Why Austria?

On Thursday I began the travels for my adventure, but before I detail that I figured it would be a good idea to address the question that I’ve had from a lot of people lately as I’ve told them about my plans for this year. Why Austria? How we ended up here has a long story to go with it, but to try keep it short I’ll just give the general overview.

While I was at Bible school in the spring of this year, my friend Celeste and I both applied for several volunteer positions within the organisation called Torchbearers, which was the same organisation as the school that we were attending in Sweden. Both of us were unsure of what we wanted to pursue within the year after we were done in Sweden and so we thought that it would be cool to spend another year abroad, this time as staff instead of students. We were hopeful that we would receive responses from these schools right away as to whether or not they would like us to come and work for them but we actually ended up waiting a long time for answers. When we finally received the first ones, they came back negative, saying that they already had their positions filled. Eventually the only place that we hadn’t heard back from was the school in Austria, called Taurenhof, and so we were praying that this would be the place that God would call us to.

We waited and waited, but still nothing. We had almost stopped hoping that they would take us since we thought that if it was taking this long to answer then they had probably filled the positions already. But the evening that a group of us from Holsby were preparing to leave for a missions trip to Brazil, we found out that Celeste and I were not going to be able to go due to issues with Visas. We were hoping to be able to re-schedule our trip to Brazil for later in the year so as to not lose the money that we had spent on flights. But this meant that we now needed an answer as to whether we were accepted in Austria so that we wouldn’t re-schedule our flights over the time that we would potentially be there. We called the school and told them that we needed a response by that afternoon and so they said that they would call us back. We spent a big part of that day in anticipation of their response, and when they called us back, they said that they would take both of us! We were at most expecting one of us to get in so this was a huge answer to prayer that neither of us would be going alone.

As it turned out we decided not to re-schedule our trip to Brazil because it just didn’t really work for either of us. But we were so happy that we had both gotten accepted in Austria that it made that really terrible day a lot better. We felt that this was God’s clear answer to our prayers because we had been denied so many things that day that it was awesome to receive a yes from them.

So that is an extremely condensed versions of how we ended up with this position in Austria, (the Brazil story could be a lot longer with more details but that’s the general idea). Taurenhof is located in central Austria closeish to Salzburg. Celeste and I will be working in the kitchen at the school as well as possibly helping with a few other jobs around the campus. We actually don’t have a ton of details about this but are really excited to find out what it’s going to be like!