Hello friends! With this blog I hope to keep everyone updated with my travels and share some stories of what will happen in the next 6 months of travel. I also want to use this blog to show how God works through every situation we come to in life. God has really been showing me that through Him all things are possible. God also has been teaching me what trust is and what true love towards others feels like. I also want to tell you guys that God really does take care of us. I learned about my trip to South Africa, which I will be going on Feb. 11 with Kent Bresee, only two weeks before Christmas. So in my mind I was then and am now trying to figure out how I was going to raise $5000 dollars for this trip. Thus that brings me back to say that the Lord takes care of us, because 50% of my donations or a little over that has come from people my age and younger. I am very proud of my friends who have donated to my trip and very thankful. Everytime someone hands me a check or cash I feel limp and extremely humbled. God provides for us in ways we do not understand and in ways we thought would not be possible. So you are asking to yourself what about this trip? Am I excited? What are my thoughts about leaving for so long and why am I doing it?

I must explain that this trip to South Africa is going to be one of the most unique adventures that I have ever embarked on. It is an act of faith to jump on board with this trip because it will be out of my comfort zone, the farthest I have been from home, a new hot and uncomfortable living sometimes, challenging physically and emotionaly, with people that I do not know yet except Kent, and many more reasons that would bore you to death so I dont want to kill you. South Africa at one point was a place that I did not want to find myself going but now the Lord is taking me there. The trip for me even though I have not left has already started. Emotionally I have been attached to Tulsa, Oklahoma and OKC. The places of home where I have made many friends and have started to find out what God wants me to do here. BUT all that has been put on hold for this trip and it truly hurts me to leave what has only thus begun.

And for what the trip entails. Kent and I will travel down to South Africa with Marvin Phillips and Dale Bresee, Kents father, to establish relationships in small businesses in Venda where Dales chicken farm has been started. Dale is going with a rod in hand because the chicken farm has not paid back what they said they would in the time Dale has been gone away. But I wont dwell on that because thats his story. The four of us the first weekend there will be heading to Durbin which is a coastal city south of Johannesburg to meet with Roger Dickson and George Funk. While in Durbin we will be prepairing to go to Venda in a rent car. To the chicken farm we will go, then after bumping heads with the chicken farm we will have the pleasure of a South African hog hunt for just a day. Then we will fly down to Cape Town and send off Marvin and Dale back home. Kent and I will stay and become slaves to Martha and Roger Dickson. We will be working in a print shop printing the Bible and books that Roger has written for his International School of Biblical Studies. After working there for a time or two in Cape Town it might be in the planning books for Roger, Kent, and I to go on a distributing trip up through South Africa to Namibia and then over to Botswana and back down to Cape Town. And from there on I do not have any knowledge of where the trip will take us other than meeting with house churches and teaching and preaching whenever we can.

So to tell you the truth I am excited and a little frightened but not trapped by fear about the trip. I trust the Lord that He is sending me there for a reason that I cannot quite figure out right now and I am ok with not knowing that right now. Why am I going on the trip? Well for selfish reasons I want to see this place BUT this trip I would have never gone on if God did not give me a push out of the door. I am going on this trip to be a servant of God.

God I pray that I may be used to glorify you in all that I do over there and will be able to have the courage to do anything you put in my path. Make me a light to a dark world. May this trip encourage others and inspire them to break out of their comfort zones. I pray that you put situations in my life that I have to choose to trust and love you. Thank you for your mercy and grace on such a broken world and broken person such as me. Thank you for your love that never ends. Amen