And We're Off!

In less then an hour Mark and I will be one our way to Madison, er, Columbus (the location was changed because the Madison facilities didn't have enough room for all the students!) Wisconsin.

Instead of written updates, Mark and I are planning on doing video updates. I wish I could say they'll be weekly, but I don't trust either of us to be that on point with our scheduling, especially at the beginning. I'll be posting the videos on my YouTube channel and linking them here, and then putting this blog link on Facebook.

PLEASE be praying for us on this trip, but especially this weekend as we are adjusting to a whole new group of people and as we are away from our family's for Holy Week (again). I don't know where Mark was last Easter, but he was either in England or Amsterdam, and I was in Rome.

Anyway, I have to go over my packing list one last time and then my dad and I are off to pick up Mark and his father for a double father/son road trip!

Thanks so much to everyone who has supported us thus far with finances and prayer. Please remember to share the link to our GoFundMe, which is on the left side of this page.

Thanks again.

And again.

I'm gonna go now...

God's Blessings,
Chris

My Next Big Thing (Plus DTS Outreach Video!)

It's been a few months since I last posted on here. Oops. How time does fly! I apologize for that. I really did intend to update more frequently, but life keeps happening and I'm so easily distracted...

Example A: I intended to write this big long post about how I was accepted into the Bible School for the Nations (BSN) with YWAM in Madison, Wisconsin, but I can't really think of what to say other than that. If you want to know how I decided to do this school, you can ask me, because there's a lot of personal experiences that led up to it, and I can't really put it all in writing very well. All I'm going to say is I very strongly felt the call of God to go here, and now I am going here, and it's all very exciting!

So I'm just going to explain what the BSN is and then I'm going to put a link to a video I made of my DTS Outreach in Italy. I could have sworn I posted this video on here ages ago, but it doesn't look like I did. So, two birds, one stone, all that. Okay, here goes...

A Conversation with God About the Weather

The following is a post from a previous blog of mine, "Cookies for Breakfast", that I no longer write for because reasons. The reasons are not that important, and to be honest, I'm still not a hundred percent sure why I quit it. I just know that at the time, it was the right thing to do.

And now I have this blog! "Chris The Missionary" is a much more structured and much more focused blog than Cookies could have ever hoped to be, but at the same time, some of my most favorite things I've ever written are on there. So I've decided that whenever I want to post something here, but don't feel like writing anything, I'll just steal one of my posts from there.

This was written after working on a stressfully humid day, and I was reminded of it today when I was at work today and it was stressfully humid. I went and reread it and had a good chuckle, and decided to re-post it here. You're welcome!

"Faith Apart From Works Is Dead":

I am going to be very upfront about this: If your faith isn't prompting you to do something for the Kingdom of God, I'd encourage you to reexamine what you believe. If you believe that there is a God out there who sent His only Son to die the most horrific death imaginable so that you could be with Him in His perfect presence for all eternity, and that doesn't prompt you to do anything out of gratitude and humility for Him...do you really believe any of that?

I believe that is what James meant when he said, "For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead." If you are not moved to do good works out of an overflow of love, then you may not have the same faith that the Bible talks about.

Let me tell you a story from my life about how some folks looking to do a little good - picking up trash - showed God's love more than anything I've yet seen in my life.

Why I'm Not Writing An Update About My Trip To Italy

I've put this off for long enough. For various reasons, I've failed to write an update about my mission trip to Italy on my blog about being a missionary. It's something I've been struggling with writing since the day I got back from Italy. 

I've started to write a post about outreach numerous times. I started an update hours after landing back in the U.S. as I was doing my laundry, but that draft got deleted pretty quickly. I went through many ideas and drafts before just quitting in frustration a few weeks ago. I haven't touched my blog since then, but after doing a lot of processing the past few days, I feel this has to be said. So, without further ado...

Why I'm Not Writing An Update About My Trip To Italy

(Sorry)

This trip, and my DTS as a whole, was such an absolutely massive part of my life so far, that there is no way to do the whole experience justice in a single blog post. Quite frankly, I feel that it is not within my writing abilities to do justice to just how impactful this trip was to me on an emotional and spiritual level.

Yes, Italy is amazing. I could go on and on about the beauty of the land and it's culture. I could talk about all the awesome things we saw God do (and we did see Him do amazing things). Most of my fellow missionaries would say I should focus on those things here, because that's what people want to hear about. But that would be disastrously one sided. Let me see if I can explain to you why I can't write a glowing piece all about how awesome my time was.