Who would have guessed?

For those of you that know Adam and/or Sara well, we are a rather unlikely pair to be jet-setting across the globe. Until we were dating, Adam had never been on a plane, and as Fred likes to report, Adam went all the way to India to dip his toes in an ocean. :) 

As for me (Sara), I am not exactly known as "laid back" so traveling presents all sorts of challenges for my Type-A planner nature, and while I have no doubt that I will easily and immediately fall in love with the girls and the Anthony family, some of the other aspects of traveling (flights, time changes, different food, etc.) can leave me a bit anxious.

...And did I mention that neither of us have a good sense of direction?

It can be hard sometimes to explain to people why we are making this trip.  And people understandably want to know. After all, taking a trip like this isn't exactly on everyone's life to-do list!

For me (Sara), it can be hard to articulate why we are going partly because I want to be careful to explain why we are not going.  That is, we are not going to change the world or because we think that in two weeks we can take on a social issue in another country and solve it or because we hold some sort of ultimate answer. We are just two twenty-somethings from Kansas. What do we know?

We are also not going to (to put it bluntly) throw money at something and walk away patting each other on the back, not knowing whether or not it actually helped anyone.

I hope you will forgive my frankness, but it is really an important distinction for both of us to make and quite honestly, it is extremely easy to fall into these thought processes.

With a typical Robertson preface out of the way :) here is my best attempt at why we are going and why we are so very excited to step on that plane in a few weeks:

Basically, for us, it all comes back to relationships.

We are building on relationships Adam began in 2009 when he first visited Love in Action. We are supporting the work of the Anthony family and the beautiful girls that join their home. We are encouraging them in their daily ministry to their family, to their neighborhood, to their city, to their world. We believe in what they are doing--loving each other, fighting for justice, bringing Hope into dark places--and we believe that they are doing it well.

We willingly support their work financially because we believe that to those who have been given much, much is expected. We believe that we are a global family and we are excited to share our resources with them just as our generous community has shared resources with us.

For us, this trip is about saying yes to something that we don't fully understand. We are saying yes to the homemade stenciled invitation we received on pink construction paper last fall addressed to Auntie Sara and Uncle Adam that now hangs in our kitchen. We are saying yes to the call God has placed on us and our marriage from the very start. We are saying yes to something challenging, something stretching, something we expect will cause growth, something that has already caused growth.

Thank you for joining our journey.