Days 1 & 2 - Uganda

Our days begin with a breakfast of 2 pieces of white bread, a fried egg, and warm milk. Some days we stop by the internet cafe to update people back home. The first morning we ran errands around town to get our rice and beans for dinner and exchange money at the bank. The first afternoon we met our first program member, Jane. She runs a business selling drinks and juices, which is were we stocked up on water. We got a carbonated pineapple drink made by Schweppes that was awesome. Our big project the first day was to go and visit the land where the school will be built. The architect, Alex, came from Kampala and we headed out to the land. We picked which acre from the 3 for the school we wanted. To get a better idea of the size of the school rooms, we went to visit the secondary school here, which houses 600 students ages 12-18. That afternoon we went and visited with more program members and students who were out of school. One member cut down a jackfruit from her tree for us...they are huge!!

Day 2 we headed out to the land with machete's to start clearing it. It's amazing what you can do with a few people! It is so pretty out on the land and the breeze is usually cool. I ended up having to wear a hat and long sleeves because my sunscreen made me break out, but I was perfectly fine. We took a break to try local favorites, which included their white sweet potatoes (they taste just like ours) and a tortilla flatbread type thing that is common here. In the evening, we headed to 2 more program members houses and got updates on their kids. The kids they have taken in are part of our program and can be sponsored. One is a tailor that has fabric and makes clothes and the other has a farm and goes to the market to sell sweet bananas and jackfruit. We got to try fresh passion fruit and watched the sunset, which of course I loved!

Day 3 started out with going back out to the land. Some of the guys from the community came and cleared some more yesterday and it is starting to look amazing! Tonight we will finish visiting with program members. Tomorrow is church day and Sunday we will work with the program members in the morning and then the kids in the afternoon. On Sunday evening, we will head to Kampala so that we can catch the bus to Nairobi on Monday morning.

A few things about Uganda so far: 1 - it is pretty hilly and reminds me of my new home in Tennessee, except there are many fruit trees here. 2 - There is so much fresh fruit here and it is amazing to try it fresh off a tree from one of our program members! 3 - The stars are AMAZING! I literally thought a few were airplanes because they were twinkling so much. 4 - It has been really interesting to be living as a true minority in this village, as the 3 of us in our group are the only white people. Everyone has been welcoming and it has been a great experience so far!

Thanks for all the prayers for our team and our interactions with the program members and their kids!

Quick Update

Hey all! I just have time for a quick update. We are in our second full day in Uganda. Yesterday we ran some errands around town and met with some program members and their kids. This morning we went to the land that was purchased for the new school and cleared it. Pretty sure I'm going to be sore from all of my machete skills ;)

Our travel day was really long and I'm still struggling with jet lag. The devil used the 5 hours I couldn't fall asleep last night to bring on the anxiety.. I was fairly calm until that point, so prayers would be appreciated for a restful sleep tonight. We spent over 30 hours traveling, as traffic from Entebbe to Kiboga was bad and we didn't arrive until 1am on Wednesday morning, which was 5pm Central Time Tuesday after leaving at noon on Monday. Yikes, I'm pretty sure I can take on any traveling after that. Everything is going well here. Our guesthouse is nice and our food has been great. We have eaten all kinds of fresh fruit and seen some amazing stars! Internet is limited for now,  but prayers for continued health and safe travel would be appreciated. Thanks!

Africa: How it happened & What I’ll be doing.

I love to plan. It makes me feel organized and in control. But I’m not the one in control. God is. When my world came crashing down last fall (ok...slightly dramatic there), I realized how much I had planned myself instead of relying on God’s plans. That realization turned into my “year of no plans” (or attempting to…)

On December 31st, I wrote and asked God to start to open doors for a possible trip. In the middle of January I wrote about my year of no plans and said “It is a really odd feeling for me to walk around not having plans for where this year will go. I could continue to do exactly what I am now, I could get a different job, or I could even end up in Africa. Only God knows. My job is to be obedient to Him each day and trust in Him and His plans.” Well, He delivered :)

This past weekend was my last Sunday at Apostles, the church I have called home since November. During communion I broke down because of how specifically God has answered prayers and shown me a plan that not even I could have imagined over the past 10 months. There were so many weeks where instead I broke down during communion, not knowing what God was doing in my life and why things were the way they were. It was surreal to see that come full circle. So...how did Africa happen?

I have no gifting in the medical department, I’m not a teacher, and I don’t have strong muscles for manual labor. Those 3 things are typically what trips involve. As I was in the process of praying about a trip, some things about UTST began to show up on my facebook feed. One of my friends is on their board and there were stories of people who were getting ready to go on a trip. Since they were leaving on a trip, it wasn’t until March that I was able to connect and learn more about what they did. Once I got to know more, I knew this was an organization that I wanted to be involved with due to the way they were fighting poverty with economic empowerment, so I began to help out with some minor finance items here in the states.

They were planning another trip this summer, which I kept as an option in the back of my head, knowing that I was going to start looking for a new job. The beginning of my job search was going slow (all God’s plan), and when I didn’t have anything by the end of May, I had to say no to going on the trip, which was originally scheduled for July. The job I was on in July at EY was a year-end and I knew I couldn’t leave that close to the start of it. So that put my earliest date that I felt comfortable leaving to August 1st. I was really sad, because this was a trip I wanted to go on. However, one of my friends continued to pray for it to happen and for God to open doors. I knew that nothing would change in my situation at EY, so I rolled my eyes a little at her prayers (proof of my struggle trusting God with every little thing).

What I did not realize is that God was working to change the actual dates of the trip (which wasn’t even something that had crossed my mind...shows you how much better and higher His ways and thoughts are than ours!). Everything in my job search process, from the lengthy time it took them to initially call me after I had applied (I was convinced they thought I wasn’t qualified), to delaying it another week so I could visit Nashville, to another week delay due to vacation, brought the timing of my job offer to perfectly align to take the month of August off. The question now was would they allow me to push back my start date to just a month before their year end (9/30). Thankfully, I am going to a Christian company that encourages these kinds of trips and will match my vacation days if I take them for a mission trip in the future. Once I got the green light from them, it was go time! Praise God for His planning that is beyond me.

Many of you have asked specifically what we’ll be doing, so here is a quick summary :)

Uganda: We’ll be working in a rural community.

- Land was recently purchased to start building a school, so we will help to begin to clear the land so a temporary structure can be built.

- 9 women have just finished the UTST training program to receive their business loans within the next few weeks. We will meet with them to go over their business plans and help them to work through their first steps.

-UTST has around 20 kids who are all orphans that they help to sponsor their secondary education. We will check in with all of them.

Kenya: We'll be working in the slums in Nairobi.

- 12 people are currently in the UTST program that have their loans and are running their businesses. We will check in with each of them and help out in whatever way needed with their plans.

- UTST is also hoping to partner with an orphanage in Kenya to support orphans once they get to the age of needing secondary education. We are planning to visit an orphanage or two to help begin a relationship for this.

That’s a lot of people to meet and see in a short amount of time, but I know God has it all planned out! I’m looking forward to building relationships and getting to spend days with people learning what their life is like and the challenges they face. It’s almost time! My chacos got delivered yesterday (yes, I’m joining the club!) and I’m ready to go. 5 days!!!

P.S...some of you have asked how you can be praying. First, please be praying for the people we will be working with and our interactions with them. Additionally, if you could pray for safe and healthy travels for our team, that would be much appreciated!

Life, Love, Africa & Moving.

Hi! So the intention was to start my blog a month or two ago (I even wrote the first post back at the beginning of May!), because of all that God was teaching me in this season of life. But then the past month happened. More of God teaching me His ways, which included traveling, interviewing, working, and decision making. So here’s a quick summary :)

I’m not even sure what to think or feel right now. In one morning, July 15th, I quit my job, accepted a new job that has me moving 4 ½ hours away, and bought a plane ticket to Africa...all within 5 hours of each other. Phew! Ask me 10 months ago and none of that was even a thought in my mind yet (I was convinced I would be planning a wedding and moving to where my then-boyfriend got into med school). Praise God His ways are better than our own. It all hasn’t quite sank in yet, but I am amazed by every small detail of God’s plan in it all.

Everything leading up to the day of decisions was only something He could orchestrate. The past week I have sat in awe, without words to speak, amazed at what He has done. Literally, I have no words. It is beyond amazing and beautiful and a testament to how He loves His children and knows what’s best for us. Always and forever. I hope through this blog I’m able to somewhat put into words to share with you how His ways are always better than our own.

To quickly catch up (there will be more posts on each of these), here’s how the past 10 months have gone. Exactly 9 months prior to that day, and a week after my 25th birthday, my then-boyfriend decided he no longer wanted to be with me. 4 days later, I left to be out of town for 9 weeks straight for work, living out of a hotel room by myself. New responsibilities at work were causing me to be under the most stress I ever had been, which meant being physically sick often. Oh, and I was also searching for a new church home. Cue the quarter-life crisis perfect storm.

Needless to say, it was the hardest season I had been through in life. It sent me to my knees, face down on the floor crying out to God on multiple occasions. Most nights, it was just me and God. I had no one else to turn to and was feeling hurt, lonely, betrayed, and like I couldn’t handle what life was throwing my way. But I had God. A Constant. The One who promises to be with us when we pass through water and walk through fire (Isaiah 43:2). So we became best friends. He took me where I needed to go for Him to be able to teach and mold me. It wasn’t easy, but I learned a lot about both myself and His Love.

So where do Africa and Nashville come in? Let’s start with Africa. Who goes through a quarter-life crisis and says that the next summer they will quit work and go to Africa? This girl! All praise to God for actually answering that crazy claim. Africa, and even more specifically Kenya, has been on my heart ever since I can remember. I’ve always wanted to go there and serve. The problem was I wasn’t plugged in to a church and I didn’t have an organization I wanted to go with, so I started to pray about it. I happened upon Under the Same Tree, found out a good friend is involved with them, and was ready to go. God pulled the reigns when the dates of their trip weren’t going to work out for me. But then, just a few weeks ago, He opened the doors wide. The dates switched, my new job allowed me extended time off before I started, and I booked my ticket.

Now, if you know me, you know I like to be informed and have a plan. I booked my tickets to Africa less than a month before leaving, not even fully sure of what the plan was. This set in as I went to a travel clinic to get my vaccinations. The lady began to ask me questions about sleeping conditions and who would be preparing my food. I had no idea. Still don’t actually. I know I have my plane ticket, got my vaccinations, picked up my Malaria pills...and that’s about it. So unlike me, but so like what God has been doing in my life the past 10 months. (I will find out more specifics, so stay tuned!)

Nashville. As you learn more about the story, this one is more mind-blowing than Africa. I decided I would be leaving EY last fall. So I started to pray some bold, crazy prayers about what God would do and where He would lead me. At the end of December, He planted a seed about Christian jobs, specifically in Nashville, in my head from a blog. It took 7 months of His perfect timing, but the rest is history. For a while I doubted that Nashville was actually a thing. It was always in the back of my head and I had conversations with a friend about it frequently. I kept saying, I guess we’ll see IF Nashville IS actually a thing. I still can’t believe it was...a city I knew nothing about and where I know no one. The way God lead me through the job search process and His timing with everything was something that not even I could have planned out.

So there’s the past 10 months in a nutshell. I can’t wait to go through more of the stories of how God specifically worked later. There are so many small things that were woven into a much bigger picture.  For now, I hope to keep everyone updated on Africa and how things are going in Uganda and Kenya. The countdown is officially on...I leave 2 weeks from today!

The Truth About Idols

Note: I wrote this earlier this summer, but never got around to posting it until now. Hopefully there will be more to come soon as well :)

Whenever I hear the word “idols,” I think about the idols that the Bible describes.  The ones that were gold or wood statues that the people would bow down to and worship.  In my head I get this picture of this flashy, trophy looking thing that people look silly bowing down to.  Since I don’t worship anything like that, I always thought that idols weren’t an issue for me. Boy was I wrong.

God always has a funny way of putting things into your life right when you need them or when they correspond to something else.  As God was beginning to reveal different idols I had in my life, I began a study called No Other Gods: Confronting Our Modern-Day Idols.

I learned that idols aren’t just those statues that were worshiped in the Bible.  They are anything that we put before God. Richard Keyes said “An idol can be a physical object, a property, a person, an activity, a role, an institution, a hope, an image, an idea, a pleasure, a hero—anything that can substitute for God.”

That’s a lot of different things.  There are also things in that list that are good. I always just assumed that idols had to be bad things since they were taking the place of God.  But is a person, a hope, or a pleasure necessarily a bad thing? No. Keyes says, “Idolatry may not involve explicit denials of God’s existence or character. It may well come in the form of an overattachement to something that is, in itself, perfectly good.”

So that awesome hope you have in something for the future, the great new friend you made, the fun sport of volleyball: all of those things are perfectly good.  What turns them into idols is when we get attached to them and let them take the place of God in our lives.

I began to realize that I did that (and still do) with a lot of things in my life. The great new friendship I was building, based around our love of Jesus, was an idol because I easily put it before God.  The sport I had played competitively for 8 years of my life, was an idol because I was playing for reasons other than to glorify God (more on volleyball in another blog). My hopes for the future God has for me were an idol because I was thinking too much about how things could end up instead of going to God and letting Him take control.

I got attached to those things without even realizing that I was letting them be more important than God in my life.  That’s the scary thing. I wasn’t worshipping a statue and saying that God didn’t exist.  I was worshipping God. And I was worshipping God through these things. I just let them be more important than Him. They had a part of the worship of my heart instead of it being fully God’s.

We’re human. We’re always going to be facing idols in our life.  As our lives change, the idols in them will change as well. But we have to be cautious in recognizing them.  It isn’t always the things we think are ‘bad.’  It can be perfectly good and healthy things.  The attachment and devotion we give to them over God is what makes them an idol.  I pray that we start to recognize the idols in our lives that have taken hold of parts of heart and surrender them to Him.  The only way we can get rid of them is by giving them over to Him and letting Him fill our hearts fully instead.

Happy 24th Birthday!

It’s my favorite angel’s 24^th birthday today.  If you haven’t been to the site created by her family in her memory (www.meganboken.com) then go check it out.  It does a much better job than I ever could of explaining how truly awesome she was, although words will never do her justice.

Earlier this week I was on there and saw the clip posted with her interview after she got defensive player of the week.  I clicked on it to listen and immediately paused after she started talking.  It had been so long since I heard her voice.  I clicked play again and she said my name (of course I was the one to tell her that she got the award, that probably doesn't surprise my teammates!). I paused the video again and lost it. Tears were streaming down my face. Yes, I still miss her. And yes, some days are tough. But I’m at peace knowing that she is in a much better place and some day I will join her.

Since it is her birthday, I thought what better than to share some of my favorite memories.  I treasure these so much more now. There are so many I can share, but here are a few that stick out in my mind.

1.     The famous Hawaii airport “who packed the chocolates” incident

This is one of my favorites that gets told over and over again. Basically, when we were leaving Hawaii from our tournament, a lot of people’s bags were over-weight.  We were shuffling around items to get all of our bags under weight. When we all finally got to the terminal, we were hungry, it was 11pm, we had just played a game, and all the food places were closed. So we got the food out of our bags and started throwing stuff around to find the chocolates. They were nowhere to be found. Boken was the last to have them, so all eyes turned on her.  She had put the chocolates in her checked bag and preceded to go off about how she was sorry she checked the chocolates (with a few of her favorite words thrown in there.) If you knew Bokes, you knew it took a lot to upset her and set her off. Luckily, we were all able to immediately laugh about it and we all survived the trip...and enjoyed the chocolates later.

2.     M&F class

Fall of my sophomore year (her senior year) we got lucky enough to plan a class together.  The better thing was that it was a marriage and family class.  This was a perfect class for the two girls that always bonded over being the single ones.  We always had a lot to catch up on in class, drew pictures on each other’s notes, and got yelled at by the teacher to stop talking…A LOT. I’m surprised I ended up with an A in the class because we were definitely not on his good side.

3.     Sunday afternoons

Some of our best quality time was spent on Sunday afternoons.  We nicknamed these “Depressing Sundays” because most people went home. We thought it would have been the perfect days to have boyfriends and hang out with them.  Since we didn’t have boyfriends…we hung out with each other! We would share every detail of our lives (or at least I would), eat whole tubs of Sabra hummus, spend quality time with cheetah blanket, and go for rides in the Jeep.

4.     Locker room Dance

Her famous “Open Swim” dance would come out before every game.  It was the Baywatch theme song, I’m Always Here by Jimi Jamison. At her pool back home, they would play this song when the kids could go back into the pool after a break.  She had a lovely interpretive dance that went with it and became a staple of our pregame routine. The smile and look on her face when she danced to it was priceless, something I always think about when I hear the song.

I love looking back and thinking of all the times we spent together. I’m so thankful for the time I knew her and all the smiles and laughs I got to share with her. She was such a special person and always saw the positive and loved life.  Happy 24^th birthday Bokes, hope you’re having a blast in Heaven J

Friends.

Yesterday, I took a “texting hiatus.” Basically, I didn’t text anyone (except my boss). My phone even decided to help me along because I lost service all afternoon at work. I needed that. The way I stay in contact with people is through texting.  It is my lifeline. It is friend. But I had gotten to the point where I was tired and sick of it and needed a break. It was nice, refreshing, and I threw myself into reading and my work.

Turn to today. God knew I needed the rest yesterday because today was a different story.  My day was filled with conversations about Him.  Days like today blow me away.  I heard about so much hurt and so many struggles.  We all deal with that daily, some are in tougher situations than others.  But I also got to hear stories of how God was working through my friends.  The encouragement I was able to give and the encouragement I was shown was amazing. God is SO GOOD!!! He knows what friends we need in our lives and when we need certain encouragement.

Tonight, I randomly texted a friend from high school that I hadn’t talked to in over a month.  It could not have been better timing.  We caught up a little and the conversation quickly turned to what God was doing in our lives, how we were struggling, and what we were trying to work on. WOW! We were both able to encourage each other from what we were going through.

This semester I was also reminded of how God places friendships into our life when we need them. I was starting my new grad program and didn’t have many friends at home.  The one MBA class I had ended up having a girl in it.  Her name was familiar because I knew she had interned for FCA, where I was now working.  Once we figured out who each other was, God placed such an encouraging friendship into my life.  It was exactly what I needed.  She helped me in so many ways throughout the semester when it came to school, guys, life in general, and now as I am getting ready for FCA camp.  She’s been through camps the past two summers and knows what I’m going through.  Her encouragement and prayer makes me want to encourage those around me more. It’s amazing and she is amazing.  I was able to help her out a bit as she moved to St. Louis recently.  It was almost as though we flipped spots this summer.  I’m so thankful that God knew what He was doing when He placed us in class together semester. It was literally all Him!

God knows exactly what we need. Some days, we need a break and time to focus on Him.  Other days, He knows we have friends that need us more or we are the ones that need encouragement. Finally, He’s got our back.  He places friendships into our lives when we need them the most.  Never doubt that He always has our best interest in mind J