Participant Blogs

  "You can only love Me with the amount you love yourself." When I heard that I felt like I should have gotten up and ran as fast as I could. Run until my legs couldn't carry me anymore. I couldn't though. It was as if something had glued me to the cold cement floor. "You can only love Me with the amount you love yourself." Lord. I don't even acknowledge myself as a person? How do I love myself??? "You are allowed to love Me, love me with unconditional LOVE, and feel good about it." What is unconditional love?...

It was day two of serving tea to the refugees at Tabanovce, the border between Macedonia and Serbia. It was a cold day. Raining too. I remember not feeling my toes and serving tea was nice...at least my hands could touch some warmth every 7 seconds while filling a cup of chai (black tea). " Talg? , Charien?" were the main 2 words spoken to many refugees stretching out their arms over the counter also longing for some comfort in the cold weather - a cup of warm tea (served with a smile :-) While trying to serve as many...

Ahh Middle East, what an awesome place! I'm so stoked that I had the privilege of serving the people of crossroads. I'm really liking the tea a lot it's like a mix between rooibos and normal tea, it's perfect! I thought that we would be doing intense physical labor, but actually we just helped out with whatever needed to be done! Us guys got to play soccer with the kids every Saturday but because their culture requires men to wear pants we had to play in our jeans, and that made things a bit heated, and these kids completely wrecked...

weeks??? Why so fast??? Can we come back??? The rime spent in the Middle East has been spectacular! God is showing us his heart for these people. Visits, distribution; gas, pillows, stoves. How can people that need so much basic resources bless us so much???? With peace, joy, love and kindness and a lot of tea. My heart is filled with joy and hope for the rest of the year. Even though you may think that you know something, God always has something to teach us. There's nothing better than to just sit at His feet and listen. Bringing hope...

Sitting atop a building in the Middle East, with intimidating hills staring at me from a distance, I wonder why we're, most of the time, rushed..? The hopeless running after things which are seemingly thought to be unseen, though we can measure its worth by just an up and down look. Nice jewellery by the way...   It spills over into more of us, I mean, aren't we sometimes like that with God, such a desperate searching for deeper and more. But actually when we rush Him and get frustrated, its more about us than Him. And more - things...

The Middle East was awesome with love giving strangers that felt like my long lost family. I love the Middle East with the hart of our God. There has been weird laughing and awesome times Austin and I love cookies and wheels (Cookie name),but the best is waking up at 04:00 am with Mosque's screaming Allahu Akbar. It started to sound more like music the second night.

To suffer: to undergo, be subjected to, or endure pain, disability, death etc. patiently and willingly…. If I look back on the past few weeks and conversations I had, many topics come to mind: love for others, serving without reward, true wisdom, grace and mercy, forgiveness etc. But the theme that seemed to make its way into every situation was suffering. What does it mean to truly suffer? This question can be easily answered by my mind but for the first time I was confronted with a response from the heart. As the definition above describes, suffering is normally involuntarily...

My mind is blown. My foundations shaken. Suffering is still a thing? It's still happening? Why do we not know about this? Why did I not know about this? Do people actually know what is going on? Do people actually realize that there are PEOPLE in these circumstances. Living breathing people. What do you do in a situation like this? What can you do? Deliver a heater and a stove? A few mattresses, pillows, gas? Just enough food to get by for maybe a month? Show LOVE. We've been in the Middle East for three weeks now. Visiting families and...

I've recently felt lead to dive into the theme of mercy and to discover what it looks like. For in the passage of the Good Samaritan, a man is shown that his neighbor is the person who he has mercy on. The one that he helps physically, financially and emotionally after being beet up by robbers. God requires mercy and not sacrifice. Further on we learn about a master who forgives his debtor an enormous amount of money, whereafter he states "Should you not also have had mercy on your fellow slave even as I had mercy on you". It...

Arriving at our frist country with such a low expectations thinking that we will probably be camping ouside the church due to lack of rooms but was so surprised to us sleeping in warm beds (no one expected that) but the beds were not the only things that was warm,but the hospitality of loving people that live here was over all the best experience of all.Welcoming us with open arms showering us with love and blessings.Making each of us feel so important to them,appreciating everything BIG and small thing we do and blessing us with so much FOOD. this community blessed us...