Why me?

Why am I going to Cambodia?

I've grown up in a Christian family and the churches that I've been a part of have mostly been about teaching doctrine.  While there have been mission trip opportunities I never really thought about actually going always thinking that I wasn't ready, there wasn't time, or some other excuse.

Fast-forwarding to 2012, still without having giving much thought as to going to mission trips, I ended up in Fremont due to a job opportunity that the Lord had provided for me.  Not knowing anybody in the area nor having a church that I was planning on going to, I fell into a cycle of thinking that I’d find a church the next week.  Finally at the urgings of brothers and sisters in LA to find a church I decided to take a look at GrX Fremont as it was close and a sister from LA had told me about it.

After attending GrX Fremont for a few months, I found out that they were planning a missions trip to Cambodia for two weeks.  When I first found out about it, I thought that it sounded interesting but didn't think that I had enough vacation days accrued to take two weeks off so I didn't give it much thought.  Wanting to learn more about what the church was going to be doing in Cambodia, I attended an info-session about the trip even though I wasn't planning on going.

During the info-session, Victor had brought up that the main purpose of the trip was not to go and try to help the people there, but rather to try to learn and to start building long term relationships with the Cambodian staff already working there.  This was interesting to me as almost all the missions trips that I had heard of were about going and doing things, such as building houses, teaching vbs, or some other service to the people.  Still thinking that I didn't have enough vacation time accrued, I didn't think about it too much after that.

After hearing a few people talk about possibly taking unpaid time off for the missions trip, I thought that maybe I could do that and decided to actually calculate how much time off I would be able to take by the time it was time to go.  To my surprise, it turns out that I would have just enough to take the two weeks off!  Once I found that out, I was still hesitant as I wasn't sure if I was ready to go until I thought again on what Victor had said during the info-session about going to learn and build relationships with the staff there.  I decided that I would probably always have reasons to not go on missions and felt like God had led me to this opportunity to go to Cambodia.

So here I am on the team and about to leave in just a couple short weeks!  Thanks for all your support and please remember us in your prayers!