3 Months Later.....

Here's the email I wrote to the director of the Philippines midwifery school when she wrote to request a final interview before making their acceptance decision. I received her email on Friday night - about 4 hours afer Caleb accepted his new position at NavPress. I applied on September 26th.
It's truly amazing as we walk by faith and not by sight. Our Lord does seem to have it all planned out, doesn't he?

Dear (director),
We have been praying long and hard about this decision, as you can imagine.
We have such a heart for the birth center and have become very emotionally attached over the last couple of months through pictures, blogs, and stories of the people and the work that is being done. We want very much to be a part of this wonderful endeavor but feel that we will have to delay our journey at this time.
This is a much longer conversation than I can contain in an email, but here's a few summarized points.

We have many reasons for making this decision.
One of our desires in coming is that we would be able to have a financial plan that does not include going into debt, as we have just spent the last 4 years getting out of debt with the intention of becoming more mobile. We feel this would be best accomplished if we are able to sustain some of our own living expenses through work that my husband may be able to do at a distance. He has just accepted a Senior Editor position with NavPress here in Colorado whose leadership and employees have a global vision and culture of missions. We have already shared our plans with them and have been told that they will support us in a short term vision trip and intensive skills training opportunity sometime in the next couple of years.

Secondly, I am the co-founder and director of a young non-profit family organization. I am worried for Xylem's success if I were to leave in such an early stage without an adequate replacement. However, I will be working toward transitioning many of my responsibilities by training and mentoring others to allow me to focus more on missionary midwifery in the future.

And the biggest issue is that I'm not quite ready to be away from my little ones for such a length of time each week.

My current plan is to continue on with midwifery training here in the states at a slower pace and reevaluate in a year based on what I have been able to accomplish. At that time, we would like to plan to come sometime the following year (2008) for apprenticeship/intensive skills training. This trip would not only be to fufill NARM requirements (catches, prenatal numbers, etc) but act as a vision trip and aquire training for missionary midwifery. Our heart still aches for missionary midwifery and the idea of learning how to operate a birth center in developing countries. I would love to schedule a time to chat and have you tell us what this might look like if we were to come for an apprenticeship/intensive skills training. What length of an apprenticeship/intensive would be necessary to learn this aspect of the program?

Thanks so much for all of your help and consideration of my application. I would love to hear any feedback or questions you might have.
I look forward to talking with you again soon.