A Small Thing I Did in April 2005 Finally Paid Off Today
I'm not sure I believed the day would ever come...but it's here
In April of 2005, my daughter, the first of our three children, was just a month into her third year with us. Her brother had been born the previous December. Then, in the opening weeks of 2005, we had braved winter roads on our way from from Boise to Kansas City. We got lost coming into the city, but eventually found the place we would call home for several weeks. With our toddler and infant in tow, we attended several weeks of pre-field orientation and training before being sent to Indonesia, where we would live for the next 17 years.
It was a crazy time of transitions, changes, learning, growing, and looking ahead to what the future would bring. We made some life-long friends, learned a lot about ourselves, tried to get some rest with two little ones, and carried a massive inflatable raft around to churches as we challenged people to “get out of their boat” to follow wherever the Lord might be leading them. Even today, people still talk to us about that raft.
Somewhere in all of this busyness, we started doing something (and continued doing it regularly over the past 17 years) that never gave anything back to us until yesterday. In April 2005, we opened educational savings accounts for each of our children. Yesterday, I paid for the first semester of my daughter’s college education with that money.
Yes, it finally paid off.
When I opened those accounts, sending our kids away to college seemed like a lifetime away. Now, as I write, we are less than 48 hours from boarding a plane to Nashville, where our no-longer-a-toddler little girl will begin her first semester of university as a Social Work major.
Where did the time go?
What have I been doing all this time?
I’m not ready for this…but ready or not, this is happening.
Making a digital transfer of funds is just the first step—the first signs of change that will only continue and intensify the following year as her brother does the same. It’s good and the way things ought to be, but that doesn’t make it easy.
I am glad that we have some funds available to help them. It’s not much, but we have been blessed. I can’t wait to see where they go, what they do, and the difference they make in this world. I am so incredibly proud of each of them.
Even so, the words of our 5-year-old last month ring loud in my heart — “I’m going to miss her when she is gone…it’s going to be the saddest day of my life.”
For years, I was always the one leaving — leaving friends and colleagues in Indonesia to visit the States and then leaving friends and family in the States to return to Indonesia. Now I’m the one being staying behind.
There will be tears, to be sure, but most of them will be drops or gratefulness and hope for what lies ahead.
Go get’em girl!