Purpose Asia

The Parliament Building in Victoria, BC Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!       Christmas often is one of the busiest times of the year and yet one of the best and I think that is definitely true for me. Just to give you a bit of an update and a recap I'll tell you what's been going on this month before we ring in the new year. At the beginning of the month I had my church commissioning, send off party and final approval to be released for field service! God has done some incredible things and I'm so excited about His amazing work and purposes.  Gingerbread house about a little boy's imagination    After all the mad rush of the beginning of the month my family and I decided to take a few days away together for a quick family vacation. We drove up to northern Washington and took a ferry to Victoria, BC -- a place that we've had many wonderful memories and vacations over the years in the Pacific Northwest. It was wonderful! We explored the city of Vi

Original Painting by Amy Binder While I was at orientation training with Wycliffe in April I was captivated by a beautiful painting that hangs in a hallway at the Wycliffe USA Headquarters. A woman carefully follows text with her finger from the pages she gently holds in her hands and her face is knit in concentration over the words she reads. When you first see the painting it almost looks like a black and white photo. But as you draw nearer you begin to see that the portrait is made up of thousands of fingerprints. The artist, a missionary to Bolivia herself, dipped her finger in ink and created the masterpiece that catches the eager grasping of the Word of God by a woman from Papua New Guinea. Close up of the same painting This painting mesmerized me and I often went back to gaze at it in wonder while I was in Orlando. As I studied it I was struck with how similar this painting is to the work that God is doing with and through us among the nations. We are small, like a si

"Trust in the  Lord   with all  your heart  and lean not  on your  own understanding;  in all your ways submit  to him,  and he will make  your paths straight. Proverbs 3:5-6 NIV What an amazing time I'm walking through right now! It's also an incredibly uncertain time as I'm walking into a great unknown. Since my last post I:   received my visa and permission to purchase tickets to Papua New Guinea.   I had my church commission me and I had a send off party to say goodbye for now and thank you to my partners here in the Pacific Northwest.  Now, I am facing the certainty of my departure date: January 7th. Twenty-six days from now I get on a plane and leave all I know to embark on God's adventure for me in missions. That's exciting.... and daunting.      One of my mentors put it this way. When we choose to follow Jesus anywhere -- missions, ministry, being a stay at home Mom, business -- we are choosing to trust in the "Known Unknown.&qu

Thanksgiving is one of my two most favorite holidays (the other is Easter). I love that Thanksgiving is a time for family and friends to enjoy each other without expectation. I also love how it causes me to stop and think about what I have and forces me to reflect on what I am thankful for. You see, I don't know about you, but I often get caught up in the business of life and forget about all the wonderful things I have been blessed with. As a result, I find myself weary, stressed and wishing for things I think I don't have. However, this year I realized just how grateful I am for what I have. Major life change brings a new layer of perspective to the season of Thanksgiving and my imminent move to Papua New Guinea has made me aware of how grateful I am for good friends, amazing  family, and God's provision of all I need. I'm also thankful for all the miracles He's done in my ministry in providing prayer and financial partners, nursing licenses, work permits, pla

      This last week I packed all my earthly belongings into two giant plastic trunks (action packers) to send to North Carolina to be shipped by sea from there to my new home for the next four years in Papua New Guinea. There was a lot of wondering and worrying: what should I pack? What will fit? What will I really want in Papua New Guinea? How do you even begin to pack for four years in a foreign country? It was certainly a crazy time and I wish I could say I did it with grace, composure, and dignity. However, more often than not I was disheveled, stressed, frustrated and exasperated with a healthy dose of "this is really real and my emotions are like a Richter scale about now with a 9.0 earthquake registering." Packing certainly has brought home to me how close my departure date really is: in less than two months I will set foot on the soil of Papua New Guinea, my new home for the next four years. That's both heavy and  exciting.       It made me think of all t

Have you ever heard people say, "I'm not good at saying goodbye"? Or perhaps, "I don't do goodbyes"? Today I had to say a lot of goodbyes and went scrounging the internet trying to find a good quote to sum up how I was feeling. You know what I found out?  Nobody knows how to say goodbye. I realized that no one can make sense of goodbyes. No one can sum them up. No one can unravel the complex, messy, convoluted emotions that are all tangled up in goodbye. Goodbye is such a short word and yet such a vast emotional experience. Just trying to think about goodbye, when you're truly immersed in it, is like facing the darkness of an unseen path and willing it to go away by merely staring it down. It's paralyzing. It's overwhelming. And yet, there's a glimmer of something that you just can't put your finger on in every goodbye. At first you just have the nagging, grating reminder of the fact that you have to part ways with places and

"For  now we see through a glass ,  darkly ; but then face to face:  now  I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."  1 Corinthians 13:12      Tomorrow I will work my last day at the job I've had for the last two years. It truly has been one of the best jobs I've ever had and I'm sad to leave it. However, I am excited in another way because its yet another tangible step on the path toward God's calling on my life. Everyday I'm getting one step closer to leaving for Papua New Guinea in January.          As I was sitting down to write this post and considering all of the changes going on in preparation to leave long-term to the mission field I thought of the verse above. The verse right before it is one that's been rumbling around in my brain through this whole process, " When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood  behind

Early in life, Kristina lost two of her three children during childbirth. The emotional pain devastated her, but she was also very physically wounded. In the attempts to save the children and repair her ravaged body, Kristina underwent four agonizing surgeries. The trauma from these events lingered in her life for many years. Later on, she was introduced to Christianity. And though the hurts from her life persisted, after a time, she placed her faith in Christ and began to follow Him. Soon after that, she and twenty-nine other participants from seven languages were given the opportunity to attend an Oral Bible Storytelling (OBS) workshop in Wewak, Papua New Guinea. The courses at the workshop—divided into four modules that took place throughout the year—were designed to teach Papua New Guineans how to memorize and retell Scripture in a way that’s familiar in their culture where storytelling is an art. After the first module, Kristina returned home and shared the Bible storie

Hey Everyone, This video tells the story of some Wycliffe missionaries working to translate the Bible for the people of Arop village in Papua New Guinea. It's long but incredibly and I highly recommend it.

" The condition for a miracle is difficulty, however the condition for a great miracle is not difficulty, but impossibility"                                            ~Angus Buchan One of my favorite movies is the true life story of a preacher from South Africa. That sounds like a boring start, but let me tell you, his life is anything but boring. The movie tells the story of how he moves from a life of anger and desperation to one of bold, fulfilled faith and how he trusts God for the impossible. He sees God come through in an amazing way when he feels God asks him to plant potatoes, a water dependent crop, during one of South Africa's worst droughts. The results were incredible and Angus went from being an obscure farmer to a great preacher and through all that he made the statement above, " The condition for a miracle is difficulty, however the condition for a great miracle is not difficulty, but impossibility." The last few days I've been pray

     Many people ask me what a normal day looks like for me as I'm preparing to go to Papua New Guinea in January. I can't help but smile and inwardly chuckle when people ask me this question. What don't  I do?  I ask myself before I respond. Today for example, I started my day with prayer for the work at hand. After that I had a skype meeting with my supervisor and we talked about the direction for the next week and the tasks at hand. Then, I turned my attention to a stack of newsletters that needed to be mailed to some of my partners. After an hour or so of jotting notes to some of my partners on the backs of prayer cards and addressing envelopes I sealed the last one and put it down with satisfaction. Now what? Oh yes. I remembered that I needed to text a few people that wanted me to confirm appointments with them for this week. My fingers moved methodically over the tiny letters as I coordinated times and dates and tried to hold all of the information in my head l

“ 20  I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Galatians 2:20 I settle myself in front of the computer and my fingers hover over the keys, what do I have to share with my partner family this week? I ask myself. Thoughts swirl through my head as the to-do list for preparation marches before my mind’s eye. I have been home from North Carolina for 3 weeks now. The first 2 I worked like crazy meeting with people, working my job and trying to get my head on straight after a month away. This week however, was the first week I’ve really had of decreased work ours to allow me to focus on ministry work, and let me tell you, the transition is significant. You never realize how wrapped up you become in whatever task takes the majority of your time. God’s been speaking to me about this the last couple of months but there’s nothing

Smack That Fly! (shared with permission from the PNG Experience: Volume 2. For more stories see: http://thepngexperience.wordpress.com/) The fly was larger than her hand, but it didn't faze the nurse. She slapped the illustrated poster once more and then turned to her audience. "Flies carry disease, polluted water carries disease, and uncontrolled rubbish and feces carry disease. That is why your children get diarrhea." She paused, looking hard at each of the students. "This is why your children die." Twenty national teachers from eight different languages were seated in the shade, listening intently to the health lecture and furiously scribbling notes. They had gathered for an intense, month long training held by SIL and national staff, to better equip rural teachers in using the local language in education through topics like principles and practices of literacy, fluency, story writing, book production, and curriculum and material creation as well as pe

Happy to be at the Isle of Palms beach, NC Unpacking has been the theme for the last few weeks both literally and figuratively. I've been figuratively unpacking things in my spiritual life, emotional life and interpersonal/work life. God has really been revealing some good things to me.... and, some things that need to be left behind. It's sort of like that moment when you are packing and realize not everything is going to fit in the bag you need to take with you. You stop and look blankly at your suitcase trying to decide what can stay and what absolutely must go with you. God really helped me weed through things in that way the last few weeks. He helped me set aside things that just take up space and helped me pack the tools that I will need most in Papua New Guinea. Over the last few weeks I've picked up critical tools for spiritual growth and vitality and ways to stay spiritually healthy wherever I go. I found language and culture acquisition skills that fit perfe