Guest blogger Rebecca Floyd and her husband Nick lead Mercy Table, an outreach in St. John’s in association with Anawim.

Most weekends we leave Mercy Table excited about what God is doing: He chooses to use us to create a church that welcomes drug addicts, thieves, ex cons, you name it, that wouldn’t otherwise step foot into a church, and we get the chance to share a meal with them and share the love of Christ.

If you look at what we do with spiritual eyes, the picture is obvious, essentially it’s Jesus with tax collectors, it’s the great commission lived out, its walking in faith and obedience, it’s “fishing”, it’s being a missionary family, it’s really a beautiful thing. God using a family that is available to Him for His purpose.

BUT if you look at it with worldly eyes, we are basically crazy. While there is enough evidence to make a great case for that, (without even knowing that our family does MT) or maybe it seems like a really nice thing to do.

We have been doing this for two years (CRAZY!!!, can’t believe it’s been that long already!) and we have always discussed and prayed over the fact we are called to His purpose, which means our kids are called, however He wants us to be wise in what we do.

So what does that look like for our family?

He knew we had five young children when He called us.

And He knew who He was calling us to work with.

After a very eventful Saturday in June we made lots of decisions regarding the ministry. God took us on a journey in two of the longest short weeks ever.

The thought of quitting was on our radar for sure, yet, at the same time, we knew that was fear-based and God called us to this, and if He called us to Uganda we wouldn’t get there and try to go home because our kids weren’t safe, so, now what. How do we do this safely, wisely, but remain obedient to the call?

First we knew we had to have childcare for our own kiddos, something we’d been praying about for months, yet were not blessed with help. So we decided Nick would go alone until we had help, our bold prayer was, God if you want us to continue this ministry we HAVE to have childcare.

A tiny pinch of me (and Nick) wanted to just quit and go back to comfy suburb life attending church on Sundays, and for that matter let’s just go back to Texas and have a giant home (in a reasonable market for crying out loud!!) and raise our family and never leave home, or at least never be around people who aren’t safe (whatever that means).

We took August off, the whole month, none of us went, those whom God serves through us knew we weren’t going to be there on Saturdays. Our kids reaction to the news was interesting. They were concerned for specific people and concerned about what they would eat and other things, (thank you God for teaching my kids (Your kids), and giving them a heart for others and You, through this ministry you called our family to)

August we prayed, boldly, fearfully and fully confident that He would answer, If you want us to continue, bring us childcare and more help.

He brought us FOUR trusted friends to watch our kids AND an incredible God fearing, Jesus loving, Bible reading woman, who has walked the life that some of our people have, AND a college student to serve with us.

So, we have our answer.

(We would still love to have help, please please pray about joining us.)

Today was an incredible day of being able to focus on what He has called us to do, without worrying about our own kids, and it was so amazing to see Him work through the new volunteers, and spend time with my MT kids. Nick led a great message, I say led a message because our church is far from traditional and often Nicks message is a giant conversation about the Gospel. (INCREDIBLE to be a part of)