Category: Uncategorized

Sedative drugs are a very good thing.

I am normally not a nervous traveler, but always the night before a big trip, I get nervous. I downed 20 mg worth of valium last night at 7:30 pm and woke up fuzzy and drugged at 2:45 this morning.

Nerves, nerves, nerves.

Safety is always a concern, but normally while I’m on a trip. I don’t take into account the fact I am not graceful at any point in time, and sometime whilst showering, busted my face on a mirror. Blood began pouring out of my nose, on my hands, on the floor…and thirty minutes later with no end in sight, I pondered if it was broken.

(It is now 6 pm ET and it hasn’t bled since, so I’m going to go ahead and call it good).

Flying into Miami, and then into Santiago was pretty seamless. A small weather delay and two hours later, we’re in the DR. All of our luggage made it which is a miracle. We were warmly greeted by our hosts from GO Ministries, ate a mid-day meal and are taking advantage of the wifi.

It’s warm. It’s humid. But the breeze is nice and the sounds of a city yet to be explored surround us.

I’ve uploaded some photos on our Flickr page here…there aren’t many…the bandwidth isn’t like home, but I hope you’ll stop by and check them out.

We’ll be heading out for ice cream later, getting a good night’s rest, and then on to a construction site tomorrow.

Thanks everyone for your prayers!

it is 3:40 am, also known as the ungodly hour, also known as i need some red bull, also known as five minutes before i am leaving to meet the team from cross point at the airport.

it is early.

but, i am excited…i feel privileged to take another out-of-the-country trip into a land which will stretch me far beyond my comfort zone. humbled at the chance to serve some with some amazing people.

the dominican is not far away. a quick trip to miami, then right into santiago. we’ll be arriving there about the same time you’re eating lunch.

your prayers are so needed for this trip. we have a pretty large group (26) going and with luggage and some camera equipment and well, just 26 people, logistics can get hairy.

please pray specifically for…

–our health & safety. this one always makes me nervous. especially after my roommate in africa had to go to the hospital in uganda while we were there in february. my asthma has been flaring up lately too…so yes, please cover us and some in this area.

–logistics. sometimes, luggage gets lost. it’s not the end of the world, but can distract us nonetheless. it was a miracle nobody’s luggage got lost with all the connecting flights we had to africa. please pray for smooth logistics.

–hearts. most importantly, our hearts. there are a lot of first-timers going on this trip and going to a new country and doing hard work out in the sun, away from comforts and family can do many different things to a person. please pray that we will keep our hearts open and flexible to ministry.

thanks everyone…i’ll update when we have some down time, and hopefully, i’ll be able to send short updates via twitter…so you can follow me that way too.

maybe you got an iPhone today, and maybe you got one last year. maybe you just have some old mobile phones sitting around your house. in any case, why not take a little time to help balance out the gadget refreshing world by donating your old phone to a good cause?

here is one site that will allow you to send in your old phone and select one from a variety of charities to benefit from it.

or

another one to help soldiers overseas

when it does all this. well, almost all this…

[[edit]] i had to take the video out because it kept locking up my blog. but it was funny…sorry.

did you take the plunge? will you ever?

ht: MPT

before we moved to nashville, pete emailed me and told me to call him after i left work because he had something exciting to share. (this, please note, was before lunch time…and the suspense throughout the day was killing me!)

on my way home, i called him and he asked if i’d like to help lead a trip cross point is taking to the dominican. no question about it — yes!!

so, next tuesday, pete, myself, and a group of others (we are in the process of gathering all their blogs for those who have them) will be headed down to the dominican until july 22.

we are working on doing something similar to the compassion bloggers trip i went on, sharing with words, photos, and videos what we are doing and experiencing there.

if you’d like to pray for us, i know we would greatly appreciate it. and if you’d like to share our journey with your blog readers, you can find different sizes of the above image here at this link.

i hope you’ll follow us!

i have written about online corporate reputations before. and i’ve talked about how twitter has helped saved lives.

although there were no real life threats, both mine and chris’ sanity was being tested all night long.

we have had a buffalo airstation for a while which has been pretty solid for DSL wireless, but hasn’t always played well with cable. we decided, after it wouldn’t connect with our new comcast cable internet, to get a new router. off to best buy, chris went, and purchased a netgear super g router, which was even worse trying to set up.

now, i’m not completely clueless when it comes to techy things, and have set up plenty of wireless connections in my day. so, after a couple of hours of set up and nothing was working, i twittered my frustration.

several of my twitter friends responded (one even called) and recommended the airport express. so out chris went to the apple store for purchase number two. we plugged and didn’t play right away, but after some minor tweaking, got it to work.

what really surprised me in this whole ordeal was comcast. after first losing our initial reservation for service installation, and after being on hold for a while via their phone systems, i realized that on twitter, @comcastcares had almost immediately responded to my woes. we walked through a few options, twitter went down for a while (sigh), but soon enough, he was back on trying to help me out.

even better was the personality of @comcastcares. his name is frank. he apologized for a slight delay he had in responding to me…why? he twittered that he was playing wii with his wife. perfectly acceptable in my book!

again, social media has pleasantly surprised me. even gigantic companies like comcast have taken initiative and customer service is being reshaped. why would i spend 10 minutes going through mazes of phone systems when twitter help is right there?

the first time i breathed a breath of nashville air was less than a year ago. i was up for ministrycom, a communications conference, and during the couple of days we were here, i fell in love with it. after i got home, i told chris that we had to visit sometime on vacation. maybe our fifth anniversary or something (which ironically, was the day we moved…)

i think i finally figured out what it is about nashville that is so appealing. it’s not a place where people go to settle down. it’s not a place where people go to be comfortable.

it is a place where people go to chase their dreams.

most of the time, those dreams take sweat, blood and tears to achieve. it requires living simply, working wherever and whenever you can so that in the few hours you have left, you can spend them working out whatever that dream is.

and for whatever reason, nashville is one of those places where a lot of people go to do that.

maybe it’s because it’s where country music was born, and now so many artists flock here. i think when people are chasing their dreams, something spiritual happens and it draws people in. people who don’t want to be comfortable.

it’s a bit paradoxical, but i am comfortable being uncomfortable. chris is technically self-employed, so we don’t know how much he’ll make a month or if he’ll have to pick up side jobs along the side. and yeah, it’s scary. it’s really uncomfortable. but seeing him chase his dream is one of the most beautiful things i’ve ever seen.