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Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Recap of trip- Day 1

Getting adjusted back to reality but our trip was amazing, life changing and it was humbling to be a part of this team.  So many willing to serve and love the people of Ethiopia.  The Lord provided unity as a team and it was certainly needed! :)

Internet was spotty and our time limited while in Ethiopia so I will go back and recap each day of our trip.  The opposition was strong on this trip was God was faithful and provided for each of our daily needs.  One team member commented that He simply gave us our manna, just enough for that day!

We had a few issues with flights being delayed, etc on the trip over.  Our team had great spirits and attitudes through it all.  Who knew that a strike by the Greek air traffic controllers would impact our flight to Addis.

We eventually landed in Addis and started collecting all of our baggage.  Amazingly only 1 bag didn't make it- it came a few days later.

We had all of the necessary paperwork to get our many dental and humanitarian aid supplies through customs.  Moody and our dear friends in Ethiopia work tirelessly prior to these trips to secure the proper documents needed to allow for smooth travels through customs.  Last year we got 120 bags through with no issue.  We had many praying at home for the same experience this year.  The Lord had other plans.

A few team members got their bags out with no problem but then it all came to a halt!  It was rather crazy with bags being pulled to the side, we were pulling out our official papers signed by the various government agencies, Moody's official license to practice in Ethiopia, our humanitarian aid letter for the infant formula, etc to show we had cleared all of this prior to arrival.  It was a Saturday night, we were already exhausted and it appeared that no one knew what to do or ultimately who had the authority to let us go or not.  They began to open each bag, trunk and bin one at a time.  We had to pull out any personal items and then they kept any medicine, dental equipment and infant formula.

After a VERY long time, the team headed out to load the vans and get to the hotel.  Moody and Kurt stayed behind with our dear Ethiopian brothers to attempt to sort out the customs issue.



Apparently it went downhill for the guys at the airport and they finally decided to try to work it out the next day.  They arrived at the hotel around 3:30am.  Tired and weary but knowing the Lord must have a great work ahead for the team!  Thankful to be back in Ethiopia, it was off to bed for a few short hours. :)

More to come on Day 2!

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Wednesday, September 28, 2011

update

Hey everyone! This is Avery. I talked to my mom a little this morning. She told me to give an update. Some of you might already know all the issues that happened with customs, but they ended up just leaving all the supplies at the airport and are working on getting all of it allowed on the plane home now. Other than that she said the trip is amazing! God has provided for their every need. They will still be able to treat all 4 days, they just won't be able to do much more than extractions because of lack of supplies. She said the team has bonded so well. They also got to meet my baby sister! She said it was incredible. And she is beautiful! But it was very hard to leave. I cant wait to have her home! The internet and phone service has been out most of trip.

~Avery





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Thursday, September 22, 2011

heading out tomorrow!!!!


I am so excited to serve with our team this next week!  I had high hopes of putting together a big post, full of pics, etc and for some reason, it isn't going to happen.  I blame it on the 6 kids. :)  I wish I could magically make all of our bags be perfectly packed to 50 lbs, but that isn't going to happen either.

What I want you to know is that once again, the Lord has raised an amazing team to go serve on EthiopiaSmile 2011.

Moody and I are only taking Wick on this trip.  Really excited about time with him!

The plan is to update the blog as often as possible.  We would truly covet your prayers.  We meet our sweet baby girl on Monday.  I simply CAN. NOT. WAIT to get my hands on her and kiss her cheeks.  I know my heart will break in a million pieces when it is time to leave, but I rest in the hands of the ONE that will provide for all of our needs.

Humbled to be given opportunity to once again go.
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Saturday, September 17, 2011

less than one week

We will be in Ethiopia this time next week!!! I am so excited yet have a million and one things to do before I get on the plane.  Last EthiopiaSmile trip we took the whole crew and this trip we are only taking Wick.....and about 40 other amazing people.  So I am trying to get everything that I need to secure for being away from here for 10 days as well as prepare for the trip.

God will certainly provide for each and every detail.  This mama's heart always has a hard time leaving, but knows the second we hit the ground, we will be moving!

I am so excited about our team this year and all the Lord has for each of us.  On my to do list is a post to introduce you to our team.  We do plan to update the blog while we are there as much as we can.

Here is a prayer card for the trip and we would certainly covet your prayers while we are there.  It is humbling to be able to love and serve the people of Ethiopia.


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Sunday, September 11, 2011

Remembering 9/11



I will never forget that day.  I was sitting on the couch feeding 3 week old Izzy when my friend Carrie called and told me to turn on the t.v because a plane had just hit the World Trade Center.  We watched as the smoke billowed out and they speculated as to the situation.  Then, before our eyes the second plane hit the south tower.  It all changed then.  We knew.  We didn't talk anymore.

Where were you?


Peggy Noonan wrote an excellent article as a New Yorker.

We'll Never Get Over It, Nor Should We

By Peggy Noonan (Archive) · Saturday, September 10, 2011

Ten years later, remembering a day of horror and heroism.

People are discussing the geopolitical implications of 9/11 and how the tragedy changed our country, and most of what's been said has been worthy and serious. But my thoughts, as we hit the 10th anniversary, are more local and particular. I'm in a New York state of mind.
There were two targets, Washington and New York. Washington saw a great military institution attacked, and quickly rebuilt. In Washington people ran barefoot from the White House and the Capitol.
But New York saw a world end. New York saw the buildings come down.
That was the thing. It's not that the towers were hit -- we could have taken that. It's not the fire, we could have taken that too. They bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and took out five floors, and the next day we were back in business.
It's that the buildings came down, in front of our eyes. They were there and proud and strong, they were massive, two pillars at the end of the island. And then they groaned to the ground and there was a cloud and when people could finally see they looked back and the buildings weren't there breaking through the clouds anymore. The buildings were a cloud. The buildings were gone and that was too much to bear because they couldn't be gone, they couldn't have fallen. Because no one could knock down those buildings.
And it changed everything. It marked a psychic shift in our town between "safe" and "not safe." It marked the end of impregnable America and began an age of vulnerability. It marked the end of "we are protected" and the beginning of something else.
When you ask New Yorkers now what they remember, they start with something big -- the first news report, the phone call in which someone said, "Turn on the TV." But then they go to the kind of small thing that when you first saw it you had no idea it would stay in your mind forever. The look on the face of a young Asian woman on Sixth Avenue in the 20s, as she looked upward. The votive candles on the street and the spontaneous shrines that popped up, the pictures of saints. The Xeroxed signs that covered every street pole downtown. A man or a woman in a family picture from a wedding or a birthday or bar mitzvah. "Have you seen Carla? Last seen Tuesday morning in Windows on the World."
The bus driver as I fumbled in my wallet to find my transit card. "Free rides today," he mumbled, in a voice on autopilot. The Pompeii-like ash that left a film on everything in town, all the way to the Bronx. The smell of burning plastic that lingered for weeks. A man who worked at Ground Zero told me: "It's the computers." They didn't melt or decompose, and they wouldn't stop burning. The doctors and nurses who lined up outside St. Vincent's Hospital with gurneys, thinking thousands would come, and the shock when they didn't. The spontaneous Dunkirk-like fleet of ferries that took survivors to New Jersey.
The old woman with her grandchild in a stroller. On the stroller she had written a sign in magic marker: "America You Are Not Alone, Mexico Is With You." She was all by herself in the darkness, on the side of the West Side Highway, as we stood to cheer the workers who were barreling downtown in trucks to begin the dig-out, and to see if they could find someone still alive.
The notes neighbors left under each other's doors. "Are you OK? Haven't seen you and just thought I'd make sure all is all right." The flags in every bodega, on every storefront, in the windows of apartments, up and down the proud facades of Park Avenue. My beautiful cynical town covered in flags, swept by love and protectiveness toward our country.
At first we didn't know what to call it, so we called it what happened. "Do you believe what happened?" "They think he died in what happened." It was weeks before we called it 9/11. Sometimes tragedy takes time to find a name.
We were half crazy those days. We were half nuts and didn't know it. The trauma on Tuesday was followed in the middle of Thursday night by a storm, a howling banshee that shook buildings -- thunder like a cannonade, lightning tearing through the sky. And then there were the stories. We kept hearing about guys who dug themselves out of the rubble. We'd hear a guy came out of the rubble and said, "There's 20 firemen down there in an air pocket," and we'd all put on the news and it was never true. I will never forget this one: As the first tower went down some guy on the 50th floor grabbed a steel girder that was flying by, and he held on for dear life and it landed on a pile of rubble 30 floors below and he got up, brushed himself off, and walked away. That wasn't true either. The stories whipped through the town like the wind, and people grabbed onto them.
And there were the firemen. They were the heart of it all, the guys who went up the stairs with 50 to 75 pounds of gear and tools on their back. The other people who were there in the towers, they were innocent victims, they went to work that morning and wound up in the middle of a disaster. But the firemen saw the disaster before they went into it, they knew what they were getting into, they made a decision. And a lot of them were scared, you can see it on their faces on the pictures people took in the stairwells. The firemen would be going up one side of the stairs, and the fleeing workers would be going down on the other, right next to them, and they'd call out, "Good luck, son," and, "Thank you, boys."
They were tough men from Queens and Brooklyn and Staten Island, and they had families, wives and kids, and they went up those stairs. Captain Terry Hatton of Rescue 1 got as high as the 83rd floor. That's the last time he was seen.
Three hundred forty-three firemen gave their lives that day. Three hundred forty-three! It was impossible, like everything else.
Many heartbreaking things happened after 9/11 and maybe the worst is that there's no heroic statue to them, no big marking of what they were and what they gave, at the new World Trade Center memorial.
But New York will never get over what they did. They live in a lot of hearts.
They tell us to get over it, they say to move on, and they mean it well: We can't bring an air of tragedy into the future. But I will never get over it. To get over it is to get over the guy who stayed behind on a high floor with his friend who was in a wheelchair. To get over it is to get over the woman by herself with the sign in the darkness: "America You Are Not Alone." To get over it is to get over the guys who ran into the fire and not away from the fire.
You've got to be loyal to pain sometimes to be loyal to the glory that came out of it.

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Wednesday, August 31, 2011

58: film




58: THE FILM Trailer from LIVE58NOW on Vimeo.


Isaiah 58

1 “Shout it aloud, do not hold back. Raise your voice like a trumpet. Declare to my people their rebellion and to the house of Jacob their sins. 2 For day after day they seek me out; they seem eager to know my ways, as if they were a nation that does what is right and has not forsaken the commands of its God. They ask me for just decisions and seem eager for God to come near them. 3 ‘Why have we fasted,’ they say, ‘and you have not seen it? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you have not noticed?’
“Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please and exploit all your workers. 4 Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife, and in striking each other with wicked fists. You cannot fast as you do today and expect your voice to be heard on high. 5 Is this the kind of fast I have chosen, only a day for a man to humble himself ? Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed and for lying on sackcloth and ashes? Is that what you call a fast, a day acceptable to the LORD?
6 “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? 7 Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter– when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? 8 Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard. 9 Then you will call, and the LORD will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
“If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, 10 and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday. 11 The LORD will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail. 12 Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age-old foundations; you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls, Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.
13 “If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath and from doing as you please on my holy day, if you call the Sabbath a delight and the LORD’s holy day honorable, and if you honor it by not going your own way and not doing as you please or speaking idle words, 14 then you will find your joy in the LORD, and I will cause you to ride on the heights of the land and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.” The mouth of the LORD has spoken.



3 comments
Thursday, August 25, 2011

Happy Abe Day!!!

So hard to believe that this happened three years ago today.  We love you so much Abe!





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"Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from becoming polluted by the world." James 1:27
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