years ago before we left the U.S. we placed three Geocaching dog tags with a kina coin around them, in various caches across the U.S. One in California, One in Northern Carolina, and one in Oregon.
If you don't know what geocaching is, check out geocaching.com
When people found the dog tag, they looked up the serial number, saw our story, and then moved the dog tag along to another cache.
Our story was that of why we decided to move to PNG. Our challenge was to pray for us (if you're a praying type or person), and to further the dog tag towards Papua New Guinea. We hope that one day, someone will come to us and say 'I have your PNG dog tag here in my hand!' while we're in PNG, and we'd invite them in for dinner.
Along the way the finders of the dog tag, write notes on our website wall and tell us something about themselves.
(I got this idea by having found a journal with entries written in it, in which a couple on their wedding day, told their story, then dropped the journal off in the hopes that at their ten year anniversary it would find them again).
About 3 years into the experiment the Dog Tags disappeared. I should never have attached unique coins to them. But then suddenly one surfaced in Germany. (we know several Germans here, and so, it could very easily job the pond to get here).
The funny thing is, all the status update posts have been in German since it re-surfaced after a 4 year hiatus. And we don't know German. I have been meaning to have someone interpret for us.... but haven't gotten around to it.
For fun today, I had Google attempt to translate and this is what today's has said:
"who has been his goal but misses neat. participating with you after. then is true times the direction"
This is just one of the many 'unique' ways we're trying to share our story of how God has moved in our lives. Geocaching is a family fun hobby that we enjoy when we can, and we happened to be able to find a way to tell people about our ministry through it.
