Today was a cool and drizzly day. It would’ve been a perfect day to stay home, read and take multiple naps. Or maybe clean out a junk drawer. Instead we left a zero dark thirty to visit a couple of prospective SOWER projects about an hour south of here.

Our first stop was Hobe Sound Bible College. We had a great tour of the campus and learned more about their program and need for SOWER assistance.

We were impressed with the campus and the other auxiliary ministries that are all interconnected (church, K-12 school, thrift shop, international mission board) and they seem to have enough RV spots available. While the decision of whether or not is not ours to make, we were happy to make the visit and report back the project committee.
Our second stop was Missionary Flights International in Ft. Pierce.

As the name suggests, they serve missionaries (primarily) in the Bahamas, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Which means they have been especially busy with disaster relief in those hurricane and earthquake devastated areas. Our visit with these folks was a little more informational (they hadn’t yet filled out an application, and our discussion was more on just how SOWERS works and how we could be a help to them.) We got a tour of the facility

and even got to look inside one of their DC-3 planes.

They recently built a new Hospitality Park for visiting missionaries, volunteers and work teams that are affiliated with MFI. A part of that is one of the nicest RV parks we have seen at a SOWER project (or maybe anywhere!).

Even on a gray and drizzly day, those are mighty fine RV spots!
Again, we’re not the ones making the decisions, but we definitely were impressed with the ministry, their need for SOWERS, and their readiness to have us come!
Those were two great visits – learning about how God is using different ministries to meet needs and share the Gospel. We were honored to be able to see those projects in action! But God had another unexpected blessing waiting for us. Since there are two other existing SOWER projects in that area, we decided to stop and say hello to any SOWERS that were home. Only one couple was around, so we introduced ourselves and they invited us in. As we were sharing our “SOWER stories” we realized that we had dear friends, Jim and Lily, in common. Jim and Lily were some of the first SOWERS that we worked with and they’ve held a special place in our hearts. We’d visited their Maryland home, stopped to see them at their son’s home in FL, and generally connected whenever we could. Lily’s health began to fail and she recently moved into nursing care. As we (our new friends Tom and Kathy) were sharing Jim and Lily stories (they knew them from Christian Motorcycle Association and had in fact introduced Tom and Kathy to SOWERS), we decided to just give Jim a call!! I’m pretty sure we made his day – and I know the conversation made ours!! What an unexpected delight!

It totally made getting up at zero dark thirty worth it! 🙂

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