Visas. Sometimes they are stamps in your passport given on arrival. Sometimes they take weeks and months of applications, fees, and the anxiety of mailing your passport off to an embassy praying it will return.  Regardless, in most cases if you want to enter another country, especially if you want to live there, a visa is required.

For our Global Partners, obtaining or renewing visas is a part of the rhythm of their lives. When it is time to apply for a new one, its always on the prayer request list. Nothing is certain when it comes to visas.

Recently, some of our Global Partners were denied a visa renewal. They have one month to pack up and leave a country that has been home for 16 years. They will leave behind their ministry, church, friends, and their daughter, son-in-law and  grandchildren. There will be tears and grieving, but they have faith and trust that God is in control and He has ordered the next season of their life.

Two more of our Global Partner families have been facing visa challenges.  Both have been waiting and praying and trusting for months.

In John 9:57-58 we read, “As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’ Jesus replied, ‘Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.’ ”

While visas can be a source of burden and stress–they are also a constant reminder to cross cultural workers, that following Jesus can mean uncertainty and that we need to be willing to go wherever and whenever He moves us. Most of us don’t have to worry about visas, but are we open to God moving us?

Please pray today that God will keep open doors to people and places that need His healing and grace. Pray that our Global Partners would trust Him when doors close that they don’t understand and they have to pack up, move, and start over again.

Let’s pray too that God would speak clearly to our hearts, and that we too would have the  courage to move where He calls… whether it is across the street to meet a neighbor, or maybe even across the world.