I have had this thought at different junctures in my life, at different times, and I realize I am on the cusp of having another such moment.

Its weird, the World Race. You get all ready and you say good-bye to you friends, your relatives, your best friends, and finally at the airport your family. You give them a big hug and you know you won't see them for almost a year, and you say good-bye. A tough time no doubt.

Then every month you say good-bye. You say good-bye to new families, new communities who have taken you in. Many who have let you live in their house, these people feed you clothe you, pray with you, love you, and no matter how quality of a relationship you have, at the end of the month you say good-bye. I never realized how taxing so many good-bye's in one year would be.

I don't know if people are really meant to say that many good-bye's. The sad fact is that I will never see 98% of the people I met this year, at least in this life time.

But I am approaching the hardest good-bye of them all. For 11 months 40 people and 80 if you include both squads have been around me no matter what. 5 in particular, and whether I wanted them there or not, there they were. Two of largest constants of the year have been, your team is generally within 15 feet of you and your parents are on the other side of the world.

These things are about to get drastically re-arranged, because I'm heading home. We fly out of Bangkok, exactly 50 hours from when I am writing this. And after all this practice all year, I will get to say one final good-bye to these people I have been traveling with. This is a hard good-bye because I realize that in all likelihood, this could be the last time these 40/80 people are ever all together in one place. The last time we pray together, share a meal together, the last time we are all there to just hang out. There are times this year when I literally would have given you all the money in my bank account (which probably amounts to about 7 bucks) to make this year be over, and now I find myself wanting time to slow down.

Because I am sick of good-bye's.

They are necessary and they are a reality, but they just stink.

However, I suppose fighting reality never really gets us anywhere. A wise man once said, "Life is simply a series of hellos and good-bye's."

So maybe instead of being tired of the good-bye's I can just be thankful for the hellos. The fact of the matter is I just had the opportunity to travel the world with some incredible people...INCREDIBLE! To my supporters who are reading this, it is one of my deepest regrets that you don't get to meet these people because they are the reason I made it this year. These are the people I laughed with, cried with, argued with, worshipped with, prayed with, and slept next to. They are great, and they are family.

To those of you reading who were with me, thank you, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. For both teaching me and putting up with me. I am sorry we have to say good-bye, our time seems so short now that its at a close, but I am thankful that I got to say hello. It has been an honor and a privilege to spend this year of my life with you, and I feel confident that I will never forget a single one of you.

A not so glamorous life style......

When I first heard about the world race it seemed like pretty much the coolest thing anyone could ever do. 11 months, 11 countries, traveling to literally all over the world getting to a month of mission work in each country. It sounds, for lack of a better word, glamorous. It sounds awesome. It is the rock star of mission trips.

Don't get me wrong this year has been amazing. It has opened my eyes to so much. There are times every month where I laugh so hard I am crying. I have met some amazing people. A few I am sure I will be in touch with for the rest of my life and who could potentially play a large role in my life for years to come.

But to be honest.....this year has been so much harder than I could have ever imagined. I was a little naïve about the whole thing going into it. I was caught in awe looking at the trip and how majestic everything was going to be. What I missed, and failed to think about, is that real life is rough. Real life is not easy. Its rocky and bumpy and people are rocky and bumpy and full of junk to be dealt with.

I have seen that everyone is flawed, everyone makes mistakes, ESPECIALLY ME! I am so full of crap at times its shocking. But I have seen people love me regardless of myself. I have learned to look for the Jesus in people, because by ourselves, we are hopeless, we are jerks, we are selfish, we are a mess.

This mission trip is so much different than anything else I hae ever done in the "missions" category. Most of the work I have done in this category is very short term and every day is exciting and new, you try to soak in every moment because it is over soon.

But this year has been VERY LONG at times. There are mornings where I wake up and I simply have not wanted to get out of bed. I don't want to tell David and Goliath one more time, I don't want to play duck duck goose again, I definitely don't want to have to try and talk to a translator who doesn't speak English. I don't want to do it.

If you would have asked me before this year what kind of person does missions for a living, I most likely would have described someone very pious, someone who is seeking the lord and who is on fire for the lord, and if I had to take the guess I would say they loved 95% of their days.

What I have seen though on the field from the full time missionaries we have encountered and what I have even experienced in myself is that being on the "field" can just be hard. It can be miserable, it can be everything you don't want to be in right now. Jesus tells us to go to the nations making believers and baptizing in the name of the father, son and holy spirit. What he doesn't say is this will be easy. I often times think of myself as very mature, understanding the world for what it is, and tend to consider myself a realistic guy, with realistic expectations. But I pretty much missed the boat on all accounts here.

I am a wreck and if you don't believe me I can point you to 39 individuals who will vouch for this in a heart beat. Some days I have won the fight to just keep going, and honestly other times I have lost it, I have thrown in the towel. In a lot of ways I am not half the man I thought I was. But I have come to accept that the man I thought I was or was becoming was missing a lot and was a little off course.

We start our month of manistry tomorrow morning, and I have to say I'm pretty excited... Ironically MANistry month is all about girls. Its completely backwards, but also works at the same time. We are working with an organization called Remember Nhu.

Remember Nhu is an organization that removes girls who are risk for being sold into human trafficking. These are girls who have been orphaned, whose parents are in debt, children who have had a sibling that has been trafficked, and other types of at risks situations.

The close of Vietnam....

I apologize in being so long to write a blog. No excuses. Vietnam though to wrap it up was far and away my favorite country we visited. I think this had to do with a combination of things. What we did, who we did it with, the city we live in. Like anything each month is its own beast in the sense that we change contacts, ministries, locations, living arrangements, diets, schedules, and really mind sets going from country to country. Vietnam though was really a great month. Wqe leaved in Ho Chi Minh City which seems like a really cool place and I only feel like we grabbed the edges of it. Seems like there is so much more to experience.

The street where we stayed was indeed very touristy, but all the same, still very cool. It was weird seeing so many white people though, and not just Americans. It was quite the mixing pot of peoples and cultures.

The food was cheap enough that you could eat your meals out on the streets at vendors and places of the sort. My particular favorite was a rice and pork lady who was 5 doors down from our "hotel." Also for breakfast we found a killer 50 cent smoothy. I had between 1 and 5 each day..... : /

Ministry this month was also very neat as it was a little bit all over the board. Many people spoke English here which also definitely helped. It is a strange thing to be able to communicate so well with so many people. One girl we worked with is even heading off the US to go to college....it's a small school that I think I've heard of before called Yale (I think its on the east coast somewhere, but don't quote me on that) . But it was a neat thing to spend time with the college kids, most of whom spoke decent English. One part of ministry was in fact going to a coffee shop a couple of times a week where people form all over the city came to work on their English. We would simply have conversations with people, build friendships. It was an exciting time. We worked with both a branch of YWAM as well as a coffee shop called SOZO. Sozo the coffee shop hires disadvantaged workers as well handicap employess and does a great job reaching out to the community. There is also somewhat of a ministry run out of Sozo that works with English speakers, a blind school, children's groups. It was a very neat piece of ministry to have the opportunity to be involved with.

It was a really hard month to leave, not only because we had A/C but we just enjoyed being there, all of it. Its so weird with how worked up I was going into that month, it turned out to be my favorite one thus far. I got to see that our brothers and sisters in Christ are our Brother and Sisters, no matter where they live. The true Church, the Church of people seeking God's face doesn't know politics or country lines. It doesn't know history, but rather it knows love. It knows that people are people with souls who need completion. I did not see anything miraculous happen while in Vietnam, nobody that I saw was raised from the dead, but it was a fruitful month in my opinion.

We spent time we college kids, we put smiles on the faces of kids at the blind school. And we learned first hand that countries do not define the people.