Today's post comes to you from my friend Kasey Otto! Kasey, her husband and their four wonderful kiddos are moving to Malawi, Africa as missionaries.
The Lord brought the Otto family into my life just last year. We attended the same church and knew of each other but it wasn't until both of our life journeys lead us to the same continent, did our friendship form. All it took was one dinner at their house for me to be hooked. I loved this family like they were my own!
I absolutely LOVE what God is doing in their lives and the amazing journey He has set them on! Plus I am so excited and thankful to have them living so "close" again. Honestly when most of your friends and family leave on an entirely different continent, being on the same landmass does something to your heart!
I invite you today to prayerfully consider partnering with them this month... and in the coming months as they raise the necessary funds for their family and ministry.
We are so excited God has placed us on this amazing adventure to Malawi, Africa! We are the Otto family, Trevor and Kasey, Victoria, Corbin, Penelope, and Elliott. We first heard God calling us to go deeper with Him in the fall of 2011. We were leading a typical Christian life and enjoyed attending church regularly, volunteering occasionally, and enjoying fellowship time with family and friends. We started a study on Crazy Love, by Francis Chan and the Holy Spirit quickly convicted us that we were living a luke-warm life style! This had to change! We didn’t want to be luke-warm Christians; we wanted to live a radical life stopping at nothing to carry out the Great Commission leading those around us into the love of Jesus Christ. So we began to get intentional with our life. God opened our eyes up to our neighbors and led us into a neighborhood ministry during the summer of 2012. Children gave their lives to Christ and were even baptized in our own backyard! It was truly amazing and only something God could have planned.
While God was doing amazing things with our neighborhood ministry, Trevor and I still felt that God wanted more. Trevor had prophetic words spoken to him during a time of prayer and he was told he was going to have a dream in which God would tell him exactly what He wanted him to do with his life. The very next night, Trevor and I had the exact same dream. We dreamt of Africa all night long. In our dream we saw dark-skinned children, mud-huts, the dry African landscape, and we knew this was the more that God wanted for our family.
We asked God for confirmation many times in the following months that this was indeed His plan for our life. We would ask Him to speak to us in specific ways and He was faithful every single time. He even reminded us of when our oldest daughter was 5 years old and would beg us for months on end to move to Africa so she could study all the animals there (during this time we assured her we were never moving to Africa and she would have to wait until she was at least 18 to move there herself). He led us to A Lighted Path and we suddenly had a mission, a place to live and friends in Malawi, Africa. We knew we wanted to visit Malawi before moving and God sent us on a trip in October 2012.
This trip opened up our eyes to what God meant when He said we must deny ourselves, pick up our cross, and follow Him. We had never seen so much poverty in our lives; hungry, homeless children, broken down homes and hopeless faces. I told God I wasn’t going to do it. I wasn’t going to move my family into this dirty, sad, unpredictable country. He whispered back to me “I’ll be here with you, if you want to follow me; this is where I want to use you.” So we must go. We must go because God has people who are waiting for us in Malawi, they are waiting to hear about the love of their Savior and God wants us to go and tell them. They have been praying for clean water to nourish their bodies and Living Water to nourish their souls and God has told our family that we are going to be the ones to physically deliver these things. God has children waiting for us to arrive and bring them food so they know they will eat every day. The Father wants these children to sing His praises and we must teach them to do so. So we must go, we must go because we have brothers and sisters who have been praying and are waiting for us to arrive.
I pray that you want to go too. Even though God has chosen our family to physically go to Malawi, He wants every believer to send His gospel to the nations. You can do that by praying for us. Follow our story and journey and tell other people about what God is doing so they can pray too.
You can also go to the nations by supporting us financially. We need support in the form of monthly pledges. We estimate our monthly need to be $3000.00 month. In the future we hope to be self-sustaining but ask that you would commit to two years of pledges while we are getting our ministry started.
We are also in need of monies to cover the cost of specific things that we will need as we begin our life in Malawi. We are praying specifically at this time for:
*airfare to Malawi for 6, approx. $18,000
*vehicle for use in Malawi, approx. $10,000
*household furnishings and goods, approx. $2000
You may set up a recurring monthly payment using or send a one-time gift using the pay-pal button or by mail to:
A Lighted Path
P.O. Box 27154
Omaha, NE 68127
Checks can be made payable to A Lighted Path. We ask that you put nothing in the memo line but instead attach a sticky note indicating you would like your gift donated to our family. A Lighted Path is a 501(C)(3) tax exempt non-profit organization.
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