desire to see them reach their potential. A desire to see hope planted in their hearts!
Someone once said that need does not necessitate call. In every place that Visiting Orphans travels there is immeasurable need, and the trips are a great way to expose people to those needs. I know from personal experience that God will take care of calling their hearts to a certain place.
Sumer Yates
Project 61
