A Global Umbrella

Summer of Celebration Series …

Celebrating the Faithfulness of God in Ordinary Places

There was a time in my life when I thought relationships were difficult to maintain even down the block. Life gets busy. People move. Schedules fill. Friendships drift. I assumed that was simply how life worked.

And yet somehow, my mother has built relationships across the globe.

Not surface relationships. Not social media acquaintances. Real relationships. Deep relationships. The kind built through prayer, sacrifice, ministry, tears, shared meals, and showing up for one another over and over again.

I didn’t fully understand the power of that until my son ended up in the NICU.

The Call for Prayer

There are moments in life that divide everything into “before” and “after.” Sitting beside a tiny hospital bed while your child fights for strength is one of those moments. The monitors beep differently. Time slows down. Your body is present, but your mind races through every possible fear at once.

As a mother, you feel helpless and fiercely protective at the same time.

And in the middle of that uncertainty, my mother made a call.

Not a phone call for sympathy.
Not a social media plea for attention.

She called for prayer and fasting.

Women responded from across the world.

Women from different churches.
Different countries.
Different cultures.
Different languages.
Different time zones.

Some I had never met.

And yet they fasted and prayed for my son.

That moment humbled me more than I can explain.

A Global Church

At the time, the call to Umbwella's Stand had already begun stirring, though the mission itself had not fully taken shape. The call had gone out, but the full meaning of it was still unfolding.

Honestly, global missions had never really mattered much to me personally before then. I didn’t dislike missions. I simply didn’t understand them. I thought of missions mostly as travel, ministry trips, fundraising, and people serving far away from home.

I had no idea how deeply connected the global Church actually is.

I had no idea that women thousands of miles away would stop what they were doing to pray for a baby they would likely never meet.

I had no idea that fasting and prayer could cross oceans so naturally.

But they did.

In that moment, the world suddenly felt both enormous and incredibly small.

The Things That Never Change

There is something sacred about realizing that the same God hears prayers whispered in South Africa, Germany, America, and beyond. The same God responds to mothers crying out for their children regardless of language, culture, or geography.

Some principles of God and humanity simply do not change from culture to culture.

The desire to love and be loved.
The desire to support and be supported.
The instinct to protect children.
The longing for hope.
The need for community.

These things are universal.

And maybe that is part of what missional living truly means.

It is not merely boarding airplanes or preaching sermons overseas. It is recognizing that the Body of Christ was never meant to function in isolation. We were designed to carry one another’s burdens. To mourn together. To rejoice together. To pray for one another across borders and oceans and denominations.

The global Church becomes very personal when your own child is the one being covered in prayer.

What Umbwella's Stand Means to Me

That experience changed the way I viewed missions forever.

I realized that relationships built through ministry are not transactional. They are transformational. They create a network of faith that stretches far beyond what we can physically see.

My mother spent years investing in people, encouraging missionaries, praying for families, showing up for others, and living missionally long before I fully understood why it mattered.

Then one day, when my family desperately needed support, that same global community showed up for us.

That is what Umbwella's Stand means to me.

It means the world is smaller than we think.
It means prayer travels farther than airplanes ever could.
It means obedience creates ripple effects we may never fully understand.
It means relationships built in Christ are never wasted.

And it means somewhere across the globe, another mother understands exactly what it means to cry out to God for her child.

No translation needed.