Author: To Haiti We Go

As we are on this support raising journey to get fully funded 100% with monthly supporters and one time moving costs, we will be blogging about that from time to time because obviously we can’t move to Haiti until we get that support coming in monthly BUT there is so much more we want to share with you along the way too! So be on the look out for blogs on different things about Haiti and our lives there to our lives here while we are in the waiting journey! We’ve been asked this already and I’m sure it will be asked many times again, which is fine by us, we love questions; and the question is WHERE WILL THE BOYS DO SCHOOL? If you know our family, you know we homeschool. Micaiah is in preschool at our local christian school, which Isaac did the same thing and we loved it. Then Micaiah will start homeschool next fall with Isaac, at home. The plan is to transition them to the missionary kids school they have there in Les Cayes. If we get fully funded and can move by the end of 2018, which is what RMI’s goal is for us and our goal as well, we will obviously be moving in the middle of the year. So the plan for that would be for me to finish out homeschooling Micaiah in Kindergarten and Isaac in 3rd for the rest of the school year and then help them make the transition to the missionary kids school by the next fall!

So what is this Missionary Kids school?  It’s an amazing small school for all the local missionary kids. This will be great for our boys to get to know not only the other RMI missionary kids but other missionary kids as well, from other organizations! They bring in US teachers that raise their own support to come down and teach for a year or longer and there is usually a few grades in each class. It’s a smaller setting and kind of reminds me of a large homeschool co-op class! 🙂 I think our boys will thrive in it because of the smaller setting.

The nice thing about missionary kid school is it only goes from 8am-1pm so we all come back home together at 1pm for lunch. In Haiti, lunch is the main course and bigger course of the day. That is one thing we look forward to, is being all together every day for lunch! Of course this is on the days one or both of us are not out with a team at a village.

We are excited to try this and see how it works for our boys! It would allow so many opportunities for them and us, by them going there. It will allow them to get to know and interact with more kids in the area and have a separate place away from home they can enjoy. It also will allow April to be able to do more ministry work during the day while they are at school. With Zeke being so young, he will be able to go with us to some of the things we do and April can try and do some of the ministry work from home when he is younger as well. We would love prayer that when the time comes for us to try the boys out in the school, that God would give the boys such peace and joy with it and help them transition well.

P.S. Thanks so much everyone! Today was an exciting day for us as we got our FIRST official FAMILY monthly supporter! (Our first monthly supporter we mentioned before was a business) We’ve had several commit to being monthly supporters (which we are so excited about and thankful) but nothing official yet has come through the site, so it made our hearts leap with joy today when we saw the email come in! 

We love you all, we are so thankful for you all! This journey is cRaZy and we need your prayers. We talked about how daily we have to give our worries back to God or else they would overwhelm us! To us, this amount we have to raise seems impossible…but like God has shown us so many times in our lives already…NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR HIM! ❤ So thankful for that!

Love,

The Starkeys

It’s been a whirlwind for us the past few weeks since we announced. It’s been fun to see those of you who have talked to us or messaged us and shared how you are praying for us or that you want to support us. We greatly appreciate it so much! Most of all, we’ve had A LOT of questions, which we love! We thought it would be nice to put together a PRAYER LIST for you all, which might help answer some of your questions but also help you all know how you can specifically be praying for us. This journey is daunting if we let get to us that way,. If we even forget for one second that God owns all the cattle on a thousand hills (Psalm 50), this journey feels scary and overwhelming. Yet, if we remind ourselves daily that God’s got this and He already knows all the people He is going to use to send us to Haiti, then we relax, we breathe and we remember the Creator of the universe who spoke it into existence, who parted the sea, who fed the 5,000, who raised Jesus from the dead…that same awesome Creator is the one who knows every step of this journey before we even started. We might not always say it, but we COVET your prayers so much because we know there is so much spiritual warfare going on in Haiti and the enemy would love for us to NOT go to Haiti, he would love to do everything within his power to discourage us and slow us down during our support raising journey…HOWEVER we know that God already has the victory and is way more powerful so we THANK YOU for coming alongside us and praying for us during this journey. WE NEED YOU!

HOW YOU CAN PRAY FOR US:

1. For protection from the enemy over our family and this whole process.
2. For God to bring alongside us, families & people who want to be prayer warriors for us & encourage us.
3. For God to continue to prepare our hearts, the boys and our families as we make the transition to move away from all we know and all that is familiar.
4. For us to rest in God, trust Him and not give into fear over this process.
5. For families, individuals, churches & businesses that would come alongside us financially and become a part of our ministry family by supporting us monthly, starting immediately, because we cannot start saving up the funds to go until the monthly support starts coming in.
6. For wisdom on which things to do, places to go and things to say during this whole support raising stage.
7. That God would allow us to experience so much joy and peace during this stage. This stage is typically known as a really hard and dreaded stage of missions and we would love to find the good in it, find the ways that God is working in this stage for His good.
8. For God to help us know the right time to put our house up for sale and prayer for that family who will be buying it. That God would already start making the way for them to find it and buy it when we put it up for sale.

THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!

What an amazing outpour of love & encouragement we’ve received via comments, messages and in person as well, since we announced last week about us moving to Haiti into the mission field. Already many of you have asked some GREAT questions that I thought I could answer in this blog to help clarify some things. We are an open book so feel free to reach out anytime with questions about our journey.

When are you moving down there?

Our organization’s goal is to have us down there by the end of 2018. There is much to do and we are very needed there. Our goal and hope is to have our funds 100% raised by this time next year! We will live there 100% fully dependent on individuals, families and churches who decide to partner with us and sponsor us monthly, quarterly or annually.

Where do we donate and when do we start doing so?

Our organization has a great website where you can set up your monthly recurring payments on there so you don’t have to worry about it once you do it the first time. You can go HERE to donate online or if you’d rather mail in a check you can send it with a note sharing it is for Jim & April Starkey, to Reciprocal Ministries International 5475 Lee St. Ste. 301 Lehigh Acres, FL 33971

If you feel led to become a part of our ministry family and partner with us by donating monthly to us, we would greatly appreciate it if you can start the support IMMEDIATELY because we don’t get to go until our support is coming in 100%. As monthly support comes in now, while we are here in the states raising support, it will help build up our one time moving costs funds that we need before we move.

So what’s next?

So we are in the deputation stage, which is just a fancy way of saying that we are in the waiting period of the missionary journey where we are seeking God about who He will use to be the hands to send us to Haiti! We will be connecting with churches that we know or have connections with from people we know who go there, to see about either speaking at the church and/or getting support from the church. We will be connecting with individuals and families as well, as God leads, to share our calling and story with them and financial needs and see how God might use them to help us go to Haiti. Within the next week we will be sending out close to 300 prayer cards (picture of our family) and newsletters to people that help explain our journey a bit more and how they can support us! (If you’d like one and haven’t let us know yet, please do so soon)

To be honest, saying YES to obey when you don’t see the whole picture or even how it’s going to happen is quite scary. We immediately thought, could we raise the funds needed to support us in Haiti? The answer was simple…NO we couldn’t….not by ourselves. However, God has been showing us how He is using this part of the journey to grow our faith in huge ways. We may not be able to raise all the funds we need, but He sure can. He has shown Himself faithful to us time and again so we have no doubt He will not fail us now. He is reminding us that HE may be the one who can “send the water” (story of elisha and the 3 kings) but He wants US to “dig the ditch” first. Meaning that He will provide, He will stir in people’s hearts and lead the people He has chosen, to be the hands to send us BUT He doesn’t want us to sit back and do nothing or sit back in fear and worry constantly either. He wants us to STEP OUT IN FAITH, work hard, share our calling, our story and what He is wanting us to do. As we step out in Faith and action, trusting Him, He will provide the funds we need at the time He decides, for us to move to Haiti!

We want to leave you with 3 things for now!

1. Would you please be praying for us during this journey? We would love to have prayer warriors on our side praying for us.

2. Would you please pray this week about yourself or family partnering with us and being one of our monthly supporters, whatever the amount would be. We need the support to start NOW so we can get the thermometer moving up and get 100% funded so we can move down there to start helping. If you’d like to hear our calling and what all we will be doing and how we are needed down there, please let us know. We would love to share!

3. Listen to THIS song today. These words have moved me in a mighty way. God doesn’t need us, but yet He still wants us! That is mind blowing y’all! Oh how He LOVES us and somehow that FREES US to take our hands off of our life and the way it should go and give Him control. 

Our plans, our dreams, our intentions, our obsessions…we lay them down at God’s feet. We know that no matter what we had planned for our life, God’s plans are SO MUCH BETTER and worth it. We step out now, we know God has called us to Haiti, and we know God could use anyone. We are NOTHING without Him. We want to make Him known. We want to help bring freedom to people that can only be found in Him. We step out, we may quiver and even shake at times but we trust Him because He’s never failed us.

Love,

The Starkeys