AND we have purchased TICKETS!!!!!

I AM SOOOOOOOOO excited...the deposit has been made and tickets are on hold!!!!! we have a STRONG team of 13.... God is amazing HIS provision and WISDOM is unreal! I am so thankful for the task GOD has set before me!!

Update

We are getting excited!! Applications have been sent out and God is calling forth His team!! We have been in much prayer for this trip already!
My goals...in 10 months from now we will be getting ready to go. By then I plan on being prayed up and ready! I have made the commitment to read thru the entire Bible before next October and to study the charcteristics of Jesus... This is going really well so far. I am praying the the whole team will take this challenge. I am also commited to fasting... not just here and there but living a fasted lifestyle. This will be very hard for me for I am addicted to sugar. Right now a close friend and I are fasting sugar 1 sweet iteam a day and then in a week we will go to everyother day and then to every three and so forth to where we eat one dessert every 5 days. This has been the hardest thing for me. But I am commited to no longer put anything in my life before my God and I have definetly done that with sugar!
I have three applications in so far...I can't wait to see what God is going to do with this team!

How can you be apart of the team?

I have the applications ready. Let me know if you are interested and I will send you an app and info. Email dustyandsteph@gmail.com
How can you help if you don't feel called to go. We are collecting money for the well now. A well costs $7000.00. You can send donations to New Life Community Church at PO Box 176 Haubstadt In 47639. Put Ghana well in the memo. If you would like to help with the expense of the trip indicate in the memo Missions trip.
Everyone CAN make a difference...What are going to do?

The commitment

I have made a commitment to make a differnce. A difference in the world. My commitment starts with my relationship with God. If I want to have an intimate relationship with my God in heaven I have to do my part. I know the Word of God. But I have made a commitment to be in the Word each day. I am reading the narrative chronological Bible beginning to end. I commit to pray and fast on a regurlar basis. It is a disipline in our walk with the Lord and fasting is an area I am weak in. My commitment ia also with my family. How can I be a better wife & mother. What can I cut out of my life to make more time for them? Am I building them up with words of love? My commitment is with my community. To make a difference every chance I can. To be a helper. Not to judge! To see a need and fill it. My commitment is with my nation. To pray for my leaders. To stand on the Word of God and pray that our nation returns to a nation under God. My commitment is to the world. To be aware of what is going on in the world and pray. To make a difference any chance I can. To not be blind of the orphans, the widows, the poor, the oppressed, to pray for the enslaved and traffiked people of the world. My commitment is with my money. To be a good steward. To tithe to my church. To make offerings above my 10% to help the community, the nation, and the world. To make smart choices with my finances to give more waste less.
This is my commitment. Will you make it yours?!?!?!
I pray that the team going with me to Africa will make this commitment to God. It's about growing. Growing as a person and in your relationship with God. This is a marathon not a sprint. The commitment will give us the strength we need to endure the race because it will strengthen our relationship with Jesus. He is strong when we are weak. This is the journey I will be sharing... My commitment to God and my my journey along the way...

My story

I am an overcomer! I am blessed beyond measure but I have had many trials to overcome in my life. I was raised in a household that was anything but peaceful. A storybook childhood mine was not. My parents both struggled with addictions to drugs and alcohol. They were very good people with BIG hearts but satan had a grip on our family and the strongholds were deep. Children are meant to be loved and pampered. To feel important and safe. Beautiful and worth any more than anything. Unfortunately I had none of these feelings growing up. Now I would like to say that my parents never abused me. I was just a witness to countless acts of abuse on each other. I would also like to point out my parents are both clean and sober now and we have a great relationship that was made possible thru forgiveness and much help from Jesus Christ. I tell you this not for pity but for an understanding that even as a small child I had birthed in me that my life was going to mean something and that someday I was going to make a difference and change the world. I had no idea that God, my father in heaven, had given me that dream.
As a young child I was molested by a family friend. That single act of violation changed the course of my teen years.
Like I said before I am an overcomer. Not only from my family but from myself. Fast forward from my childhood to my teen years... I was a mess. Desperately needing love I looked for it by means of guys. I had a warped body image of myself. Never thinking I was good enough let alone beautiful. I drank. Smoked pot. trying to desperately to fill the void I had in my life. I felt like a princess trapped in a tower waiting night after night to be rescued. I hid. I put on a fake smile and pretended everything was great. I was an overachiever took on way to much. Trying to find someone to tell me they were proud. I didn’t know who I was and the thought of trying to find out scared me to death. The person I made up in my head was much better than the person I could be. I had a deep sense of hatred for myself. I was a liar. I lied to everyone but mainly to myself. I tried to "be better" than I was. Secretly scared anyone would find out who I really was. A scared little girl who wanting someone to see me... really see me and realize that I was important. Now I am telling you this from my perspective. This is how I felt. The devil had a great control over me. I was loved deeply by my grandparents and even my parents in their own ways. But satan knew everything I struggled with. The shame from being sexually abused as a child and how to use that against me in every avenue of my life. I couldn’t see the love others had for me because I had built so many walls around my heart I was shut off from the world and from real love. I was numb. Looking back on my life I see things differently. I see the choices I made how wrong they were and why I made them I was in deep bondage that only Jesus Christ could break. I married young. had two beautiful children. I should have been happy. But I wasn't. I had a false sense of what life would be. I thought that since I was not in an abusive relationship it would be romantic and magical. I didn’t know how much work it would be. Again my feelings of self doubt and self hatred faired up. I made bad choices in my life which resulted in the marriage ending. Everyone is just a few bad choices away from life changing events. I remarried quickly. Still a mess. This time I married an alcoholic. We often repeat our past.
But all this time God was there. He was keeping me safe. And wooing me. Giving me glimpses of a better life. Dusty and I were both saved after he almost lost his life. We radically changed our lives. Dusty had felt called into the ministry as a small child but had run for a long time from God. Eventually we found a church that nurtured us. And after praying for mentors I had wonderful women of God speaking into my life and forcing me to take that long hard look in a mirror and really see who I was. Facts were I was an ugly person. I was selfish. I lived for me and what I could get out of the world. I was not nice. I never left a relationship with out another one started even as a child. I had to stand in front of the mirror and look at myself completely stripped down to see the real me and build a foundation from that. It took months stripping the layers away. It was painful. It was ugly. AND IT WAS WORK!! As I sit here now (many years from that moment) I am not perfect. I still struggle. But I know who I am in Christ Jesus who saved me. Picked me up from the muck of this world and cleaned me white as snow. Gave me hope. Gave me joy. Gave me peace something I have never felt. Gave me life. A real life. Where I loved myself and gave myself to Him freely to serve God in whatever capacity He needing me. I have scrubbed toilets, changed baby's, worked countless hours in "kid's" ministry missing services so others could enjoy services, I have also got to speak into some amazing teenagers lives that I believe have been changed because of the words God gave me to say to them. I was able to share my testimony in Africa to a group of Muslim and Christian African women. I have traveled I have done GREAT things in His name. I am a servant and I will continue to scrub toilets wipe baby's bottoms and preach anytime I can. Because I know the secret none of the things I have mentioned before are any greater in God's eyes. They were all an act of service to the King. I mean it when I pray each day. Lord what can I do for you today? It has taken me completely losing my identity and taking on the identity of the King to find out who I am and what I was made for! I am a princess of the Most High King and I am a servant ready to do the work for Him.
I am an overcomer. There is hope for all!

Starting my journey

I am still trying to figure all this out...so bare with me!
I was priveledged to go to Africa last January and while I was there God birthed in me a desire to bring a team back. So here I go... The first round of applications have been sent out so We will see the response! I will be blogging more about my story and my journey to get here, But for now the purpose of our trip...October 2011 we will be returning to Ghana West Africa. We will be digging another well and visiting and ministering at a lake where children have been sold into slavery to work on fishing boats for 10-14 hrs a day as young as 4 years old. This is also for awarness. We live in the great and mighty USA with our blinders on about what is going on in the world!  WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE but we have TO DO something!!!  Christianity is NOT a passive religion... Jesus WENT ABOUT DOING good.  SO should WE!!!
I look forward to journalling my experience...even if I am the only one who reads it!!