Open House, Open Heart...

I feel slightly uncomfortable writing this. I'm not entirely sure why. I guess writing about someone elses despair is not exactly easy. I want to write a little bit about what I've seen, and what its taught me in this short time here in Mexico. First I want to start with a quote from my book I'm reading, "Radical" by David Platt. "God blesses his people with extravagant grace so they might extend his extravagant glory to all peoples on earth." Read that a few times through. Sometimes I wonder why I was born in one of the most blessed countries in the world. I grew up in comfortable settings, always had food, shelter and was taught about Jesus from a fairly young age. I had my rough spots but nothing too terrible. For the first time ever, when reading that quote, I realized that by grace I was born in the United States. If you ask me its an extravagant amount of grace but thats just my opinion. What I do with that grace is my choice. God gave it ...

This has been such a crazy couple days. You guys, I made it to Mexico. Can you even believe it? If you kept up with my multiple Facebook posts then you probably already know about our multiple delays, missed flights and slumber party in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  If not then I'll do a quick recap. We left San Jose Saturday morning 1 am. Flew to FL and were unable to make it through customs and security in time to catch our next flight out to Detroit. We tried talking to the airline to figure out our options. They told us the next flight to San Diego wasn't until Monday morning. As you can imagine my heart was so overwhelmed in the moment. Standing there 6 months pregnant with my exhausted almost 1 year old I whispered to God how overwhelmed I felt. We tried seeing of we could Atleast get a flight out of Florida to a place where we have family so we could wait till Monday there. 2 days at a hotel with no transpiration, no luggage and not a ton of extra spending money was not so...

So I'm finally back, just as I promised. I'm probably a little late. What an eventful couple weeks we've had. I want to share with you about the blessings going on in our life. First, Caleb's work here at the base is going well! He is starting a third and final video focusing on all the different ministries at the base. It is going to be used in an up and coming ministry to reach out to Churches in CR to inform them of what we are doing here in YWAM San Jose! I posted briefly about the team Caleb photographed about a month ago. Through this opportunity we've been blessed with another. Caleb has been asked to Photograph an event in Tijuana Mexico. We will be there from August 1st to August 11th! We are blessed to have our whole family going. This will be Axels 4th country he has been in and we will celebrate his first birthday there on August 6th. The picture is blurry but this describes my almost 1 year old to a T. My boy is full of spice. They are also ...

I have 3 blogs that are "in progress." Not a single one of them seems to be coming together. I have so much to update you all on and some changes/news we need to share but instead Im going to skip all that for just a few more days.. I promise... and celebrate the life of my little Axel. Axel is 11 months old today. To celebrate, him and dad got matching haircuts (that were done by Dad). Shaved sides with long top and back. Trendy little fellas. Dads hair is OUT OF CONTROL in this pic.  They are seriously the cutest. It was a fun time to laugh and watch axels crazy expressions. He surprisingly sat still through all of it only twisting and turning now again to attempt to see the shaver. For the 4th of July we took Axel to a Independence Day Picnic that was put on by the U.S. Embassy. Overall it wasnt what we thought it was going to be but Axel LOVED the petting Zoo. I have learned to love this boy more than words can express. Parenting has ...

---I waited to post this until we were home so I could add more photos. SO.. we are home safe and TIRED! We are currently on the bus home from Panama. Friday we left around 7 am for Bocas del Toro, which is a small island just off the coast of Panama. We needed to go to the border for our visas so we decided to make a weekend trip of it. Axel did great on the bus.  It's about 5 hours to the border and another 35 minutes to a small town where you take a water taxi to to the island.  A rough picture of us after a long bus ride. We were hot, sticky and just ready to get to our destination.  It's about a 20 minute ride to bocas del toro. The difference between Panama and Costa Rica was a lot more than I imagined. It was a lot poorer in Panama and a completely different way of life. Once we arrived on the island we headed to our small hostel/hotel that we stayed at. Our first room had quite a bit of mold so we paid an extra 10 dollars to b...