Quick Update

Hey All,

I don't have much cocmputer time and the net has been down the last couple days so here's a quick update:

--Saturday we went into Port-au-Prince to visit the Campus Crusade movement there, we drove through most of the city and saw the physical devastation of the EQ.

--Yesterday we wen to an IDP camp to share the gospel

--We have been to Chambrun, the local community a couple of times, we have showed he Jesus Film, distributed supplies, and just hung out.

Hopefully I'll get a better post sometime soon, please pray for team unity.  Our team has had some great highs, but we're definitely seeing the results of losing battles to our own pride.  Please pray our whole team would be filled with love!

Check out the team blog

Hey all,

I thought I had put together a blog before I left with this info, but I guess not.  There is a blog that our whole team is keeping at hopeforhaiti.posterous.com I got to put together a post tonight, hopefully it will be up tomorrow.

Haiti Update

Hi from Randi's Mom,
She wanted me to post for her.
Today was great, we met the Haitian students we'll be working with and spent the morning building community with them and leaning kreole, it was a blast!  After lunch we had our first work projects.  I worked with the group that was helping to make the rooms more malaria net friendly.  All the grounds are pretty new and so the rooms are constantly being tweaked, it took some doing and some time, but we were able to finish and get it all done :)  Our group even used every tool I brought so that made me happy of course :)  God is really drilling Isaiah 40:27-31 home to me, helping me to see that HE's got this all under control.

The GAIN leaders here told us today that there are over 1000 cargo loads of relief supplies sitting on the docks waiting to go through customs, some have been there for months, please pray that they would be released ASAP.

On Our Way!

Good morning from the Miami airport! Our team is all checked in and waiting for our airplane to come take us to Haiti! Surpringsly, my experience at the Miami airport has been much less stressful since the last time I has here 6 months ago :) Last night our we had a big team meeting to go over logistics and at the end we got together with the Haiti team 2 to pray for eachother as we both go out, them to return home changed forever and us to this great new adventure God has for us. Thank you all so much for your prayers, I'm not getting through this without you guys. If you can check our team blog later tonight, I think I'll get to write on it tonight! Love, Randall

CAMP!!!

I spent last week up at Crescent Lake Bible Camp-Family Camp week 1, soooo good!!  Alex and Jake weren't able to join us because they are both in Guatemala until tomorrow, so Nick brought his friend Thomas along.  The whole week was great, the speaker spoke on Elisha, very interesting, and the rain stayed away after Tuesday for the most part.  Here are some of my favorite pics from the week.

Our sunset Sunday night.

 Thomas and Nick enjoying some Frolf action :)

Nick ripping it up on the kneeboard

Dale really ripping it up on the wakeboard!

Nick, Thomas, and me getting ready for the triathlon

Me wakeboarding

Overall the week was great, lots of good fellowship with our camp family and just having fun.  More stories to come I'm sure!  As you may have notice earlier in the week I posted a blog called "Challenge by Choice" that's not up anymore.  I was really in a rush to just get it posted and I've been reading it and there's just something I don't like about it right now.  So, I'm taking it down for a little tweaking, yes T-W-E-A-K-I-N-G tweaking (please pardon the movie reference that only Alex and Mom may see, I couldn't help myself), and hopefully it will make a reappearance soon.

As you may have noticed....

As you may have noticed I have done a terrible job keeping my promise of posting this summer.  I've have a few posts that have been in the works for a while that I just haven't been able to put out there yet, but now as I get closer to Haiti I know more people will be checking to see what's new.  So here's an update and the plan:

On Monday the 12th I leave for a Campus Crusade for Christ summer project in Chambrun Haiti.  I will spend 3 weeks working on a compound near an internally displaced people's community serving and loving families who lost everything in the January earthquakes.

Tomorrow our family (those of us left in the States anyway = not Alex and Jake) leave for a week at Crescent Lake Bible Camp.  So excited to spend a week at camp!  I'm hoping that the time to just be at camp will give me some good time to spend with Jesus and will let me write and publish a couple of blogs that are in the works.

So, hopefully we'll be talking soon :)

I am not ready for tomorrow

I'm not quite sure what I'm really looking to say tonight, so I'm just going to start typing and see what happens.

I don't know if I've ever felt less prepared for a day as I feel tonight about tomorrow.  Tomorrow I will stand in a funeral for hours with my family.  I will be giving hugs, getting hugs, listening to stories, crying, laughing, and talking with people about the amazing man that my grandfather proved to be every day.  Tomorrow my grandpa's death will again be as real as it was in the hospital waiting room on Saturday.  I will be hit with emotions I don't want to experience and surrounded by a family I couldn't live without.  I will rejoice in the fact that Grandpa is in the presence of the King and mourn because I know life in this family will never be the same.

Although I've been bombarded with a million memories in the last couple days, one that keeps sticking out to me is a dinner I shared with Grandpa Billy this fall.  I had just gotten back from Colorado a few weeks ago and Grandpa and Grandma had me over for dinner.  We talked about my experiences in Colorado and what the Lord had done in my life through them.  After dinner Grandpa brought out a printout of my recent blogs.  We talked about them a little bit, one that stood out to him was a review I wrote of a book I was reading at the time, "How could a loving God...." by Ken Ham.  In this blog I talked about my struggle to understand things like death and suffereing in this world and how this book tried to alleviate that. After talking about the book for a little while, Grandpa concluded the conversation with something like "Books like these are good, but at the end of the day, we know we've got the best with God and He's got the best for us, as long as we have our faith, it's enough."  So tonight, my faith will be enough, and tomorrow I will worry about when it gets here.

Thanks so much for your prayers this week, I can't tell you hw much your love and support mean to me.