I hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving with family and friends! Unfortunately, New Zealand does not celebrate Thanksgiving so I had a big bowl of cereal to remind myself of home :) This past week was crazy. I confirmed my baptism as child by being submerged in the Ashley Gorge. I had this whole new since of renewal when they pulled me up. I am starting over and I am ready to go wherever and whenever God wants me to. Don't get me wrong, I definitely believe that my baptism as a child was real, but I wanted to make a conscious decision for myself so I confirmed what had happened when I was a baby.
This week was also a sense of renewal in the fact that I learned how much stress has been apart of my life. As some of you know about 2 and a half years ago when I was in college I was dealing with a lot of stomach issues and when I got tested they said I had to eliminate gluten and dairy from my diet. So I did that and felt a little better but I haven't ever felt completely healed. At the beginning of this week my stomach/intestines hurt so bad that I knew something was wrong and I had to see a doctor cause food shouldn't cause this much pain. The doctor said that stress was the problem and that was what caused all my stomach issues in the first place I just never treated it correctly. I will always have stomach problems unless I get healed, which I believe can happen, but he said that stress is the root of it. So now I am being aware of how stressed I am and trying to eat smaller meals to help digest the food and to exercise more to relieve any stress. I trust that God has a plan for why all of this has happened and that I can help someone else who deals with the same problems.
I leave for my outreach on December 20 and we will spend 3 days or so in Spain and then go to Morocco from there. There are 5 students (Chris, Nate, Abby, Kathryn, and myself) and our leader (Kent) going. We have become like family and we are going to end up getting a lot closer in the 2 months that we will be there. I am hoping to still be able to send updates from Morocco to let you know what all we are doing there. So far I know for a couple weeks in the beginning we will be working at a boys home, which would be like an orphanage. We will spend 3 or 4 hours there for a couple weeks trying to communicate to them the love of Jesus we have by acting things out, music, art and whatever other creative ways we can think of. They speak Arabic, so I pray that if anything else we can just hang out with them and share our love with them.
I want to continue to thank you for supporting me in this experience and ask that you would continue to pray for me. Specifically, that I can learn how to handle my stress while getting ready to go on outreach and during outreach; that I wouldn't cause myself anymore sickness.
