Global Footprints

2016

TX, HI, PNG, TX, HI
After spending a couple weeks with my family in Texas for the holidays, David and I returned to YWAM Ships in Hawaii to prepare for our pastoral visits to the DTS teams.  Each time we send teams out we make an effort to visit them midway to encourage, challenge, and bring pastoral care for the teams. We spent nearly 3 weeks traveling in and through Papua New Guinea - fulfilling my yearly "international bug."  This was our first international travel as a married couple and my goodness did we love it! Back in Kona we welcomed teams back to debrief and then graduate our class of 25 (from 7 nations).
I started up another course through the University of Nations, whom I am gradually working toward a BA in Counseling and Health Care, called the Bible Core Course.  It was a 12 week, inductive Bible study intensive.  We spent 3 months reading through the Bible chronologically while learning an in-depth and exhaustive inductive study method.  I admit, while it was amazing to study the Bible, it was also a little maddening.
In the middle of this course David and I went to live in Texas for the summer.  We had learned how to work together as co-leaders, but still had been living within a hotel room in the YWAM Ships community.  We really wanted to time and space to learn and enjoy simply living together.  While in Texas David worked at a construction site doing some finishing work.  It was a phenomenal time growing and establishing ourselves as a couple, one that we couldn't imagine having gone without.
On the way home to Hawaii we stopped into California to spend a couple weeks with my dad up north (my sister was able to join us for a weekend!).  We finished by staying a couple days with dear friends in San Francisco.
Returning to Hawaii we were able to find a 1 bedroom apartment within our budget off campus.  Then we geared up to lead our second YWAM Ships DTS programs. With 24 students, 7 staff from 8 nations, we are charging forward in a battle between intellect and heart understanding.  It has been a wonderful school thus far, with plans to send these Jesus lovers to Papua New Guinea and Micronesia.

2015

TX, HI, Australia, WEDDING, HI, TX
This year I brought home a man for the holidays! After meeting at YWAM Ships and many months dating, David came home to meet the family for Christmas & New Years.  Turns out, he and my mother get along so well it's almost scary!  Coming back to Hawaii I continued with my counseling studies in doing a practicum with a local counseling ministry while continuing to work at our community Pregnancy Center.
As the practicum came to an end, David proposed and we celebrated by going to Australia to visit his family and friends at a YWAM base he had served at for 8 years!
We were married on June 6th and began our wonderful life together in missions.


Soon after being married we took on leading a Discipleship Training School together for the first time and got a crash course in communication, respect and how we work together as a team. It was a wild 6 months seeing the lives of so many young people forever changed as they came to know God in deeper ways.
As we sent off our students into Papua New Guinea for their 3 month outreach, David surprised me with tickets back home to spend a couple weeks with my family for the New Year. It was such a blessing and time together that we will always cherish.

2014

MO, TX, to HI and pause...

The holidays were wonderful and filled with time well spent with dear friends and lots of family. While home I had the opportunity to take my little sister to a Christian conference called OneThing in Kansas City, MO, where she rededicated her life to the Lord. Also, I was blessed to spend a few days with extended family in Texas. 

I am in a season that is best described as a time in “safe harbor.” My days are spent managing Port YWAM–Kona, a 78 room hotel given to us this past July. This location serves as home port for our vessels as well as a training grounds for students who will then take the Gospel to the nations, many by boat to remote and unreached people groups. YWAM Ships exists to reach the isolated and forgotten with God’s love! Ships are the only way to do that in places that have no airports! Being close as we can to the most remote is very strategic as we are only 7 days sail southbound to be among the most remote islands on earth (Micronesia) and only one mile down the road from the largest University of the Nations campus – YWAM Kona. At the time of my writing this we have approximately 100 people each week living in the hotel that consist of full-time students and staff, teachers, visiting family members, medical providers, and volunteers; and another 60 in the field ministering to the islands, on scouting trips and crewing our vessels.
Click here to see a live tracking of our boat's movement in the Pacific as it travels from Fanning to Christmas Island over the next week! (Updates every 10 mins)

I'm continuing to serve as a full-time volunteer staff with Port YWAM-Kona, managing the Humans Resources and Housing of the facility. I consider it a “safe harbor” positioning not because it is easy, but because my stationary role in Kona is being used to build up a ministry, establish stronger community with locals and long-term YWAMers, and press in for greater breakthrough with the Lord in areas of my life.

In the last few months of this year I began another counseling school called Methods & Models of Biblical Counseling.  In this course I learned and began practicing different models of counseling while looking at the different methods used around the world and examining the way they did, or did not line up with scripture in their methodology.  This was one of the coolest school experiences I've had and although it was incredibly stretching and exhausting, one of the most beneficial schools in my studies.  Our final exam was to teach the method I had come away with, explaining the ways in which it modeled God's character & Nature, using the several case studies I'd been working on throughout the course. 

2013

USA to Samoa and back

I started the year working with YWAM Kona, staffing in a branch of the ministry called CoreLife. This ministry focused on teaching the youth and students about the importance and joy of living uprightly in both purity and transparency.  In March we ran a month long seminar called The Sexual Reformation Seminar during which we hosted 4 speakers who covered everything from dating, marriage, to the challenges of pornography, the sex trade, and same-sex marriage, and more.  The seminar helped equip participants to be members of society who would positively impact their spheres of influence for the kingdom of God through being who God made them to be - Sons AND Daughters. 

CoreLife Team and some of the Seminar attendees

Afterwards I joined a team heading down to YWAM Samoa (Samoa is a tiny Polynesian country) where we conducted a Discipleship Training School. We had just under 50 students and staff from 9 different countries and 5 different first languages. It was a difficult, but amazing experience that opened my eyes to a completely alternate way of living simply and generously. Towards the end of that time I had to return to the states early for health reasons and spent a couple months resting. 

We took a week outreach into Samoa as a field assignment during lecture and this was my amazing team. We spent 4 days working as long as daylight was available building a cement water catchment tank (the 1st clean water source) for a village. 

In December I began working with a different YWAM Kona ministry called YWAM Ships. In it's pioneering days, I am helping through one of my favorite roles of administration/organization as the campus runs regular Discipleship Training School, Bible Core Course, Introduction to Primary Health Care, and a School of Navigation and Seamanship courses. All of these courses are trained here and most will spend a part of their outreach/field assignment aboard a sailing vessel that will port in several unreached/remote islands providing Bible training, medical care, water technologies and loving on the locals. Some of these islands we are accessing only see visiting vessels 3 times a year with no other shipping services, airports, hospitals, clean water or electricity!

The Hawai'i Aloha, a 74' Ketch, who is serving the region of Micronesia. We sent her off for a 9 month voyage through Micronesia mid-Dec. She will hold up to 23 passengers at one time, many who will be DTS students on their outreach.

2012

USA: TX, MO, OR, WA, FL, HI

At the end of December 2011, I went up to Kansas City for the OneThing conference through IHOP (International House of Prayer). While there God made it clear that I needed to learn how to rest and trust Him. In His guidance I came home and packed up in 9 days to attend a 3 month Internship at the IHOP in Kansas City.  It was a wonderful opportunity, spending every day completely emerged in God's presence while in the company of dear brothers and sisters of the faith. God also used the internship to teach me more about His financial faithfulness, as I had to trust Him to provide for me in a 1st world country, rather than in the 3rd world countries I've been in. He also gave me an incredible life group, each one of them forever having left a huge impact on my life. As one, if not the, most life changing 3 months of my life to this day, my time at IHOP yielded a rock solid relationship with my Beloved Lord and grounded the truth of His living Word in my heart forever. 

Staying in the states after the IHOP-KC internship ended in April 2012, I traveled all over from California, Texas, Missouri, Oregon, Washington, Florida and then back to Texas! Then I was blessed to live with my family in Texas to work at Christ's Haven for Children, a private foster care facility where I did summer rec with the kids everyday! It was blast and kept me home for about 5 months (much to the approval of my mom and sister). Working with these children meant so much to me and I often find myself missing them dearly. 

Field Trip Day!

Touring the Rangers' Stadium with the kiddos!

The last quarter of the year I returned to YWAM Kona where I completed the Foundations for Counseling Ministry school at the University of Nations. This course was filled with models and examples of ministry that I have since used all over the world and have found one of the most helpful equipping seasons of my life thus far. With the tools I learnt from the course I have had the blessing of walking through inner healing with students from deep wounds, addictions, and life-crippling fears through biblically grounded healing and restoration. It was a difficult course but well worth the time, money and junk of my own I had to work through. 

FCM Class of 2012

2011

Thailand, Haiti & Jamaica

Two years ago a disastrous earthquake shook the nation, bringing Haiti to the top of the news internationally as this third-world country fell into even deeper pits of poverty, chaos, and corruption. The quake was centered in the governmental area of the capitol which resulted in the deaths of many of the leaders in the country. Our DTS focused largely on raising up Haiti’s next generation of leaders with strong character and a passion for a biblical world view, as Haiti positions herself to be a huge blessing to the world! The school succeeded in encouraging and equipping young adults to be a voice for the voiceless: loving the orphaned, praying for the sick, preaching the gospel, and bringing practical solutions to people’s daily physical needs. I am so excited that God called me to Haiti at that time and am honored to be apart of the great change that happened in the school and to the beautiful nation of Haiti!

Nearly everyone (staff & students) of the PAP DTS in 2011 crowded into our house's gazebo! (think I counted 80 in this picture)

I worked out of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti with Youth with a Mission (YWAM) as we ran the first Discipleship Training School in the capitol city! The DTS started June 11th,  2011 and was a ride! The first few weeks were full of spiritual warfare, deliverance, freedom and blessings. That was followed by several months where God just showed up in inexplainable, and miraculous ways in the lives of our students, staff and neighbors! Life there was anything but easy, but our school was incredibly blessed with the grace to actually live with 80-100 people all living in one house.  It is such an honor to me that God would bring me to help lead that school and He has taught me so much about the joy of being obedient. 

With a team of 9, I spent 2 months in Jamaica, leading an outreach team from the DTS. We were a multi-lingual/cultural/aged team and were so excited and honored to live in 3 different places in Jamaica! One small town in specific, called Boscobel, we lived in for 5 weeks and truly became loved and embraced by the locals as our friendship and ministry among them grew! Click on the "DTS graduates" page to read more about the team and what they're doing now, post-graduation!

Team "Jamaique"  - the 9 of us at our beach in Boscobel! Beautiful, aren't they? ;)

2010

USA to Thailand

After completing my second semester at Lee University, while working with PhotogenX (a film/photo journalism ministry with YWAM Kona), I moved to Kona to begin a full time role with them.

This was my Discipleship Training School, which was held in Kona, Hawaii (USA). Focused around the issues of injustice in the world, this DTS had 50 students from 14 different nations! It was an incredible 3 months of rediscovering the meaning of "disciple" as well as building a solid foundation on my own identity in Christ. While I have long had a relationship with God, it was during this time that I was able to take that relationship to a new level and truly learn what it meant to love and be loved in return. It was amazing to be surrounded by such a large community of passionate and single-minded believers as I spent time on the campus and it has taught me much on the value and practical structure of living as the church in community. 

Our DTS classroom in Kona - sharing testimonies during week 1! 50 students, 12 staff and way too much love to add up! 

My outreach was 3 months in Thailand, with a team of 9 ladies! It is rare for outreach teams to be single-gendered, but with the ministry we intended to do, the staff felt that was the best. The first month+ of outreach was spent up in the northern provinces, mostly in Chiang Mai, with an organization called the Abba House Foundation. There we worked vigorously with 11 men out of the Freedom Christian Center and New Life Annex (half-way programs out of the prison, drug rehabs and off the street); teaching them Bible studies, English, and doing evangelism, ministry, and worship together. We also got to spend a good deal of time with the 20 "at risk children" who lived on the base who have come to go to school. Most of their primary care givers are in prison, rehab centers, too old to care for them, are prostitutes, or who just can't manage to provide for their children. These children are sponsored to attend school and live in fantastic housing, while also growing up in a Christian environment; their faith challenged mine daily. The other half of my time there was spent in Phuket, a world-renowned tourist hot spot where the main source of tourism is focused around sex. I spent nearly 2 months in the red-light districts of Phuket, working with SHE, making friends and talking about the pure and "safe" love of Christ (though in our particular region of ministry that talk had to be done carefully and quietly).  It was hard and ugly, but the lessons I learned in that city were all about the faithfulness of God and how we must choose to allow Him to Lord - even when don't understand. Thailand is a beautiful country filled with incredible people; over 70% of the population is Buddhist with only what is estimated at 1% being Christian! That figure alone draws me to go back to Thailand every time I think about it, and I definitely hope to return, but until then I stand with the thousands of other people who have become captivated and haunted by the diamond in the rough Thailand continues to be.

Team "Aloha," the 9 beautiful women on the Thailand outreach! -we may be a little silly, just maybe ;)