At the beginning of January 2003, our family was stuck in Ohio.  We hadn't been able to sell our house in Bowling Green.  We hadn't been able to raise all of our funding, for our church-planting venture in the Netherlands.  And because of these factors, and the vague and uncertain timelines associated with them, we hadn't been able to make any definitive plans for our final leap across the Atlantic Ocean.  We were stuck in a holding pattern.

But then in one 24-hour period in the middle part of that month, everything came together.

One morning, I was eating breakfast when the telephone rang; it turned out to be a couple that I had just talked to a week previously about financial support for the "Amsterdam Project."  They said that they had talked about it and wanted to pledge their support.  I eagerly wrote down all of the relevant information and thanked them for their call.  It was very rare for someone to initiate contact when it came to financial support (more typically, it requires a follow-up phone call on my end) -- so their boost in support was especially encouraging.  An hour later, another individual called with the same situation:  another new pledge, without any follow-up work on my part, putting us just $100/month away from the "magic number" that we needed to reach before our missionary funding would be complete.  Of all the thousands of fund-raising contacts I'd had throughout the years, I could count on one hand the number of times that someone had called me back unsolicited, taking the initiative to become a part of our ministry team; and two of them had happened within an hour of each other!  Later that afternoon, I received two more pledges in the total amount of... you guessed it:  $100/month.  And suddenly, our funding was complete.

In between phone calls with ministry donors, we also got a call from our realtor in Bowling Green.  She said that the potential buyer for our house had finally accepted our counter-offer, and they were ready to sign papers the following morning.  Almost exactly 24 hours from when the wheels of progress had first been set in motion by that breakfast-time telephone call, we talked out of the bank with our house sold -- and suddenly, we were free to make our travel arrangements.

Right then and there, in the parking lot of the bank, we called our travel agent and told her to go ahead and book our tickets to Amsterdam, completing our improbable transition from "stuck in a holding pattern in Ohio" to "frantically preparing for the final push to the Netherlands."  Just a little over a week following our Day of Destiny, we were on an airplane flying to our new home in the Netherlands.  And on the 30th of January 2003 -- exactly eight years ago, today -- we landed in Amsterdam.  At the time, I never would have thought that this place could actually feel like home to me; but believe it or not, as of this coming summer (Lord willing) I will have lived in Amsterdam longer than I’ve ever lived in any other place on Earth!