Life Rollercoasters.

Have you ever ridden a rollercoaster? One which has many loops, sharp turns, and many ups and downs?

I think that would best describe our emotions and life as of right now. This may sound like a harsh reality, yes but it's really not. I can assurre you, our rollercoaster in staying in place and on the track. Weird metaphore,I know, but it describes us perfectly right now. (Plus we both LOVE rollercoasters)!

The past two weeks have been the busiest weeks in quite a while. Being pulled in almost every direction, the good & the bad.

You may remember me sharing about a youth retreat Ted and I would be running this past weekend. If not, well, we were asked to be the "youth part" for a church retreat. We ended up having 14 youth, ages 13-18, Junior High and Senior High. Only three of the 14 were guys, so the majority were young girls.

It was incredibly rough to be honest. Both Ted and I left the weekend feeling compeltely drained and unsuccesful. Our teachings were alright, only the students could care less about anything, but freetime. I was a teen once (not even that long ago) and I too remember those moments. Plus each of them were influenced by peers, which usually leads them down the wrong path. God did teach us personally, which I guess was the plus of that weekend.

Also, as you know, the new students arrived last week. It's been an intense two weeks, learning the students names, and getting to know our small groups. Plus, the "thailand outreach" was so up in the air, due to ticket prices, that every other day until Monday, we were totally unsure of what would happen. In fact, we were almost sure we wouldn't be going to Thailand...unless that is...God performed miracle tickets...and guess what? HE DID!

We are officially going to Thailand, on a tight budget yes, but a budget none the less! Our outreach team, as of right now, we are a team of 14 including Ted and I! Amen, huh!? Thank you for your prayers!

Another thing, which is way less priority...we were given a Macbook laptop as a gift at Christmas, which was such a blessing. Well, it has been giving us trouble, and just Tuesday (the day that ted was going to do a presentation of thailand for the school) our computer crashed. Completely crashed.

I took our mac into an Apple store yesterday, and they told me that our computer was "the most corrupt mac" they've seen. I didn't know what that meant until the guy then said that they wouldn't be able to recover any of our files, because it looked like someone went in and changed all of our english files to gibberish. Ted and I are really shocked. As of this moment right now, we are shipping our computer to the apple headquarters and then waiting until they send us a new computer (for free). Which is nice, but our documents and photos are ALL lost.

Please pray for us, because this is really hard. We did have a back up hard drive but not a lot was on it. Which means our thailand, wedding, ted's afghanistan photos...all gone. However they did say that we could send it in to another place and pay $700-$800. Which will not happen.

I was just telling someone, that I am not really freaked out about all of this, I know God will work it out.Even if it means, we just get our computer backed, all cleaned and fixed, but lose the documents. In the long run, it's really not that big of a deal.

There is ALOT MORE that I will share in the coming blog! It's a bit about our future, and the sudden change God has placed in our "plans". HAHA, our plans, funny how we sometimes think we know!

Love,
Jami Joann