Trip to the Philippines

I will be leaving on a missions trip in 11 days to the Philippines. I am starting to get excited. I have to prepare a sermon and a workshop. I think the sermon is nearly done, but the workshop is really hard for me. And I need to be able to relate to them and thier situation. They are way poorer and are used to hard work (even washing clothes is done by hand). They like stories, but I can't seem to tell one without stuff that isn't relatable! I need to change the perspective so that it focuses more on how I felt and how great God is in his provision than on the things I got. So I will post my story. PLEASE post any comments on how I can improve it for these wonderful ladies we are ministering to.
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A few years ago, my husband was looking for a church to pastor. He ended up finding one 1000 miles away from where we were. At the time we were living with his parents, youngest brother and for a short time his middle brother and his wife. We were all living in my father-in-law’s parsonage. So we were going to have to move far away from them and that made us a little sad. We were moving closer to my family, but our daughter was very close to my in-laws and didn’t know my family at all. We were concerned about tearing her away from them.

Well, we got all packed up on a Saturday and we were going to drive our car and his parents were going to follow us a few days later. We had agreed to be there on that Sunday so we were planning on driving the 14-hour trip through the night. We made it 4 hours and our car broke down. We had no way to get to our new home and church . We stayed overnight there and in the morning Chris’ (that’s my husband) parents picked us up and were able to tow our car to our new house.

That left us having missed our very first Sunday at our new pastorate and we did not have a car once we got there. We figured we could manage without the car for a while, but because we were living in the country, we would eventually need one to go shopping. We live about 30 min. from any large stores. The cost to fix our car was too much and we knew it would be months before we could afford to have it fixed. We also needed a washer and dryer and food.

When we arrived at our new house, another nearby church had left us groceries! It was a wonderful surprise! So we had what we needed most. A few days later, someone lent us a van to use. Two weeks after that, someone else GAVE us a different van. During that time someone gave us a washer and dryer so that we could wash our clothes. God also gave us more food a month after we moved. We had so much food we didn’t know where to put it."