One step forward, ten steps back

Well, just when we think things are moving forward with Allen's karate classes, something seems to delay the start date.

I'm starting to wonder if this is ever going to really happen. But, in the meantime, we are definitely learning a thing or two about patience.

We were working with a church in Nashville to get things going. Allen had approached the preacher there to get some spiritual guidance on how to make his business a ministry and include devotions and stuff in his classes. Through discussions on that, the church asked us to have classes at the church, which sounded awesome since we were still looking at places to do the classes. It was a win-win for everyone! But, those talks started like 6 months ago and here we are, still waiting. There's a lot of things involved when you work with an organization that's run by a lot of people. So, here we are, still waiting for the church to tell us we can get started.

Allen has been pretty accomodating, doing whatever they ask of him and he's been willing to compromise but the timeline is getting frustrating for him. We had this big demo in March to get interest. We've got the interest and now we get asked weekly when are we getting started and we don't know what to tell them. Soon, we'll probably lose these kids to something else because it's taking so long for us to get off the ground.

It's hard seeing Allen so excited about this and then seeing the disappointment each week he comes from yet another meeting with no information. I don't know what to tell him. This week, he came home and I could tell the meeting didn't go well and that he still had no date and he was probably given a new set of hoops to jump through. And I was right. All I knew to tell him was that God gave him the vision to do this and that God would make it happen when the time is right. In the meantime, I told him he needed to get back on his knees and pray about it, because it's during times that we doubt that we need to talk to God. It's funny that I gave him that advice when I don't even do it myself. But that's something, I too, need to try and change.

Anyway, we've been working on this business over a year now. We've done everything as good as we know how but it still does not seem to want to get going. It just feels like for every step we take forward, we take a dozen or so backwards.