Hello everyone! So I wanted to start off by telling a small part of my testimony. Okay, don’t freak out, it’s only my first post so it is not going to be in full detail. But I think it is important that y’all know a little bit about me if you are going to be reading my blog posts. So….here we go!
I am currently 19 years old, single, still living with my parents, and I have two part time jobs. You don’t have to tell me, I know what you are thinking, “Wow! She is living THE LIFE!” Haha, just kidding. I have grown up in a Christian household, going to church, learning about Jesus every Sunday, and very rarely even missing a Sunday. I was saved and baptized at the age of 7, because that was a normal thing to do in a baptist church. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to be saved because I did believe in Jesus and that he had died for me and washed away my sins. But I didn’t start living for him for a very long time. About 10 years to be exact.
I went on mission trips with my church, helped with VBS, went around to people’s houses and witnessed to them, prayed with people, loved on kids and elders….all the right “Christian” things. But I had blinders on the whole time. It wasn’t until my senior year in high school that I actually started fully living for Christ. Everyone who has ever graduated from high school knows that between your sophomore and senior year, you get asked at least 487 times a week, “So what are you going to do when you graduate high school?” And if you’re anything like me, you want to say, “I DO NOT KNOW! STOP ASKING ME! I DON’T HAVE MY LIFE TOGETHER LIKE YOU THINK I SHOULD!”
But one night at the end of my sophomore year, I was at a church conference (I couldn’t tell you for the life of me what was taught at that conference) and I just felt this soft whisper tell me, “You should work with orphans.” So I went home and researched international orphan work. I saw some interesting websites and organizations, but nothing really stood out to me. But I did know one thing for sure - I was not going back to China. Oh yeah, I kinda skipped over that little detail. I went to China with my parents and younger brother at the age of 13 to adopt my youngest brother Joshua. And we had a great experience, but since I had already been to China once, I wanted to go somewhere different. I spent the next year and a half researching on and off about orphan work and couldn’t find anything that I really liked.
I’ve always loved kids and babies; and I have a very special relationship with Joshua. So my senior year in high school, I was talking to my mom about it and she said to look into an organization called “Show Hope” that does student trips to China during the summer. So I looked into it, decided to just apply to see if I would even get into the program, and I did! I was more excited about going than I thought I was going to be. So I went to China two weeks after I graduated high school in June of 2017. My team and I volunteered in a special needs care facility in Luoyang, China. I loved it so much and wanted to go back as soon as possible.
In December of 2017, one of the girls that was on my team to China, she told me about a different organization that does camps for special and non-special needs orphans in five different locations in China. The organization is called “Bring Me Hope”. I applied to go and heard back from them a couple weeks later saying that I had been accepted and was going to be in two different locations - Yantai and Zhengzhou. I planned for months on end to be in the country I call my second home. I will tell y’all more about my camp experience at a later date, but know that China will be talked about a lot in my posts. It is a great part of my story and why I love being apart of the Kingdom of God. Love y'all!
- Han <3 -
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