Greetings
Hello Friends and Family and Happy Easter! After our last post, many of you have reached out to us to ask if there have been any recent updates concerning our future plans. For those who missed our last big blog update, you can read it here. As a brief recap, Samantha and I shared back in January that we felt God calling our family into something entirely new. The plan we shared with you all was that this would be our last school-year working with Emmaus Bible Ministries and that I (Jacob) was beginning the process of enrolling in seminary out of state.
Update
We had hoped to share an update with you all MUCH sooner, but the enrollment process into seminary has dragged on much longer than we had anticipated and we still don’t have a sure answer on that front where we had hoped to be able to give you one now. But more significantly, Samantha and I only recently discovered that God truly did have something entirely new in store for our family’s future… we just had no idea how different it would be from the plans we had in mind!
That’s right folks, we’re expecting, not one, but TWO new baby boy McRaes this Fall. It perhaps goes without saying, but twins were not on our family’s 2025 Bingo card and this has caused us to pause and re-assess what lies ahead for us and to continue discerning what the Lord is leading us into. Because the babies are due to arrive right around the time I had planned to start seminary full-time, that plan has begun to take on a new shape.
- First, we had planned to move this summer in order for me to attend seminary full-time and on-campus in the Fall. With the new arrival of the twins in the Fall, the new plan (if my application is accepted) is to start seminary in a very limited capacity online–in the hopes that we can resume the original plan of me attending seminary in a greater capacity (and on-campus) once our family is ready to make that transition. With this plan, we will remain in Florida throughout the pregnancy and delivery, and until such time we feel it would be more practical to resume our original plan.
- Given this extended stay in Florida, we have also decided to extend the timeline of our transition out of Emmaus. We have so far committed to remaining with Emmaus throughout the remainder of the calendar year (December 2025) and will continue to discern throughout this time what the right next steps may be. Even though we had initially felt that God was leading us to begin something new on a much quicker timeline, we LOVE Emmaus and I’m excited to be able to continue helping in whatever ways I can over this next season. As a ministry, Emmaus has some exciting things ahead, and I’m glad to be able to continue my passion of teaching the Bible while we wait upon the Lord’s timing in all this.
Prayers
Please be praying for us throughout this process, as all these decisions have felt very weighty to us and the unexpected nature of the timing still has us internally reeling in some ways. While we’re very excited for what’s ahead and we’re rejoicing over what God has already revealed concerning the future of our family–there are a lot of practical things we still need to think through and figure out. Of our many prayer requests, one of the more immediate prayer requests (which feels like a constant one for our family!) is: a vehicle. While transportation is currently not an issue for us, we do not have a vehicle that can fit four kids, and we’ll need to figure something out before the twins come.
Closing
Because this is a lot of new info for an update all by itself, I’m going to try and release another more ministry-related update in the next couple of weeks detailing some of the work and exciting things going on with Emmaus. 🙂
We love you all and we deeply appreciate your prayers and support!
– The McRae Family
Please enjoy some recent photos from our family’s Spring Break trip and Easter:
The McRae Family 