What a Long, Strange Trip – Revenge of the Résumé

The whole “camp pastor” thing was amazingly cathartic. 

Not quite a week later we scheduled a meeting to sit down with one of our pastors. After telling him our story, he said that perhaps – and “maybe I’m wrong, but…” – we had been brought to Twin Falls and then to a failed job because we were still supposed to be in ministry, just not that ministry anymore. A different kind of ministry. Knowing how God works sometimes, that seemed reasonable. And so a new batch of résumés went out over cyberspace.

I became active with a couple of Christian job placement sites, headhunters for church work. At the final count, I had sent out 46 résumés. Number 46 was the one that landed a response. It was to an international church in Chiang Mai, Thailand. 

“Honey… what do you think about living in Thailand?” The church website told us that they were looking for both a Senior Pastor and a Youth Pastor. I decided to put in for both. It was around 4:00 in the afternoon on a Friday.

“Wouldn’t it be cool,” I said, “if they got back to us so that we could mention it to the pastor.” Andrea reminded me that it was around 5:00 Saturday morning in Thailand. “They’re probably not going to even get the email until Monday.” I knew this, but still thought it would be cool. That evening, at around 10:00, I saw that I had an email. It was from Chiang Mai. They wanted more information. We emailed back and forth for a week or so, and the church told us that we needed to be connected to a Mission Organization. Andrea’s folks had been with one that merged with Pioneers, so we contacted them. 

Pioneers arranged a Skype interview with us, and we passed. We were told that we needed to attend an Orientation in Orlando, either in October or January. Since we wanted to really see if this was the direction God wanted to send us, we settled on the October session. With paying for the training itself and airfare, we were looking at around $2000. Did I mention that we were both still unemployed? Within five days, we had all but $70. We were on our way.