HEY FRIENDS AND FAM!!! WE LOVE YOU ALL!
November 28, 2023, Wesley and I sat in the Cape Town International Airport in Cape Town, South Africa, waiting to board a flight that would touch us down in the United States of America–we were going home! After 16 hours in the air, we arrived in Atlanta. We spent our first week back in the states with my family in Philadelphia, and then we took one last flight (at least for a bit haha) south to Greenville, SC. We had an incredibly sweet Christmas season surrounded by family and friends! We hope you also had the merriest Christmas with your friends and family, celebrating and rejoicing in the awe of the birth of our Savior Jesus!
It’s a little wild that we’ve been back in America for a month! Thank you for your grace with us as we transition back and adjust to another new place and season. Since being back, we have settled into a sweet little townhome in Greer, SC, are getting back into the swing of “life in America”, and are now excitedly anticipating the arrival of our sweet baby girl! I am 39 weeks today, so really, she could get here any day! Whoo hoo! We seriously cannot wait to meet her.
We wanted to write out a proper overview of our time overseas. We know we bounced around a lot, and it may have been confusing as to where we even were at times, so in writing this, we hope to give you, as our supporters, a more physical way to see and celebrate with us all that God brought us to and gave us grace to experience, as well as all the places and moments that your support and prayers took us!
Let’s start, shall we? The end of August, we said “see you later” to America, and headed to Penang, Malaysia. We spent 3 days there with an amazing YWAM couple whose apartment we stayed in during our time in Malaysia. That couple was leaving for a 3 month span to work on a project in a different area of Malaysia, and God so beautifully orchestrated both of our times so that they could share and bless us with a place to stay while we were in Penang and they were gone. Before we even really adjusted to the time zone, Wesley and I hopped on a flight to Cambodia! We spent a week there following around and documenting a little bit of the story and ministry of a Khmer man named Pastor Abraham. Wesley has finished editing and putting together that entire documentary already, praise God!!! We are SO super excited to share this film with all of you!! After Cambodia, we flew back to Penang and spent the next 2 weeks storyboarding, editing, coloring, and praying over the story and footage we had gotten from Cambodia. During those 2 weeks, we also got to adjust to and explore more of Penang as we slowly settled in there. We found some of our favorite places to eat and favorite coffee shops to edit from, found the good grocery stores, and even found a bouldering gym for Wesley to climb at (and me as the preggo girl to cheer him on at haha). We then packed up our suitcases again and flew to Indonesia. Our time in Indonesia ended up looking differently than we first thought, but God had such a good plan for us there! The organization we were working with, World Outreach, hosts courses, training, and teachings for their field workers. In the past, many of these trainings had to be done in person, but during our time in SE Asia, we got to use our talents and means to record many of those courses so that they are more easily accessible for the new workers. During our travels, we met many of the teachers of these courses, and were able to film their teachings as resources for WO. In Indonesia, we were able to film a number of courses, as some of the teachers are located there. We also got to experience what they called meetings of “the hub”, which is basically a joining together of all the missionaries located in that certain country in effort to unify and encourage them, as well as strategize and share stories and wisdom with each other. This was such an encouraging and eye-opening thing for Wesley and I to just sit back and listen and learn from brothers and sisters with such different experiences as well as culture. After our week in Indonesia, we came back to Penang and were there for a week and a half and spent time working on editing and organizing past footage. We left again at the beginning of October and headed for Thailand. Our first couple of days in Thailand, Wesley and I got to take a little “anniversary” trip to the southern coast of Thailand to celebrate our first year of marriage! That was a really special time of connecting, resting, processing and praying, and dreaming for the future! After that, we traveled around to different areas of Thailand and met up with many different Thai missionaries for the next approximately 2 weeks. We filmed more of those courses and teachings that I mentioned we did while in Indonesia, but this time, with teachers based in Thailand. We got to experience the Thai “hub” meetings, which again, were very eye-opening and insightful sessions for us. We also got to film smaller videos for 5 different couples/ministries that they were able to use personally to update their supporters and tell more of their stories. At the end of the month, we flew back to Penang for the final time and had 3 weeks ahead of us there. We began editing what we had from Thailand and putting those stories together. During this section of time in Penang, we were also able to do a lot of filming for World Outreach as an organization itself, which looked like filming a handful of videos from their International Director, filming updated orientation videos for new workers, and editing more teachings. We also filmed beginning content with a ministry in Penang for a future film (ooh!) that we hope and are praying to complete later this year!!! I also had the amazing and humbling opportunity to go into and experience this certain ministry. We are really excited to share more about this ministry with you all! The middle of November, we said a bittersweet “see you later” to Malaysia and the friends and teammates we had been blessed with there, and hopped on a plane bound for Africa! Wesley, myself, and WO’s International Director flew together to South Africa, which is where we parted ways. WO’s ID and Wesley were heading to Mozambique as one of the final ministry stops of my and Wesley’s travels, but at this point, I was in month 8 of pregnancy, and many things about Mozambique made it not ideal for me to also join the boys on this part of the trip. I stayed behind in South Africa with a local missionary family, and Wesley and the ID continued the trip on to Mozambique. They spent a week there visiting a missionary family there and encouraging their ministry. Wesley will write more about that in a later post, so stay on the lookout for that! I stayed the week in South Africa and was so poured into by the missionary family that graciously hosted me. For me, that was a beautiful time of rest, processing, hearing stories and getting to ask questions to this family, refreshment, and getting to intercede for the boys in Mozambique. Wesley and I were reunited that next week, as he and the ID came back to South Africa and picked me up from the family I had been with. The 3 of us then traveled to a different area of South Africa to visit a different missionary family. We spent 2 days with them, hearing more of their story and getting to see their ministry. Our final night with WO’s ID was Thanksgiving night actually, and it was very sweet! We had been SO blessed to have spent so much time with him during the past 3 months; traveling with him, learning from him, asking him question after question, praying with him, watching him lead, and hearing stories from him. He is American as well, so it was special to be together with him on that day! We ate ostrich, lamb, and water lilies instead of turkey that day, but we celebrated nonetheless haha! The next morning, he flew back to Malaysia, and left Wesley and I in South Africa for what we called our “final debrief”. These few days were a final time for just Wesley and I to be together. To rest, process, think, dream, and truly just talk about all we had experienced the past months, and also to enjoy the beauty of the country of South Africa! And just in time for the Christmas season (and the frigid cold haha!), we made it back to the United States. WOW. What a journey we have just been on!
I hope that short overview helps each of you get a better handle on where your incredible support and your faithful prayers took us during these past months. Thank you thank you thank you for supporting us and praying for us then and now. We cannot express how empowering and encouraging it is to know the love of people being behind you.
We have a lot coming up that we are really excited to share with you all! For now, we’re settling into life here again, praying and dreaming for what’s to come, and waiting for this sweet tiny girl to get here!
We love all of you so much!
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