We have teams in on Saturday for training camp and all of them launch out of the United States to their prospective country on Wednesday, January 19th. Over the next four months young adults will travel to five different countries to bring Kingdom and we are so excited to see what happens during the four and a half months they are out on the field. At Real Life, we are asking participants to try to blog every week. This can be about the difficulty of living on the field, community, ministry, the adventure, or anything related to their time on the field. Granted, internet time can be hard...

Imagine this: eight people camping out in the mountains in the middle of the ruins of an old fort cramming under a ten foot tarp trying futility to keep reasonably dry and warm while attempting to catch at least a couple of hours of sleep.  That is what this team was doing Friday evening in the middle of the Brazilian mountains.  We were going on a pilgrimage to seek out the Lords voice by getting away from noise and distraction, or at least that was the original plan.   It began by our leaders Ryan and Angie calling the team together and giving us a very short list of items...

Here is a list of things you should never do if you ever find yourself in a foreign country working with a group of kids: -let any kind of candy be seen that you don’t want to share -start throwing balls at kids and let them throw ones at you if you don’t want to spend the next half hour as the object of a one sided doge ball game -let the girls start putting make up on guys…..I’ll let you imagine how that can end. -above all, don’t start tickling matches or piggy back rides, especially if you did not have enough sleep the night before…… I made that...

I met a woman named Patrice on Wednesday. We did our first house visits and I didnt know what to expect so I was nervous the whole way we walked to her house. Instantly you can see that her family has desperate needs. Four people live in a two room house, if you can even call it a house, its closer to being a shack than a house. The most obvious was the illness that plagues that family. Patrice suffered from a stroke four years ago and she has not been able to walk since, she is only in her 30s. The hardest to see was her son Wallice. He suffers from some type of brain degenerative disorder...

Ok so I am going to keep this short and sweet, because the blog I had written out just didn’t seem right.  This week has been really awesome, and have had so much fun. We left the ranch last friday, backed up all our stuff, bedding and food. We have been on the go since, its really been cool. We stayed at a familes house for the weekend, went to youth group on Saturday night and church on Sunday night. We were with the kids and youth the whole time. Its so awesome, and I really enjoyed hanging out with the youth.   Sunday night, we were brought to the slums to this...

This weekend 40 Brazilians came to stay on the ranch for a retreat. If you knew what the ranch looks like you would know that there really isnt a specific place for 40 people to stay overnight, so people were packing like sardines in any building with a roof and furnished floors. After the intial shock of having so many people here (about 12 people are usually ever on the ranch, including us) it was actually a lot of fun. So on Saturday after noon we were all given free time till the meeting that was supposed to happen later in that night, so the boys got a great idea, lets ask if any of...