Update: Although we didn’t find out until days later, on same day all this was happening, Jenny’s mom agreed (“out of the blue”) to keep paying her normal monthly support stipend while we’re in Africa! Between that, and an unexpected and very generous monthly support subscription from a friend, we’re up to 46% of our monthly support target! That’s a whole new ballgame right there! I am so thankful to my friends out there who, day by day are stepping in alongside us in our journey and becoming real answers to prayer!!

I spent a couple of hours working on our front page monthly support thermometer widget. It took me ten minutes to pull together the widget and just under two hours working on the back-end script total the donations and work out the math, which wasn’t adding up. As it turned out, the math was fine, we were just way below what we expected. As of right now, we only have 17% of the support we’ll need to survive in Uganda. With only a month to go, I found myself wondering if I had made a huge mistake with this Uganda thing. After all, I’m supposed to be the provider for my family, and I’m unemployed, uprooting our existence and traveling into the unknown.

So we prayed about it before dinner and explained the situation to the kids, telling them that it was cool and that we were in God’s hands and that this path we were on was the right one and didn’t all the open doors make that all quite obvious?

My own words echoed in my head all through dinner. This was the right path. There was no doubt about that. But without the money, it was a hard path.

At that moment, somewhere on the Internets, some interesting things were happening. First, a man and wife (who want to remain mostly anonymous) were blowing up our Donor Cloud (<plug>Over there on the right, see? That form where you can make a donation, get a link and feed kids?</plug>). Their donation was thirty times bigger than our largest cloud donation EVER. We had some email conversations with the donors in the past and they hinted at wanting to help us personally, through the “Long Journey to Africa” fund. Jen and I agreed to email them, thank them profusely and explain the various options for their donation, especially since the cloud was designed as a low-cost option for funding the food program.

We laid out several options for the money: building a classroom, funding the food program for several months and (in the smallest paragraph) helping us with our journey. The donor said to “use the funds as we saw fit”. It took a split second, but we examined the options.

The food program had a solid stream of income thanks to the Informer, the donor cloud and royalties from sales of No-Tech Hacking. Our “Long Journey” fund was struggling, but at least we had some money coming in (17% of what we needed was something, right?). The computer classroom initiative, however was really struggling. We hadn’t had a solid donation for months, aside from a check that we couldn’t yet cash because it was made out to HFC and our business account wasn’t ready.

In that split seconds, despite the ability to use the check as we saw fit, we Jen and I knew the money would go towards a computer classroom. The story didn’t stop there, however.

At almost the same time (right after dinner), another donor was making the single largest donation ever into our family fund. There was no decision to be made. The donor wanted us to use the money for our one-time living expenses.

The lesson was clear enough to me. This would not be an easy path. It would be littered with tough decisions and potential distractions, but in that moment, my faith was bolstered.

We’re still at 17% of what we’ll need every month and I do find myself checking the monthly subscription totals in the “Long Journey” fund, but we’ve taken another step forward, and we remain faithful that either a financial miracle will occur or that we’ll at least be given the strength to carry on if the money doesn’t come.

Either way, we’ll be in Uganda in less than a month!