Last week I posted about Matt and Tricia and their upcoming movie to Thailand. Like I said in the post, they need to raise about $5,000 for their travel expenses, and they’re leaving really soon.

In the comments, Tricia shared some great news that they scored a ‘buddy pass’, which reduced the cost of the trip by half, but here’s what she wrote on their blog a couple of days ago:

Unfortunately, the buddy passes that our friends gave us turned out not to be the best route. Because they only got us so far, only one time, it ended up actually being more economical to actually purchase two round trip tickets. We got a pretty good price for one: $1,571.67. So, that brings our support needs back up to about $4,500. So far, we’ve gotten about $500.

In the last blog post I noted that if everyone who reads this blog on a regular basis would give 20 bucks, we could get them there. So far, two people have responded, and I have $40 that I’m going to send to the Flaglers, but I know we can do so much better than that! Let’s take a cue from Anne Jackson and show what lots of people can do when they do what they can!

’cause if you do, I’d like to share a couple of neat opportunities with you…

When I went overseas, I had about 11 weeks to find enough folks to commit to giving about $1,200 a month for at least a year while I was gone. Once I had been gone for a couple of months, a good bit of my support dropped off. I ended up having to watch my finances very carefully, and I still spent a lot of my own money.

The day I got home, I pretty much had nothing in the bank, and I actually owed some money to cover travel expenses for getting home.

Missionaries shouldn’t have to deal with that.

Fast-forward to today: God is good and He takes care of me. Steph and I are ironing out some financial rinkles and God is teaching us in the process. But I want to introduce you to three friends who are now in the shoes I was in a couple of years ago:

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1) Meet Tricia and Matt. Tricia is my sister from another mother. She was with me in Uzbekistan, and is one of the awesome-est (yes, I just made that a word) people you’ll ever meet. Since we’ve been back, she and Matt got married and started a life together.

In a couple of weeks, they will be moving to Thailand to spread the Gospel. They will earn their place in the culture by teaching english to elementary school students at this school. Once they arrive in the country, their expenses will be paid as part of their teaching positions, but they are responsible to cover all of their travel expenses, which will be several thousand dollars.

Up until now, Tricia has been working at a church, and Matt has been working part-time while going to seminary. This is another way of saying, “These kids have been living on a string and a couple thousand dollars doesn’t come easy.” If everyone who looked at this blog yesterday gave 20 bucks, we could pay for their whole trip. Please pray about it and let me know if you wanna help!

2) Meet Jeremy (on the far left — oh and be patient, his blog takes a while to load :0)

I met Jeremy when I was a student at NC State, but I really got to know him over the 2 years that I worked at my last job. He is an awesome young man who has been growing in Christ like crazy for the past 2 years.

A couple of months ago, he prayerfully decided to go to Serbia for a week with his church to teach a bunch of kids about Christ. The cost was a couple thousand dollars, and he signed up by faith, hoping that some folks would come through and help him pay for it.

I talked to him last week. He said that about 30 kids responded to the Gospel when they heard it for the first time on his trip! He also said that in the end he paid about 1,200 bucks out of pocket. At that rate, he won’t be able to do this very often…

If you are interested in investing in his trip, please go pay him a visit at his blog and leave him a comment, or just let me know!

3) Meet John (John’s not a freak like me who puts his whole life online, so I don’t have a photo or a blog to point you to :0)

John is one of my best friends, and he should be returning from Zimbabwe today. He went through the same church as Jeremy. According to his email, they had an immediate change of plans when they got in-country, and he has spent the past week building churches instead of teaching vacation Bible school.

I’m looking forward to seeing his photos and I’ll hopefully be able to share some with you here! But in the meantime, he’s in the same boat as Jeremy: he left having paid for a good chunk of his trip out of pocket. Once again, if you’re interested in helping, let me know!

Thanks for being patient with the long post…

Last week, I posted about the awesome opportunity to reach out to my sister Jennifer and her family this Christmas season.

Again, the bullet points are

• 7 people
• 2-bedroom apartment
• 5 children under 14 living together in one bedroom
• Dad out of work right now
• Opportunity to rent large house for less rent

So far, I have heard from a few of you, mostly via email, and I’m so grateful for the awesome response!

This weekend, I spoke to Jennifer, and she gave me some better details. She says they are moving forward by faith, and they have to be out of the apt by 12/10. She said their two greatest needs (besides prayer of course), are

1. Money for the move
2. Christmas for the kids

If you are interested in helping with the move, that would be awesome! I’m going to put the expenses on my credit card, and I need you all to help me pay the bill (and I swear I will give you some evidence — ie receipt or something — that the money went to good use!

If you are interested in sending toys/clothes/games/etc for Christmas, that’s even better! And I need to correct my previous post about ages of the kids… I had them a little mixed up:

There’s:

• Sarah, age 8
• Earl, age 12
• Monique, age 12
• Mariah, age 13
• Joey, age 10
• Angie, age 7, but living in Texas right now and in less need

Please help us show the love of Christ to these kids this Christmas! Let me know if you’d be willing to help in any way!

So, my boy Charlie Hall just sent me this email. He was all flustered because some dudes just stole a  bunch of his band’s gear, and he was all like, “Should I mess ‘em up?” And I was like, “Nah, I would just pray down fire from heaven.” And then he was like, “Man, this ain’t Hillsong United you’re talking to…”

OK. So that’s not quite true.

Actually, it’s almost completely untrue, except for the stolen gear part.

This is from CharlieHall.com:

Stolen gear… : ( – 11/01/2007 It’s true. We did have some gear stolen….a lot of it. All of Dustin’s drums, Kendall and Charlie’s guitar amps, Quint’s bass amp and speaker cab, a keyboard stand and several thousand dollars worth of CD’s. I haven’t posted until now because we hadn’t quite figured how we were going to handle any donations, but we’re ready now. Thanks for all your offers already! Anyone that wants to help can send a check to:
Generation Productions
611 Broadway
Oklahoma City, OK 73102

In the subject line of the check please write “Gear Replacement”. I will post a complete replacement cost of all the gear stolen in case anyone wants to know, but we’re still gathering all of that, but it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of $15,000 worth of equipment/resources. We’ve already received some donations and if we happen to receive anything over that amount we are donating the overage to the International Justice Mission <>. Thanks so much for your thoughts and prayers. We appreciate the offers of help and are thankful for anything at all.

Also, for what it’s worth, Charlie is on SixSteps records, run by Louie and Shelley Giglio. They do happen to have 4 of the biggest and most successful names in the ‘christian’ music world, but they turn most of their profit around and invest it in the kingdom. Very little ends up in the hands of the artists. Does anyone know exactly how much?