I'm not really the writing type, but we are supposed to blog every week, so I will probably be posting a lot of pictures! The past week and a half has been just amazing. It feels like we've been here a month and it's barely been a week. We are already having a blast serving and meeting amazing new people and experiencing a different but beautiful other culture. There are really too many things to talk about for me to put it all in a blog post, so I'm gonna give y'all a summary of our week and put up some photos, because a picture's worth a thousand words. ...

Delight in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart. Psalm 37:4   What does it mean to be given the desire of my heart? So often I find myself praying to the Lord I am delighting in you Lord, and these are my desires, so why aren’t you giving them to me.   But so often I left it at that, and just found myself delighting in the Lord, and wondering why things just weren’t working out, because I was “delighting” in the Lord.   I knew that this wasn’t true, and that it was just me making it say what I wanted it say. But the other day...

These words are of grace. Yesterday I told God I did not want to lean on my own understanding.   So he took my mind and scrambled it.          He took my words.   Today I was coming to peace with having no words.   Then this happened.  We were invited to take part in a Hangi feast, a traditional Maori way of preparing food.  It is literally an earth oven.  Details are needless words right now.  After preparation in heaps of rain, the Hangi, as custom goes, is prayed over, before waiting out the next four hours it takes to cook....

There was a time when words flowed freely, which I have taken for granted.  And yet in those moments, I was keenly aware that the words that were pouring onto paper came to fast to be my own. The following was inspired by a man met in a town called Franz Josef.  He goes by the name Justin.   we went tramping round down the south Island  rode waves of christ church of a solid kind westward bound no longer means pacific sun rain came down as ice on the move was found It slid by oh so fast we almost missed its passenger a man behind a beard a smile sheltered from the...

So i guess it's time for me to actually post a blog… So a few days ago Hannah and I were hanging out with some of the volunteers at El Rancho and we ended up getting into a conversation about the Holocaust. It was interesting considering one of the volunteers is German. During our conversation I said that i would rather die in a gas chamber instead of the oven. Of course then I realized that the oven was only used to burn the already dead bodies. Anyways I was cracking jokes about how I would tell Hitler to calm down and that I wasn't about to be thrown into and oven or...

Recently the Lord has been revealing the importance of the heart to me.  The heart gets overlooked so often and I am just slowly realizing how often I overlook my own heart.  It is so easy to just think or speak with our mouths without our hearts.  One morning during “quiet time” God just placed Psalm 27 right in front of me.  This scripture literally became so real to me as I just read over and over again the words.  In verse 8 it reads “When You said, ‘Seek My face,’ my HEART said to You, ‘Your face, Lord, I will...