July 25, 2025 familyflourish

Vietnam Trip Blessings

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Hello, everyone! Thank you so much for your prayers! Going to Vietnam with my two oldest kids was an amazing trip, and I saw God’s hand all over it! Here are prayers answered and other blessings:

• Our family stayed healthy throughout and only a few team members had minor illnesses.
• Everything went fine with all the flights and driving through the country–only minor delays. We all even rode on the back of motor bikes on a tour of Ho Chi Minh City the first day there without injury–just a few of us brushed knees with other motor bike riders, and a few of us ended up lost for a few minutes. Driving in HCM City is more of an art than a science. There are few rules. In streams of motorbikes, each packed with up to four or five people, they mostly just follow two main rules: try not to hit anyone and get to wherever you want to go in the most convenient way possible. They don’t travel at very high speeds, but they rarely stop, and if you want to cross a busy street, you just step out into it slowly and walk across while the traffic goes around you.

• I had the privilege of seeing Hien again, a girl I had connected with back in 2006 and 2007, and we recognized each other right away! She was a little girl then, but she’s grown now with her own son, and she was one of the main translators at the camp. It was amazing to see her and others I recognized all grown up and doing well. My family and I have been supporting this organization financially and with prayer for around 15 years or more, and it’s so good to see what God has been doing. Here we are together in 2007 and now!

• We got to sing as a team in front of a church!

• I taught four Bible lessons from Genesis, and it was amazing to see God take my lessons and direct me as I taught them–what to take out, what to add. He put together crafts that complemented the lessons without our planning to make it fit. He made other talks fit together with the themes perfectly in a way I didn’t foresee. He gave me ideas for activities to make the lessons more memorable. He gave me the translators I needed when I needed them–the more serious one during lessons that needed introspection and a more lively one when the students needed encouragement to engage more. I was in awe! Evangeline illustrated my lessons next to me, which I loved!

• In between teaching sessions, I connected with a few sweet boys. We didn’t share a language, but high fives, hand slap games, and fun in the pool don’t need a language!

• We had the joy to listen to a wise Vietnamese gentleman, who communicated with us the history and current state of the church in Vietnam.
• Home parents were able to connect with each other and get support from each other and from the staff. They were trained in how to deal with the trauma with which many of the kids arrive.
• I first went to Vietnam six years after the organization began, near the beginning. This time, I was able to be there when the founders handed off the baton to a new director.

• What a blessing it was to watch my own kids serve by leading games and helping with the kids! Both of them also gave their testimonies, which was the first time I had fully heard them. Both of them connected with kids and will stay in touch with some.

• After the camp, we drove to Nha Trang, where we visited the kids in their homes. I loved seeing them in their own environment! At the first house we visited, as we walked towards it, we could hear them squealing, as they had caught sight of us before we saw them (the picture below is of the kids in that first home). A moment more, and they were running to us. The generous hospitality the parents in each home showed us with gifts, food, and special fruit drinks was humbling.

• One home we visited was particularly special to me because Greg and I used to sponsor a child who has now left (another blessing is that while I was there, one of the staff was able to get a hold of the mother of that child–now grown, who sent a few fairly recent photos of him, and I was also able to find out the reasons for him leaving). We were able to visit that home and see the parents who raised him until he was 16, parents we knew from our first trip. Not only that, but this year that home will close because all the kids have graduated, so we were able to be present for a time when the boys who had been raised there thanked the ones who raised them one by one with translation. We ate dinner with them: delicious do-it-yourself Vietnamese spring rolls.

• Then, it was just a blessing to be in such a beautiful place eating delicious (and interesting) food with such a fun team and such fun kids! Enjoy the pictures!