Well, I am currently in the lounge chair in my living room watching the Tigers play. Life is good. I am home for two short weeks. I was able to come home to see two of my best friends, Lauren Kovac and Matt Glynn get married. It's such an amazing thing to see two God loving people get married. Another bonus of coming home is that I get to see my amazing bro who is currently serving in the Peace Corp in Africa. We will all head out next week to see our cousin, Caleb, get married in Wyoming. It's so wonderful to be with the whole fam.
US trip update... last week all the girls went to go get their passports. It is seriously so exciting! The girls are so pumped as the passports were just another sign that the trip is becoming less of a dream and more of a reality. We have raised about $3,000 of the $20,000 that we need for the trip. Please be in prayer about this because in order to continue the planning for this trip, we need at least half of the funds by December. As of right now, the set iterary is this. One week of volleyball camp at Northwestern College in Iowa, one week of visiting Chicago, playing teams in Indiana and also teams in Michigan and then Hume Lake Camp in California has also offered to cover all the girls to come out to camp. Hume Lake is one of the largest christian camps and will be such a fun opportunities for the girls. Also, it will be neat for the girls to participate in the Northwestern camp. The team came on a trip in the spring of 2010. Ever since then, they have helped out in so many ways. Their coach has sent me drills, they have provided funding to send two players to a good school, they even are pen-pals with my English class! It will be so fun for the girls to reconnect with that team. So really, since both camps are being covered, most of our funding will go toward food and transportation.
Cool Story: Keysi and Mabelis have been serving as my "assistants" this summer at the sports site. Keysi became a Christian a couple months ago and has shown HUGE growth. She has taken it upon herself to go to church on her own and really take inititive in her growth. The other day, she told me she wanted to give the devotional at the end of a practice. Keep in mind, this was one of the first times she had met this team. Well after practice, she opened up her notebook and had prepared a 3 page testimony to share with the team. I knew her story, but she had never shared it with a larger group of people. So she explained to this group of girls her history of being physically abused by her dad and her struggle to love him. However, when she accepted Christ, she felt like God began to heal her from the bitterness. She encouraged the other girls as well to rid themselves of any hatred that they may have toward their dads and that Christ was the only one powerful enough to do that. Sometime, I'll have her tell the story. She tells it much better than I do. But anyway, God is moving and its so fun to see these girls take faith as their own and start to share it with others.
