Six Months In....(and I am in it deep)

This has been an incredible six months digging in to the mission field. With your help financially and in prayer, I have built a relationship with EDGE OUTREACH that has developed into a possible lifetime opportunity and gone to Zambia with my Dordt College.

In 2009, before my first semester ended, I had to chance to attend

the ECHO Sustainable Agriculture Conference in Florida. EDGE OUTREACH invited me to help demonstrate the water purification system at a global missionary conference. I met the leaders at ECHO (Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization), and returned for a second visit to volunteer over spring break 2010 on their farm.

Your donations allowed me to both learn and serve through EDGE in Kentucky in attendance to their “I Thirst” annual fundraising dinner. This event also gave me the chance to meet some of the new people that have affected and been affected by EDGE in the last year.  While there, I continued to learn more about the purifier and showed others how it worked.  Sometimes I have found that things make more sense after explaining them to others.

Words cannot describe how powerful my experience to Zambia was in May.  Our team went to do a little service and a lot of learning, about the culture, the people, agriculture, and Northrise University, the school with which Dordt College has collaborated.  However, once away from my cell phone, and the hubbub of everyday American life, surrounded by Christian brothers, both American and Zambian, I encountered God face to face.  I really came to develop a better understanding of what it means to be a part of the Kingdom of God.  We worshiped together, slept together, ate together, and learned together about each other.  Going to Africa put faces with the “least of these brothers of mine” that Jesus talks about in Matthew 25.  Surprisingly some of those faces are plastered with the biggest smiles I have ever seen.  They really know what it means to be content with that with which God has blessed them. There is so much to learn from them. I hope to go back someday.

We had a very successful summer empowering youth and adults to do mission work in the city of Louisville, KY.  We built thirty raised vegetable garden boxes, refurbished a prayer trail, painted a homeless shelter, worked at a nursing home even painting a beautiful mural, and cleaned the inside of an old furniture factory for an up-and-coming inner city ministry.  Most importantly, we built relationships with the community, with individuals, and with each other.

I have agreed to work for EDGE throughout the school year and will be researching some new water purification technologies, getting a shoe drive started in Omaha, and preparing for a trip to Haiti in December with a team to teach health and hygiene and install a water purifier in this devastated country.

Thank you so much for what we have done together in God’s name.  Your partnership is a powerful tool God is using to make a difference in the world.


מִנְחָה֙