Robbie Vanderveen

Talk about your trip abroad in 2016. What motivated you guys to go on this trip?

We had been studying the gifts of the spirit at Church, like dreams, visions, words from God and we were in the midst of that when Chase had heard ‘Don’t book any weddings or photography jobs for the fall of 2017’. The way photography works is that people schedule things far in advance. So she stopped booking jobs and she didn’t know what this was or if she was going to change career paths or what. 

And then we would talk about it all the time, what we would be doing, and travel came up. 

So, we thought ‘Let’s just see the world’, you know we are stuck in this little circle of white America and let’s just go out, see other cultures, and have a new experience. That was the initial thought and as it got closer and closer, we thought that God was maybe calling us to be missionaries. 

We got plugged into a couple different organizations. There was a church plant in Thailand we were going to see and thought we might help with this new church plant. There was a refugee ministry in Greece that we heard of through a connection at church and so we made that a stop. Both of those experiences were so different. 

We had such an awesome time in Greece, and we were like ‘Maybe we’re supposed to be here’. We saw several different organizations that were helping, Farsi speakers in one and Arabic speakers in another. Just hearing their stories there were just remarkable, you know, they were just pulling people out of the water. 

A guy is getting phone calls from people he doesn’t know because his number is distributed all across Syria that this guy will help you if you cross the dangerous waters from Turkey to Greece. We were just like ‘Man, people are nuts,’ this is happening right now. If we had stayed in Omaha, we could have heard about it but when this guy is telling you, shaking your hand, and giving you a hug it’s that much more real. We were praying every night, ‘God, if this is the spot just make it clear to us’ and we never felt a confirmation. 

When we ended up back in Omaha, we were kind of lost not knowing what the next step would be. Something we had thrown out before we left was to move in with the refugees that we taught ESL to once a week. Why don’t we be an advocate? It’s something we said in the beginning and when we didn’t have a clear direction when we came back, we said ‘Alright, let’s do this.’

Everywhere we went we would meet people and think ‘Man, people are just generally good people.’

How did you see your heart or perspective change during your time there? 

In a couple ways. My appreciation and love for God’s word grew. I was reading stories that I really never delved into before and just opening the bible to see what was important to him and what he wanted to convey to us. That was a big thing. The other one, I kept telling Chase, was that there are so many good people in this world. Everywhere we went we would meet people and think ‘Man, people are just generally good people.’ It is God-ordained that people want to be helpful and nice and want to help the foreign person. Everywhere we went we felt loved by people regardless if they knew English or not.

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