She did it!

Kara graduated last weekend with her master's degree in Marriage & Family Therapy from the Psychological Studies Institute... woohoo!!!

Making progress!

According to my calculations, after some of the first gifts toward our financial support are now starting to come in, we are officially 4.02% of the way toward completing our fundraising goals. Woohoo! We're on the way!

Missionary Friends

Kara and I really enjoyed this past weekend. An old friend of mine, Jeremy Price, came into town and spoke at our church Sunday morning. Jeremy is with Youth With a Mission and is working on a project called Ten Thousand Homes. They're working to build homes for 10,000 children in Africa who have been orphaned by the AIDS crisis.

Regardless of how often we hear about it, I really don't think we can get our minds around how desperate things are over there. He shared a statistic that overwhelmed me: One particular tribe they've worked with has 250,000-280,000 people, and it's estimated that 75% of them are HIV positive. Absolutely heartbreaking. So what Jeremy and his friends are doing is taking kids who have lost their families in this midst of this epidemic and building homes for them. It made me very thankful and proud to have friends like him who are doing God's work all around the world.

Since I'm mentioning him, I might as well also mention some of our other missionary friends. If any of you are interested in getting involved in missions in any way, of course you can always contact us and get involved with the children's home, but these are also people and organizations that we know personally, and that I am thankful for the opportunity to be associated with.

Staci Wells is a missionary in Kenya with World Gospel Mission. She is starting the Africa Gospel Church Baby Center for orphaned and abandoned babies. The center recently got its first two babies, Mary and Benson.

Brad Nelson works in Indianapolis with a ministry called Crescent Project, which helps Christians in North America learn to minister to Muslims, both here and around the world. One of Brad's main responsibilities with them is to lead short-term teams into countries like Turkey, Lebanon, and Indonesia.

Matt Kinnell and John Morley work with New Hope International Ministries, based in Wilmore, KY. New Hope sends short-term missions teams all over the world, and they're the ones responsible for getting us connected with the children's home. New Hope sent me on my first international mission trips, and if it wasn't for them, we wouldn't have the opportunity to go to Guatemala.

Staci, Brad, Matt, and John were all friends of ours at Asbury, and we respect all of them tremendously. Please take a few minutes and click around on their websites and say a prayer for each of them, that God can continue to strengthen the work they're each doing.

If I'm talking about our favorite missionary friends, I can't help but also mention the couple that impressed us enough that we're going to Guatemala to work with them- Kendon & Wendy Wheeler, the directors of NLCH.

I'm so glad that we're privileged enough to know people all over the country (and all over the world) who are committed to knowing and serving Jesus. We certainly wouldn't be who we are without them...

To help keep up

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I couldn't pass up this picture... New Life operates a Christian School on the campus of the Children's Home with over 400 students in pre-K through 9th grade. This is from the pre-K "career day."