missions

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Beauty For Ashes Uganda Update


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Ok, friends! I just chatted with Brandi to get updated numbers and info for the gift bags for the mamas in Orobai village. Brandi is headed to Uganda next month with Beauty for Ashes Uganda and they will be hand delivering our gifts!

These are going to the mamas you’ve supported the last couple of years with mosquito nets, cows, chickens, tuition for their kiddos to go to school… Now we have the chance to send them small gifts and words of encouragement!

There are 34 mamas in our village now, so we need 3 dozen of several things:
Travel sized hygiene items (many of you have already been collecting these)
Boxes of pencils
Deodorant
Pictures of family with notes of encouragement
Candy (dum-drums, other hard candy)
Any other small items that will fit into a small gift bag (a paper lunch sized bag)

You can bring things to church, message me about meeting up some time, or you can make a monetary donation and we’ll go buy things. It would be great if we could collect enough to help provide for mamas in other villages as well!

Message me with any questions, and thanks in advance for your support!

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Why Go? Why Stay?


This week, Silverdale Baptist Church is holding their annual missions conference. As I walked into work this morning, I looked at the tables of all the ministries represented there, and this caught my eye.

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It’s from The Encounter Church in New York where Chad and Megan Wade minister. New York City is one of the most unreached cities in the world; less than 2% of the population claim to be believers in Christ.

This is a picture of what the Wades did when they left Chattanooga to move to New York. It’s what my friends Kevin and Kristi Cabe did when they left Knoxville, TN, and moved to Brooklyn. It’s what a group of my classmates in Wake Forest, NC, did when they left friends and family below the Mason-Dixon Line and moved to Boston to be a Light in a dark city.

Taking the Gospel to a lost world doesn’t mean you have to move to Africa or Asia. It could be mean moving to Chicago. Or Detroit. Or San Francisco.

Or staying right where you are and committing to live your life as a missionary in your Southern suburban setting, destroying the lie of religion with the grace of a relationship with Christ.

You can reach any unreached people group in the world w/o leaving America. Go to the big cities. Stay where you are. But obey they command “Make disciples.”

Instead of asking, “Why should we go?” maybe we should ask ourselves, “Why do we stay in our nice Southern towns with churches on every corner?” If the answer isn’t “Because I am making disciples and helping others do the same,” then maybe we should adjust the focus of our lives where we are right now. Maybe we should be the ones who go to be the light in the darkness.

Maybe we need to make sure we are being the Light right where God has us now.

That’s my challenge for myself right now. Is my life making a difference right where I am? Does God want me sharing the Light somewhere else? Short term? Long term?

Am I making disciples? Are you?

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Big Picture Thinking in an Ever Shrinking World


The story of Aggie Hurst is an amazing example of how God’s ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts. When we see nothing but our own, pain, suffering, frustration, or mere inconvenience, we miss the work that God is doing. So often we are stopped cold in our tracks by the adversities that we face in life. Instead of searching for ways to glorify God, we question Him and His plan.
I read this story on the same day that we discussed the book of Job in my Old Testament class. The combination got me thinking about my own life and how I am so often distracted by my circumstances instead of looking past them with a Kingdom perspective. I wonder how, if faced with similar situations, I would react. Would I be like David Flood, who turned his back on God when God did not meet his expectations? Or would I be like Job, who lost everything yet fell down and worshiped. I pray that God would continue to show me glimpses of His kingdom purposes to help my weak faith learn to say, “Though He slay me, I will hope in Him” (Job 13.15).