Hello ok so I've pretty much felt like I've reached a point where I'm actually going backwards insted of moving foewards. Kindof like I've given up on trying with my team cuse we talk about change all the time but nothing actually happens so I've retreted and kindof gone into hybernation of just staying where I'm at and not really caring anymore not only about them but life on the race in general :( (NO BUENO!!! The race isn't finished yet Christi-An you have to keep racing until you get to the finish!!!) and I've just really been missing home and friends and family, but I didn't really relize where I was until last friday when I went back to the very beging of my special Notebook of very important things that I started at tranning camp and so this is what I read...............
What one sacrifice do you lack to enter into the kingdome of God????
Is it worth it to you to keep holding on to it??????
Would you be willing to exchange that in return for God's Will??
(Like Abraham and his son Isac)
Is it worth it??
I don't want to bring me to the world I want to bring Jesus to the world I want to bring the Kingdome to the world not Christi-An!!!!!!
It's the goodness of God that leads us to repentnance not the, you are a sinner condemnation that draws us in it's His goodness His love!!!!!
It's Gods Love that draws people to repentnace not His judgment!!!
Romans 7:24 Oh what a miserable person I am! who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin?
'Sunday Febuary 13th 2011' Ecuador WR day 37'
Ha ha what a question I have stumbled apon!!!! Oh what a miserable person I am!! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by so much sin??...Only GOD can and no one else! Ok so I've come to the relization that the reason I feel like my team isn't united is cuz of me, I haven't cared, I haven't tryed, I haven't gone all in, I haven't stoped thinking about myself, and I haven't stoped striving to be know and understood by my teammates I've been so focused on myself and own desires and what I wanted to gain from this World Race and I've been so dissapointed cuz I've only been here for myself!!! so.....................This Sunday morning our 2nd in Ecuador at church I have had several things that have brought me to this point,that now I have decided to change my thinking!! I asked God to help me stop only thinking about myself. To stop trying to be understood to put my teamates before myself, to try and get to know them to really care and to really try to get to know them. To realize that I didn't bring myself on this trip, I didn't provide the funds for myself to come on this trip!! I didn't have anything to do with me being right here in this seat, in this church, in this country Ecuador, with this family the Amores, and with this team of 6 other girls!!!! It had nothing to do with me!! I had no say, I had no power, I had nothing to do with it!!!!! It was all God's doing, hahaha Wow and yet I try to think that, oh yah it was all me ha ha!!! You couldn't have said no even if you wanted too!! Your not here because you wanted to be, your not here for adventure, your not here to travel the world, your here because God wants you to be!!!!!!!!! Your here to Gloryfiy Him!! Your here to be changed, your here to love your teamates, your here to know how much God LOVES you and to learn how to love yourself, your here to learn how to live for something other than you!!! To live in the FREEDOM of God's never ending Love, Grace, Mercy, and Joy!!!!!!! So hurry up what are you waiting for? God I need your help, I want to feel your presence in this life, I want to know the Holy Spirit the way that I know you God and your son Jesus, because it's 3 in one. All my life I've only had God and Jesus, but I've never known the 3rd. I've never lived with all 3. I've never fully known God and His Love!!!!!
God this World Race has nothing to do with Me (Christi-An) But has
Everything to do with YOU and Your GLORY !!!!!!!
Yah so I wrote that 4 months ago and I feel like I learned a lot since then but I just got stuck in a rut again and needed to read this again and figured it would be a good blog reminder as well!! So yah !! I'm climbing out of that rut into my word of the month...........
And that is exactly what it is about. God's furious, passionate, relentless LOVE.
His LOVE is the most powerful thing in the world. It will stop at nothing! It will fight the darkest darkness! There is nothing and no one who can stand against the fullness of God's furious love. And the enemy hates the LOVE of GOD. He doesn't want to be around it. Fear is cast out in the very presence of his love. Evil and darkness have no weapon strong enough to combat his perfect LOVE.
LOVE bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
LOVE never ends.
(borowed from Bathenys blog :)
This is my first time on line since about 3 weeks or more!! I'm so happy that we didn't go Nicaragua and that we came to Honduras instead!!! God has been doing some crazy things this month..... I mean I got baptized what?? man I wish I could write faster but .......we are living with a guy and his wife Tony (American) and Nidia (Honduran) and the life that they are living and allowing us to be a part of is so incredible his story is so crazy and how he started working her about 5 years ago with several different churches over the years and the churches kept telling him that he wasn't accepted in the churches and that he had to leave because God was using him to LOVE street kids that had no hope in the churches eyes and the worlds eyes that live in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Central America and the 3rd most dangerous in Honduras!! He started by only driving threw Los Pinos with his Windows down a little bit so they could see his eyes he would drive in and out once a day for 6 months before he was able to build the relationships and now he is so respected in the area everyone knows his car and why he's there to LOVE!! Now he has one of the boys living with him (Henry). They live on a old semi run down farm in the middle of some beautiful mountains (it looks a lot like TN) and when we got there he had offered the opportunity........ to a new boy that he had been working with for 2 years on a rollercoster of ups and down. His name is Cristofer and he is the oldest of 4 boys and really has no parents (he does but they don't care) he is 16 and had a problem of sniffing paint thinner to get high so he wouldn't have to deal with life. So Tony invited him to come live on the farm for a month and he couldn't go home at all during that time and so Cristofer said yes. We have seen him change so much in these past 3ish weeks it's so crazy how powerful God's love is!!!! All anybody did to the kid was love him and everyone told Tony that there was no hope for Cristofer or any of the boys for that matter!!!!! there's 11 boys that we've met and loved on this month and there is a few girls as well. Gods been teaching me so much about his LOVE threw watching and just living life with Tony (who reminds me so much of my dad),Nidia,the boys And threw several people on my squad and right now he's trying to teach me just how SIMPLE it is!!! all I have to do is accept the love that He has already given me and covered me with!!!!!! Wow I didn't think that I could write so much hahahaha!!!! OK One more thing that I've been working on learning is that "Gods perfect love casts out ALL fear!!!!!" bye!!! :)
Ok so I'm really bad at posting blogs apperently!!!! (but if you keep up with any of my teamates they post a lot and almost every thing that they do I pretty much do as well!!! :) Ok well first of all I really love Ecuador its so pretty here and today the clouds clered just enough for us to be able to see 2 of the snow covered Mt. peaks for about 2 min then they dissapered again, It was so cool to see them today cuse I didn't even know that they excisted before today!!!!!! So this month we have been working at a school an english school, For me this has been super duper hard!!!!! And I don't think that it's gotten any eisier even thoe the Lord has been trying to teach me that I'm a good teacher, I've come to the relization that teaching is definetly not one of my strengths!!!! But its been a good 12 days of growing in the knowldedge of how much God loves me and has planed that I would be here in this country at this school with team F.I.T teaching little 4 and 5 year olds how to do flips off of me!!! hahaha so yah. Well I'm proud to say that I just wrote a blog!!!!!!!! Yaeh!!!! Ok thank you all for the prayers God hears them!!! :)
Ok so I have 2 blogs that are ready to be posted but the internet at the chicken King is very if-y so I´m at the cyber cafe and I´m using the computers provided so once I get some fairly good signal I will post both So just keep an eye out for them!!! :) P.S the enpenadas and pizza and pork skins here are delicious!!!!!!!
Hey!! I guess I've been procrastinating with my blog writing sorry!!!!! Well the day has actually arrived, the day that I can say "I leave tomorrow!!!!!" I woke up this morning and my stomach was doing flip flops, I think from excitement, Nervousness, and not having my backpacked totally ready!!!!! (even though I've packed and repacked it 4 times already and every time I take out more and more stuff and it's still just under 50 lbs!!) Yah it's been quite the adventure leading up to this point, God has been working in my life in such big ways. I know for a fact that he wants me to go on this trip!!!!! Just from the fact that I'm only $300 dollars away from my support goal of $14300, I didn't break anything learning to snowboard over new years break, also just some little encouraging stories of friends around me that keep hinting that this is where I'm supposed to be right now,and surviving a 15 hour train ride just before Christmas!!!!! Christmas was good I got to spend it with my mom, dad, brother's and Grandpa then we drove to NC and spent New years with another part of my family the Luces (Good times adventuring up there in the snow!!! ) The good bye are hard, but they are a happy good bye none the less!!!! :) Still having adventures with my unnormal family (Brenna, Kristen, Noel,Megan and Seth ect.) Like last night One of my fellow racers Megan was stuck at the FTL airport and needed to get to Miami so we (5 of us) piled into the car and drove to get her and took her to Mijami!! ADVENTURE!!!!! :) Well I need to take some other fellow V squadders to breakfast so the next blog will be from the Dominican Republic!!!!!!! Bye America!!!! I'm going to miss all my friends here!!!! but no fres I will see you again!!!!! :)
Wow what to say about training camp? Well I guess the thing that I noticed the most is how much God worked on my heart this past week. He challenged me to open up and be real, To empty out all the garbage that I had been storing up inside of me and to replace it all with Jesus!!!! So now when anyone looks at me I hope that they see nothing of me and only Jesus shining out of me!!
Ok also while at training camp we got to learn how to eat in all the different cultures like in Africa the women sit on the ground while the men sit at tables and we got to eat with our fingers!!!!! (I loved eating with my fingers I think mostly because my mom would never let me do that at home!!)And also in most cultures the left hand is considered unclean and would not be used. We got to try all kinds of food of which the most interesting one was a rice porridge with salted baby sardines for breakfast!! Yum!!!
I was also privileged to meet all 50 plus people that make up my Squad, which is called V Squad. There were three other squads at camp as well making close to 200 people participating at training camp. (Lots of people to play Frisbee with). I consider the whole V squad to be the newest members of my ever growing family and I'm excited to grow with them in this adventure that God has called each and every one of us to go on!!! We were split us up into 8 smaller teams so that way we are able to share Gods love in more places at a time when we get to each country!!
My team is 6 women including my self, I'm excited to see how God is going to use us!! Please pray that we continue to grow closer to God and to each other in the next 2 months to come before we depart on this adventure!!
I have always had a heart for missions!!!!! I remember when I was little I always wanted to be a missionary to China, and I guess growing up in Haiti as a missionary kid probably had a lot to do with that!!! I love to travel. I think traveling is in my blood. Growing up, my whole life, we were always going somewhere, whether it was driving to NC from FL at the age of three to visit my Grandma, flying back and forth to Haiti, or driving 4 hours from our house to Port-a-Prince to pick up our mail once a week!!!! We've always been a going family.
OK, so I moved out of Haiti about 7 years ago to take some medical courses in the US and I did that, but never ended up using them. About a year or two before I left Haiti, my two brothers and I started road cycling with several of our close Haitian friends. Then when we came to the states we started racing. That became our mission field and as we got better we started traveling more. Up until last year, we were pretty much traveling to races all over the US almost every weekend. I loved racing, but I always told God that at the point I was doing it only for myself and not glorifying Him through my racing and cycling, then that was when I was going to quit. So God gave me the chance to take the year off from cycling this year and He provided a new mission field for me which was bicycle polo ( pretty much the same concept as horse polo except on a bike!!). This year I've had the privilege of traveling to several Polo events across the US and be a light to my new found friends.
As far as this trip goes, I know God has a plan for my life so much bigger than what I can see!!! After I moved to the states, I somehow got this job ( that's a story in itself!!) working on the facilities crew at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, which is really the only job I've ever had. I love working there. They are so good to me, allowing me time off to travel so much. But I've always known that this is not where God wants me to be for the rest of my life and I've just been waiting for Him to show me my next step. Pastor Kennedy passed away a few years ago and there was a church merger with the new pastor's congregation and half the congregation left the church. Since the change the monies have been real low which has caused them to lay off so many of the employees. Thus, I thought I was the next one to go. Recently, my brother and I went to see some of our friends who had just left for college. On the drive up there I was making friendship bracelets to give to my friends when we got there. After we had been up there a while, I noticed one of my friends had on an anklet that looked a lot like the ones I had been making. I asked her if she made it and she said no that she got it at school from these people who were trying to raise money to go on The World Race. She went on to explain what it was and my heart started pounding, my eyes were watering and I got really excited. God, is this what I'm supposed to do next??? I came back home and I kind of forgot about it because I was real scared that I was going to be the next person to get laid off at work. After about a week or 2, I thought about The World Race again and looked it up. Right on the front page in big letters were the words "Apply now." I was like, well, it's not going to hurt to just apply. I did, not really thinking that it would be so soon!!! Since then God has just been working everything into place. I definitely believe this is the next big step God wants me to take!!!! Oh yah, I didn't get fired. I actually got called up to the office 2 days after I applied for the Race. My boss told me everything was OK. I didn't have to worry anymore. They weren't going to lay me off because they needed me. I told him about the Race and he said that was OK. I could work until it's time to go!!!
As far as this trip goes, I know God has a plan for my life so much bigger than what I can see!!! After I moved to the states, I somehow got this job ( that's a story in itself!!) working on the facilities crew at 