All Blog Posts (240)

12/26/11

Final preparations and packing for my move to Thailand. Excited about the journey/new life ahead. Praying for God to do amazing things in my life and the lives of the people in Ban Pong. Praying God uses my life, willingness to serve, and sacrificial heart to touch the lives of many friends, family, and strangers so that they may see God in a new way, draw close to Him, and seek His will in their lives and be inspired and encouraged to live a sacrificial life in obedience to…

We started the new year off with lots of good and exciting things.

-Made new friends at church

-Played badminton for 3.5 hours with some hard-core Thai badminton players from church

-Drank lots of fresh coconut water

-Rode elephants, played with large tigers…

12/30/11

The team worked at the Ban Pong Center. We scraped mold off fences, built a basketball goal, cleaned a storage room, planned activities for kids’ events, and played with an absolutely stunningly beautiful baby Golden Tree Snake we found on the fence post. After we roamed around the super crowded night bazaar soaking in all the noise, lights, people, music, random stuff to buy, watching some people get massages on the street and other people get their callused flesh eaten off…

The word empathy seems to have become a rather ambiguous word in our language today. It is a concept that we know is important. But we also seem unable to clearly define what empathy is and what it looks like. For myself, I tend to define it as feeling the same thing as someone else and, therefore, being able to understand what they are going through or have gone through. I also consider it an act of support for the person who is suffering or struggling. But what does that truly look like in…

In an earlier post I mentioned a ring-box I had received as a Christmas gift years ago with the saying “the journey, not the arrival, matters” written on the side. While running Cross Country in college I have come to a new understanding of this saying and how it applies to my life. Before I began to run Cross Country, I always assumed it was only a physically demanding sport and running was really all there was to it. It is certainly incredibly physically demanding, but it is also an…

Life, in all areas, is a matter of balance. We must balance priorities, balance responsibilities, balance our diets, balance our sleep schedule, balance our finances…It is all about keeping that balance. In the physical, tangible things, that seems to be more easily done than in those things that we cannot quite grasp and touch with our hands. So many people get caught up in the physical, the things that they can touch and feel, weigh, judge, and compare. But what really matters in…

There's something to be said for Christian radio. I'll admit, I'm never aching to listen to it when I jump in the car. But somewhere on the way from Minneapolis to Joplin to Atlanta and back I really began to appreciate the consistency that Christian stations brought to my interstate commute. I could always count on that one station when I'd had enough of flipping through the rest.

On the Present:Hope Tour's first century day, it was my day to drive, and I'd had enough. I…

My trip is losing something. It is no longer means as much when I share about it. I no longer know how to share about it. There is so much that I always wish I had shared each time I sit down after sharing. Every time I share I feel like I am doing it less justice and ma failing the cause and the people I rode for. It seems like I leave out the important parts and people do not get what they should out of the trip. But how can you explain two months of such amazing adventure in anything less…

 A couple of weeks ago I took the train home to spend the weekend with my family. I took the downtown commuter rail from the Metrodome to Target Field and then transferred to the NorthStar, the commuter train that goes from the Twin Cities up to Big Lake, directly through my home town. For some reason that day I was thinking about my tour a lot. I sat on the train and thought about the fact that just over two months ago I was just completing a bike ride across the entire country. I thought…

People keep responding to my tour with amazement and wonder. They find it so shocking and phenomenal that I rode across the entire country, that I did what I did. But I did nothing. It wasn’t me. I was simply a willing instrument in the Master’s hand. People keep asking how I did it. I tell them I don’t know. I didn’t. He did. And now each time that I encounter a new challenge, an unknown, I recognize the fact that I am nothing on my own. It is only by His grace, provision, and guidance that…

I know I speak for the whole team when I say that we do not intend for this Tour to bring the spotlight on to us but rather, we are the spotlight holders, shining light and offering a new perspective to stories you may not have seen.

Today was a day I will never forget.  We saw Joplin through the eyes of one of our team members who is the pastor of St. Paul's Methodist Church in Joplin. He and his family live here and have played a huge role in the aftermath of the tornado. …

A few things I've already learned in the 24 hours of the Present:Hope Tour.

1- I love my team. Their stories are incredible and I'm more excited than I even thought to share this experience with them.  I love that feeling of really knowing someone and thinking back to when you first met them and you didn't know them at all.  That's about to happen. 

2- I love Venture.  I love hearing their heart, stories and the difference they've made over the last 10 years.  Over $1 million…

It has been over a year since I have posted a blog on this part of the Venture site.  It the the part where participants can blog about their trip, communicate with their community of supporters, and try to explain what is happening inside of them as they log miles by biking, hiking, or running.

A year ago I was blogging about my trip to climb Mt Kilimanjaro, to raise awareness for better education solutions in Nairobi, Kenya.  This year I will will be writing about my ride…

As human beings we have been gifted with a phenomenal thing: our minds. We have the ability to reason, to think logically, to ponder things, to decipher, to learn, to create…Things that the

rest of creation can only do to a certain extent, if they can do it at all. But

this logic and reasoning of ours, though often our greatest strength, can also

be our greatest weakness and frustration in life.…

Although I do not really enjoy being on stage, I have been in several low-key musical productions at our county fair when I was between the ages of 10 and 17. Something I remember our director always told us was that we could never goof around while on stage (and she was particularly adamant about fixing wedgies) because there was always someone in the audience who would be watching us. As a child it sounded like one of those exaggerated things adults say to keep kids in line. But as I have…

Where do you go when things get hard? Do you run away physically when it gets tough? Do you walk away from the task and leave the goal unreached because it is too difficult? Do you pray, sing, and recite scripture to distract yourself from the discomfort? Do you press forward, crying as you go simply from exhaustion and pain? Do you remove yourself mentally? Do you simply try to ignore the struggle?

As a Type-A person I tend to compartmentalize everything in my life. Everything is…

When I first returned from my tour this summer I was pleased to discover that my mind was no longer racing. I had developed a lifestyle of Obsessive Compulsive Doing. I was always busy doing something, felt incredibly ill-at-ease and antsy if I was not doing and accomplishing something. And to keep myself entertained while I was doing I played music. Before the tour it was not at all unusual for my mind to be constantly racing, running through the things I needed to accomplish next, the…

I find it interesting that we do not usually notice changes right away, especially when they are in ourselves. It seems that when you are around the thing being changed during the changing process, it imperceptible until contrasted with what it was before. I have had a lot of this contrast since I arrived home almost two weeks ago. Some of the changes are kind of bizarre things, some are very logical things, some are little, and some seem huge. All are examples of how the tour this summer…

I hardly know where to begin. This summer has been the most amazing adventure of my life. I have spent the last two months on my bicycle, riding from Seattle to New York City, departing on June 5^th and arriving on July 22^nd. Although it sounds crazy and monotonous, the eight weeks between were nothing short of life changing for me. It is so strange to think that it is over now. I talked about it, prepared for it, and anticipated it for so long. But it seemed to go by so…