God Stories

As I think about all the preparations it has taken for this particular team, I am reminded about all the God stories surrounding this mission already and it gives me goosebumps! God has been involved from the beginning! Before we even knew we would attempt a surgical mission, God provided a surgeon and nurse who has tons of surgical experience! We needed surgical instruments . . . . God provided through MidMichigan Medical Center's generosity in letting us borrow some instrumetns. We already had some other surgical supplies donated but they needed to be sterilized. Again . . . MidMichigan Medical Center allowed us to use their facilities to sterilize our supplies (another gift from God). It sure would be nice to have a machine that measures a person's oxygenation. Just a call to Rick with expectations of a negative answer showed that I did not trust enough! Just so happened that a local hospital had thought they had gotten rid of 3 outdated machines (that still work) but 2 years later they found them in storage . . . I called the day after the machines were found. Ha! God had them stored for 2 years for us! Well, it would be great to have an anesthesiologist, but this was not in God's plan, so one of our family docs said he would try to monitor this stuff. Last week, an advanced-life-support trained nurse who is used to monitoring when sedation is given decided to come! Thank you God for this gift, too! We were donated a couple of CPR cases and he went through and organized one for us to take. Well, now we need some meds to counteract nausea, low blood pressure, and other emergency meds . . . quick email to Bryan (a pharmacist) and he wrote me back the next day asking when I would like to pick them up!! Holy Cow!! Was God just waiting for me to ask? I think so. I know there are other stories in there, but these are some that I have been witness to. We have just the right number of nurses for this mission and we are even blessed with 2 medical students to help out where needed. We have only one lay person on the medical team who is eager to help with cleaning instruments, cleaning the OR, and helping to move patients.
Now, we have also decided that since there was so much interest in this trip, we should plan a VBS, too! The school building at Three Angels Children's Relief is available so it's a perfect place! Colleen was placed on this team by our Lord, too, and she has a huge heart for this kind of thing. She has been totally organizing this end of things so I have not had to worry about that. She has a great group of people helping out with this, too! Veggie Tales is the theme.
We leave our homes in 2 days. We are so very excited to serve our Lord in this capacity! Thank you God for choosing us. Please keep this group in your prayers. Mention us by name: Deb, Jamie, Kendra, Christina, Mike, Colleen, Tim, Megan, Kate, Connie, Tom, Matt, Megan, Kyle, Kate, Christina, Alexis, Cydney, Pat, Katie, and Lynda.