Days 1-3

And so the adventure begins. I took off for LAX at 4 am with my father to catch my plane for Anchorage Friday. Even at 5:45 am the line for airport security was ridiculously long but alas I made it through. The five hour flight went by surprisingly fast. Even though there were small children running up and down the aisles and three loud Bulgarian men making fun of each other directly behind me I was able to get some sleep and soon I was landing in Alaska. Right when I turned on my phone on the tarmac I received a text from Byron Womack who said that he would be picking me up and that he would be my action group leader for the summer. I called him and as soon as I picked up my bags he was there to take me back to the place I now call home at the University of Alaska Anchorage in on campus apartments. There is six of us in this apartment/action group and we are all from all over the place. I am sharing a room with my new friend and brother in Christ Joe Klinger who was the only one to road trip here. If I thought my 5 hour flight was bad I have nothing on Joe who made a 10 day road trip all the way from Pennsylvania. After we got settled in the staff threw a barbecue for us and we went on a really sweet hike pictures of which can be seen below:

Here it's a little difficult to see but that is a gigantic bull moose on the trail. Luckily we weren't going that way...



The end of the hike where we stopped was absolutely gorgeous. We could see for miles around and it was breathtaking. God's majesty is even more evident on top of a mountain. Oh and in case you were wondering all of these pictures were taken between 8 and 10 pm. Yes it's true, the sun is just always up which is great if you want to do something outdoors at night like go on a hike.

Needless to say after we got home we all just fell right to sleep since many of us were suffering from jet lag and general tiredness. The next day we heard from a great guest speaker named Kirk Brower for most of the day and  it was simply amazing! Yesterday (day 3) we received some evangelism training and we went sharing in Anchorage. The part of town that we went to was a somewhat lower income area and one of the first residents my partner Brian and I talked to warned us about some of the people in the neighborhood but we had no problems. One thing that did kind of shock me is as we were walking by a car I happened to glance and see a guy rolling a joint right there in the front seat of his car. This broke my heart for this guy and this community. One conversation in particular really stood out and blessed Brian and myself immensely and that was completely unexpected was a conversation that we had with a guy named Tom (Tom wasn't his real name but to respect his privacy that will be his name for the sake of this blog). Brian and I were walking by his house and he was in the front yard trying to get his lawn mower to work. We asked if we could talk to him and he was very kind and had us come right into his yard and sit with him. We asked him some questions about manhood and how he felt on certain issues concerning what it meant to be a man and he told us how his father had been missing from his life. Soon after this Tom just began to really open up to us about so many things. His girlfriend and he had recently had a child and had recently been released from prison. They had been stealing food in order that she (being pregnant at the time) could eat and feed the starving child inside of her. Because of this they were not supposed to have any contact with each other and a father was not supposed to be in contact with his child or girlfriend. He also shared with us that his older brother was in prison as well but that his dream was to start a halfway house of sorts where guys getting out of prison could come and stay until they get back on their feet. Little did we know that we were sitting on the stoop of that house, the dream of his brothers that Tom had brought into reality. Just that morning he had gone down to the local food pantry and had filled up the house with food for the people he was currently helping to rehabilitate. Another issue faced tom though in that he was not supposed to have any organization like this due to the terms of his probation. With sponsorships from local organizations though he was able to pull it off. Through all this we could clearly see how great his heart was and how much he really cared for people. This was so encouraging for Brian and me. We also got to share with him our beliefs and how we could rely on God when the going got tough. While Tom was not a Christian when we got there, and he wasn't a Christian when we left, we were still able to share a little of the good news with him and just to let him know that in a world of people who were trying to keep him from achieving his goals that we were praying for him. I also got to help him with his gas can that he had been having trouble with since we got there. While walking away from that conversation left me heartbroken and with hands smelling strongly of gasoline, I also felt this tremendous peace and joy from talking to Tom.

Well that has been the last three days in a nutshell.I hope that now that I have gotten the difficult part of making this blog out of the way I will be able to post pretty often about the rest of my experience here in Alaska and how God is working in this place.

A  few quick prayer requests:
For job seeking
For bonding with my brothers
For a heart of service for the Alaskan people