The Eve of Christmas Eve

It has been a long time since we have shared what we have been up to.  We got some

 appointments in

 Tampa after Thanksgiving.  It was good to get to see a few people after Thanksgiving before stuff gets really crazy in mid-December.  We tried to take some potential Christmas card pics.  They did not really turn out and the one we kept is the last one from Miami, but we did get some great modeling pics:)

We went back to Orlando for some Christmas

 parties.  We were going to miss a lot of parties since we were planning on going to 

Miami for a week to meet with some people down there.  It is  good to see people and meet with people in a non-support raising setting.  When you are support raising, many times you can feel like you are on an island where that is all you do and all you know.  While we were in Orlando, we met with some referrals and some other people we had been trying to get in touch with for a while.  Sometimes I feel like when we are not going to be in a city for a short amount of time, it ends up working out better for us to meet with people.  I thought it would work the other way, but it usually does not.

We traveled back to Tampa on Wednesday because we had a small group we were speaking at that night.  It was a good to sit in on the small group and be reminded about what transparent Christianity looks like.  We are all over the place sometimes we do not get to see our own small group for months at a time. We also gathered some things that we had left in Tampa.

The next day we left for Miami.  We knew a few people down there so it turned out being pretty good with us getting 7 appointments in a week.  

We had a few funny stories while we were down there.  The first of which we sent some of our Christmas photos to the CVS for previewing.  The problem was we sent them to the wrong CVS and wrote the store number down wrong.  We  eventually found the CVS, but just to show you there are 4 in 3 miles on U.S. 1.

One of our appointments there was a knitting club that was that was having there Secret Santa party known as The Sweet Stitchin' Betties.  If you do not believe me go to their blog.

It was good to get some time in a place where we were the only people currently living there.  Thanks Jason and Judith Ann Stubblefield!  We were able to stay in their place while they went home to visit family.

The trip was hard only in the fact that we did not know where we were going, there was sporadic traffic, and Miami is an advanced driving city unlike Tampa and Orlando which is only intermediate.  A lot of old high school driving habits started surfacing again :)  All in all we enjoyed our time to Miami and we have a lot more contacts when we make our trip to go down to get our Visa hopefully in a few months!

We are currently in Tampa and fly out to Illinois on Christmas Day to visit some of Amanda's extended family and then fly back New Year's Day to Orlando, where hopefully our traveling will settle down a bit.  Flying on holidays cuts your flight cost in half which we are totally all about!

Thanksgiving Debrief

We have had the craziest two days! We had one Thanksgiving dinner with my mom, Ben, and my grandparents at their place at 1pm. We had a good time, but were sad my uncle could not make it as he had the flu. Before I go on, I want to stop here because I have a tangent to go off on. Thanksgiving is not a Jesus Christ holiday like Christmas is. I think in a lot of ways Thanksgiving is just important in some valuable principles. It helps prepare our hearts to be thankful before the holiday season even begins. I know a lot of people think Thanksgiving is just an excuse to watch football during the week or make a big meal or a "Turkey Day", but I want to make sure I am grateful before I eat it. There are so many people especially in the U.S. especially this year who do not have much. I do not want to take it for granted what I have and I pray for them to hold on and thank God for simpler things so He can get them through.

After our first Thanksgiving, we had a second at Amanda's mom's at 6pm. It was a good amount of time for my food to digest from the first. The food was also very good and I really think I gained about 5 pounds in one day (the scale said I did, I was not exaggerating). After dinner, we went through our ads and planned our black Friday agenda.

Friday morning we awoke at 3:55 am. Yes, 3 and 4 am are sleeping hours and we awake during them. We headed to JC Penney and then Wal-Mart at 5am. This was our first mistake because it was absolutely insane for electronics. I dropped off the girls, Amanda, her mom, and her sister, Liz and proceeded to find a parking spot. About twenty minutes later gave up and waited for them. I found out Liz yelled at a lady for pushing my wife about ten feet with the front of a shopping cart. We vowed never to go to Wal-Mart again when it opened. We also heard about a man who was trampled to death in New York. Next we went to Office Depot where a lady yanked a wireless printer, Amanda's mom's present, out of my wife's hand. We ended up finding some more so it was not such a big deal, it was just the principle of the thing. We were out till about 1230 pm as Amanda's mom had a lot of shopping to do. We got all of our shopping done for our family done in one day with sweet deals!

A lot of guys out there are like what the heck are you doing? Shopping for that long? Well, yes, Amanda has a good time and I do too as long as we keep moving. I make the whole operation run smooth, the chauffeur if you will ;)

The end of the day was us getting a Christmas tree, setting it up at Amanda's dad's house where we stay when we are in Tampa, and decorating it. The end of the end of the day was Rodney, asleep, face down on the ottoman. :)

Where have we been for 2 weeks?

Greetings! I said we have to do this more and then did not post for over 2 weeks. Pretty ironic I think. We have been busy always trying to stay flexible. We are the traveling roadshow. Traveling between Tampa and Orlando trying to always meet with people. We are thinking as we meet with people either the holidays will be fruitful because people get more generous around the holidays or people will be extremely busy and have many holiday gifts to buy.

One of my favorite things that we have done in the last two weeks is that we attended Flavor Fest 2008 on the night of November 7th at Crossover Community Church in Tampa Florida. I have been growing up going to Christian rap shows there for years. It was really fun for me, but it was also the first time that Amanda had ever attended. She was a good sport and stood with me for about three hours as we walked around from stage to stage and hanging out with a guy I worked with at Pershing last year, Brian or Alpha Simplicity.

We got to talk to Jutty on the 14th. It was a much anticipated call that had a lot of business in the hour we talked. We did get to hear about the focus on the 25 Italians that have shown interest in the ministry instead of meeting new ones. I think this is extremely important if we want to have Italians taking ownership of the ministry within the next year or two. We are excited to keep in touch with them every 1-2 weeks to keep a fresh vision. I think it is easy for us to get lost in what the vision is for Italy with not being there. It is also easy to blame the people over there for not contacting us as much as I would have them do so. We have to remember that they are running the ministry and now with Vonage phones we can call, too!

This past weekend we got to visit Glenwood Presbyterian in DeLand on November 23rd. We spoke at few Sunday school classes. It was good because some stuff in Saint Augustine and Jacksonville did not work out. It was good to share our vision with some people either of us had not known in our pasts.

We are excited about Thanksgiving tomorrow!!!

We Need to Do This More

We are in Tampa for the weekend and then coming back to Orlando for Tuesday and Wednesday because of Amanda's work and then back to Tampa on Thursday for a dessert that some people from Amanda's old church are throwing for her. Then, we have no clue I guess if there are people in Tampa that still want to meet with us and then we will stay here or if there are people in Orlando we will go back for that next week, it is kind of up in the air. We are going to be in Saint Augustine the weekend of the 22nd because Clay Nettles mom, Diane is throwing a dinner for us. We might go to Jacksonville the week prior or after the 22nd because there are some people there we want to meet with there. So we are basically nomads with no home and no consistent plans.

God keeps placing encouraging appointments right where we need them. It really has revealed to us more of His character. It does not mean that we still have gotten frustrated in the last few weeks, but our trip to Tampa has been a lot more encouraging that the first time we went. We are thankful for everyone's prayers!!


We are staying as busy as we can during the day, but sometimes it is tough as stuff slows down some days. We have learned to play about an hour of board games a few days during the week. Among our favorites is Mancala. It is game that you really have to think at and Amanda and I are pretty even at it. As much as I want to do support related stuff all the time because I do not want to regret that I could have done more, i need to have time with the Lord, play games, and exercise to be healthy. Just ask Amanda I can get pretty intense about support raising. As silly as it sounds, Mancala can help balance me out sometimes.

Wanting To Quit, But Continuing To Go By His Grace

I love this blog because I can just be honest on here. We share about the fun things we do, because when we are not doing fun things 80% of the time we are literally are trying to raise support. That might be sending emails, making calls, meeting with people, sending out letters, designing prayer letters, talking through strategy, praying, writing thank you notes, etc. There is so much that goes into raising support mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. When you are not raising support and "taking a break" you are still thinking about what you need to do. It is a job where you can always be doing more even if you are working at it from 8am to 9pm. It never leaves your mind with strategy and to do lists are always floating about in your head.

In addition, I have never really been as passionate as I am right now for the vision for Salerno, Italy for anything else that I did probably since I joined Kappa Sigma in the beginning of 2006, but even then I had to be laid back in a sense because I had to be very spiritually aware and cautious. I also had a drive playing sports in high school, but never for school in general in high school or college or working in the business world. For all of you out there that are saying, "What about your wife?", I say she is above this category because she is not something I did, she is more of the teammate running along side of me not a trophy or task that I accomplished, not ever a goal or objective.

So why do I say all of this? I say it to try to make people that have never really ever had anything that they are involved with other than there family or ever raised support a glimpse at what I am doing and why it is so hard when they do not really realize it is hard at all. The passion and the amount of dedication can cause me to be a workaholic and not really at times trust God to do anything, but almost a "I've got this Jesus" mentality. You called me to this and I am not going to let you down. Also the more passionate you are about something, the harder you work at it. I have got to trust Him daily in ministry in general, support raising or not, not only when I do not know what else to do or am really frustrated but always. He is the one with the plan who already knows how exactly our support is going to come in anyway.

Proverbs 3:5-6--Trust in the LORD with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make your paths straight.

Visiting the Billy Graham Library

While we were visiting Rodney's grandfather near Charlotte, North Carolina we had the chance to visit the Billy Graham Library.  If you're ever in the area, it was pretty interest to spend two or three hours learning more about Billy Graham's ministry.  By the way, it's also free to get in, which always makes things better in my opinion.  On the property is the house that Billy grew up in, Ruth's gravesite, a cafe and a museum full of videos and exhibits.  Below are some of our pictures.  

Here are Rodney and I near the front entrance:

This is the house the Billy Graham grew up in that way taken apart, brick by brick, and moved to this property, about 8 miles from it's original location:

One of my favorite part of the museum was Bessy the Talking Cow.  She talked about Billy's life growing up on a dairy.

Okay, here's one more picture from one of the displays in the museum.  Enjoy!

 

Why minister on a college campus?

In case you've missed us, we're up in North Carolina/Georgia for a few days.  Things have been going well so far, getting some much needed R&R.  We spent most of the day with Rodney's grandfather and had the chance to visit the Billy Graham library, which was very cool.  We'll have more on that (with pictures) on the next post. 

I found this article about why college students are a strategic group of people to minister to.  It was a great reminder for me about the importance of what we are hoping to do.  Whether it's students in Salerno, Italy, or students on your local college campus, wherever that may be, college students are great to invest you life and your time into.  Enjoy!

 

Why College Students are Strategic

By Ken Cochrum with Amber Kineer

Teachable

They ask questions.  THey consume information on a rapid level and can put an idea to action with proper motivation.  New challenges tend to provoke new curiosity or heart openness concerning personal purpose, convictions and life goals.  

Starting Fresh

They are setting a new life trajectory.  The decisions made, the habits formed, and the friendships forged during the college years tend to set the course for a lifetime.

Leading

They are the educated elite that will most likely lead in every domain of society -- government, religion, military, education, even sports and entertainment.  Our future leaders will be people who went to college.

Unfettered

They are free to take incredible risks.   They are unfettered by commitments, mortgages, career ladders and kids.  They are free to go anywhere the Lord leads.

Growing

They form a large presence.  The number of college students in the world has increased from about 60 million to about 120 million in the past decade.

Seeking Identity

They desire significance.  College students want to feel part of something bigger.  THey want their life to count for something and they want a cause to live for.

Global

They are connected to a global student culture.  Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and similar online social networks enable students to be accessible to their peers -- anytime, anywhere.

Innovative

The revolution of digital information has radically changed how people learn.. The average student is online 3 and a half hours per day.  Paper books and printed Bible studies have given way to podcasts, short films, text messages and chat forums.

Integrated

They fuse with society.  Students don't congregate on the campus but spill over into coffee shops, internet bars and along the city center.  Increasingly, they don't even live on campus because there aren't enough dorm spaces.  They're out in the city.

Active

Students are constantly searching for new ways to get involved with student culture and find a niche.  They try many things and are exposed to new organizations, clubs, social groups, classes and professors every semester.  

Tasteful Reminders

We have been in Tampa now for a little over two weeks staying at Amanda's house that she grew up in in New Tampa. It has been a great setup for us as Amanda's dad has been extremely flexible with us coming and going. He even lent me a car when Amanda had to go back to Orlando for two days so I could drive around for those two days. It has also been good catching up with people we usually do not have time to see and spend time with since our whole family is in Tampa and we usually see them the most of the short time we are usually in Tampa. We have been looking at our trip of more of an exploration trip. We have gotten addresses and stuff is more clear on what next time in Tampa is going to look like which I look like a win in a lot of ways. We have inserted fun breaks in between all the people we have been meeting with. We visited the Gelateria Del Duomo which I had noticed in a brief trip to Tampa's International Plaza to pick up something for my sister-in-law, so when we returned to the International Plaza because of long story that involved maybe picking up my mom's husband Ben from the airport that never happened, we or maybe I should say I needed to stop.  I do not want to go into great detail or length explaining my great love for gelato. I think that to make a long story short I do not really like ice cream that much or sweets in general to be frank, but Italian gelato I absolutely love and cannot get enough of! Cream based gelato (chocolate, hazelnut, etc.) contains only 6% fat and fruit based gelato contains none! If you do not know what I am talking about and want some explanation and a visual check out www.gelateriadelduomo.com. It was sooooooo good! It was the most authentic gelato I have tasted in the U.S. and up in the top five that I have tasted Italy! It was kinda pricey but one of my highlights for the week. (It does not take much to make me happy). It was kinda bittersweet in a way because it made me really want to be in Italy and upset that we were not there. On the other hand I wanted to be in Italy not to eat gelato, but to do the ministry God has called us to do. The gelato tastefully reminded me of what God is doing in our own lives and to not give up.  We are now about to leave for Orlando today and stay until next Friday where we leave to go on our 10 day North Carolina/South Carolina/Georgia excursion.

The new Rays

One of our first activities we did, once we got to Tampa, was to go to a Rays game against the Minnesota Twins.  We always try to do at least one fun, non-support related event a week so that we do not go crazy.  The first inning was littered with scoring with 8 runs scored by both teams including a fly ball that landed one seat over and two and half rows up into an old lady's lap.  I was not on my 'A' game since it was just the 1st inning and did not go over there and snag it since there were open seats and I could have.  The Rays ended up blowing the game in the 9th after they were up two runs and all they needed was three outs.  This was my third Rays game in their 11 years and I thought I was watching the Rays of old who only won 70 games in a season once in their previous ten years.  I would say the other crazy surprise of the game was an older gentlemen in the section over from us received a baseball to the top of the head after it bounced off the upper deck but he was okay.  Thats it for the sport report, back to support raising!  Enjoy the pictures!  

Keep On Keeping On

We are nearing the end of our 8th week. Support is going well, we are on pace to reach our goal still, but we are starting to get more one time gifts than monthly which could be a problem later on. I am learning when trusting God for things that current circumstances do not mean a thing, Chicken wing. Sorry had to do that. Anything could happen the next day or the next week, so what is happening now is something you kinda just put in the back of your head and look on. We attended our small group bible study last night. We are just starting a new series that we are going to attend when we can but we are going to be starting to be all over the place. We just had dinner and did an introduction to the book and I was encouraged and so was Amanda. We absolutely loved being a part of it last spring before it had a summer intermission. We both love being around people who like going deeper into each others' lives and the fact their are people that are from different stages of life. I wish we had a picture of everyone to share.

We are heading out to Tampa to make our first 2-3 week excursion on the 18th. At first I was okay and ready to go. Then, I got really frustrated because some things were not working out as I had hoped and now I am doing well again. This situation is just another one of the circumstances where I knew God was working because people were praying. 

I felt like I was always on the side growing up as the one praying for people as they are in difficult situations, but now as the one prayed for, I know it makes a difference in our everyday lives. It is really hard to explain, but I can actually feel my faith being affected. For instance, stuff kinda turned around about the Tampa thing Tuesday night. I realized it today that our church had a quarterly prayer night that we could not attend that without a shadow of a doubt we were being prayed for there. Thanks to everyone who is praying, keep doing it!! Let me know what your prayer needs also because the primary people I am praying for are people I am talking to and that are excited about our ministry.

Check out these videos

I just wanted to take a minute to highlight two links to video clips that are now available on our blog.  If you look over on the right side of the page, under the links section you will see 3 things listed.  The first is a link to setup an online gift.  The next two are video clipping about the ministry in Italy.  The first one, The Condition of Italy, was made by a former UCF student and now professional video producer/editor/guy.  It talks all about the spiritual climate of Italians, especially among young people.  If you want to know more about why we are going to Italy, this is a great place to start.  The second video, Marko Rosetti's Testimony, is the impact that the ministry has had on the life of one man.  Marko has had the opportunity to meet many of the students and staff that Campus Crusade has sent to Salerno over the past four years.  His family owns the hotel where many of the short term students had stayed.  By just seeing the lives of Christians in fellowship with one another, and through many intentional conversations over the years, Marko has come into a personal relationship with Christ.  It is powerful to see and to hear the words come from a man who has been impacted by the ministry.  Both of these videos are a great glimpse of what gets us excited about the ministry in Salerno.  Enjoy!

Meet more of the team

In addition to the long-term team, there is also a group of interns that are making a ten month commitment to live and work on the campus in Salerno. They recently attended a briefing in Colorado for all of the teams of interns being sent all over the world. Most of them are recent college graduates although two of them are returning for a second year of interning in Salerno. You will also see Jutty and Abbey (and Bryce and Addison) and Amanda Craig in the picture as well. Since they are supervising the intern team, they also attended the summit. All of the interns are leaving for Salerno next week so please keep them in your prayers as they are making some last minute preparations and saying goodbye to lots of friends and family.

Post Fay

The Tropical Storm is finally over!!!! I have to eat my words a little about getting a little bit of rain because some places around here got about 2 feet in like 4 days. Things were a little dreary with us not seeing the sun from when it went down last Sunday night until this past Friday and us not having many appointments. God did provide Amanda with two part time steady jobs which is a total answer to prayer!!!! We are focusing on this week and things are already 10 times better than last week with much more appointments and no storm. We also are looking forward to this weekend with Josh and Cheree's wedding this weekend, as I am a groomsman. Just a little update...thanks everyone for their prayers!

<--Josh and Cheree

Tropical Storm Fay and the storm we call our lives

Ahhhhh......Hurricane....no tropical storm....headed for Tampa....no headed for us...nope headed for Fort Pierce and we have some rain. I love when this happens and it always does. The storm changes direction and the weathermen are not really predicting where the storm is going but are really more like announcers in telling us what is happening. No one knows what LeBron James is going to do before he does it so why should we know what God's wonder of the hurricane is going to do?

Anyway enough of that because I can go on and on. Amanda and I are still going strong. Appointments have gone down a little this week but the Lord is still good! We are at about 23% of committed monthly support! We are still learning how to work together, we know how to be married as two working professionals, but not as two missionaries on one car and with one computer. This season of our lives has definitely pushed us closer together making us rely more on each other than we were relying on each other before. There are so many things that both of us have a say in and have to work together at them like never before. In staying with storms, we can call our lives a storm sometimes. With all the crazy stuff that happens in everyone's life one can be drowned by the rain, tossed by the waves or "storm surge" and blown about by the winds and feel like things are not fair. In Matthew 8:23-27, Jesus calms the storm when all the disciples were afraid in the boat. What gets me about this story is that Jesus was asleep when the storm was going, He was already calm before He calmed the storm. It does not matter how large the storm, He is more powerful than any of it! We can trust that even though storms come, Jesus will calm them. His disciples did not have faith, He called them out for it and still calmed the storm. We can trust Jesus to calm the Tropical Storm Fays of our lives!

Meet the team

We thought that we would introduce you to the rest of our team so that you can put some faces with the names. So here they are...

First, this is Jutty and Abbey Valiquette. Jutty is going to be co-leading our team. In the picture are their two children, Bryce, on the right, who is 16 months old, and Addison, on the left who 4 months old now. They are leaving for Salerno very soon so please be praying for their travel. It could be pretty tricky with the two kids. Here's a link to Jutty and Abbey's webpage if you'd like to check it out: www.justinandabbey.com





Next we have Amanda Craig. (Yes, that's right, 2 Amanda's on a team of 7 people, I can't explain it). She is co-leading the team with Jutty. Amanda has been living in Italy for most of the past few years. She's been in Orlando this summer raising support and receiving some more training, so we've had a chance to get to know her a little bit which has been a blessing.








And finally we have Bentley and Sarah Love Crawford. They both attended Ole Miss and interned there with Campus Crusade for the past year. Before that, Sarah Love spent a year moving on the campus in Salerno. We got to know them this summer too during New Staff Training. They are both very friendly and certainly have that southern style to them, if you know what I mean.













So this is them! These are the people that we are going to be ministering with for the next few years. We are so excited to be there. Just working on this post has reminded me (Amanda) of how much we want to be there soon. Jutty and Abbey are leaving in the next week and Amanda is leaving a few weeks after that. Bentley and Sarah Love are still raising support like us so they don't know when they are leaving yet either. I can't wait for the day that we are all there together. I know God will do it, all of it in His timing.

Support Raising has begun!

It's hard to believe that we have been working on raising support for 3 weeks already. The first week or so we spend a lot of time moving out of our apartment. The next questions becomes, well then, where are you living? Our friends Ryan and Sherry have opened up their guest room for us during this phase of support raising. It's been fun already. Living in community is certainly encouraging. However, Ryan did just get a Wii video games system for his birthday so it's hard not to let that become a distraction at times, but we're doing good so far.

Some people have asked what support raising really look like. What do you do with your time? We have been asking that same type of question over the past several weeks too. We want to be good stewards of our time and work hard everyday. But at the same time we know that we need boundaries and responsible expectations for ourselves so we don't burn out. The evenings are the busiest times for us. We try to have an appointment every evening where we are meeting with someone in their home for dinner or dessert to share about the vision. Any evening that we are not meeting with someone, this is crucial time that we can be on the phone with people, setting up upcoming appointments. During the day on Saturday and Sunday afternoon are also great times to make phone calls. On weekdays during the day time we do most of the administrative type work, sending thank you notes, emails, logging information into our support raising database, etc. We also have a correspondence seminary class that we are working on each week. It's a New Testament survey course and we're supposed to be investing about 5 hours a week listening to lectures, completing the readings and assignments. So with all of that, we seem to be staying pretty busy. I've attached a couple of pictures of Rodney working on support stuff, on the computer and on the phone. Those are the two main places that we are most of the time.

Anyway, I hope this gives you a little bit of a picture of the logistics of support raising. I know, I didn't really share much about how we are doing emotionally and spiritually, but at least I got a post on the blog. That's a start, right?