Barrow flavored M&M's

So i've been finding all these weird sites where you can make yourself look like some kind of charachter. It started with the Simpsonizeme.com site. You can see us as Simpson's pics below. But today i found the site that you can make a m&m look like you. Here is our picture of us on the mission field.

We are doing good. We are getting ready to head up to Montana early Saturday morning. We have a DTS conference to go to. We are there for the whole week.

The house hunting could be done on Friday night. We are meeting with a landlord at like 9:30 at night. They live up in the bay area so we have to wait for them to get down here. Then we have to get up at 4 and drive to Montana. Hopefully it goes well with our meet with the landlord. We still need some more moula but God is always faithful. We'll post some real pictures of us soon. i promise....

So we are moving to Oceano. I hate moving. I like the new house part. I just hate the looking part. It always stresses me out. We feel like we are suppose to live in Oceano. So the scary part is that we don't have a place to live in Oceano yet, but i just gave notice that we are moving to our landlord. So Jesus needs to help us out now.

We are trying to find something around $1000.00. We are looking for atleast a two bedroom place. We don't want to have a place where there are people above or below us. I know we are being kind of picky. I just hate how people are either really loud above you or you have to watch how quite you are above someone else.

For those of you reading this not from california. Rent sucks here. Most two to three bedroom places are 1200 to 1500.

Anyway if you can be praying for us. We would love it. If you want to start supporting us monthly to help up out with our expenses that are going up. We would greatly appreciate it. If you want to help support us send me a message and we'll work it out.

Thanks

Will, Lori and Elijah

The Simpsons movie

So in honor of the Simpsons movie opening today, Here is our family in Simpson's form. There is this cool website (simpsonizeme.com) that you can upload a picture of yourself to and see yourself looking like a Simpson. I want to make a website of all our staff. Maybe check out ywampismobeach.org/simpsons. Besides looking like Sipmson's we are doing ok.

Well...what have we been up to. Eli is starting to try and walk, and he's getting very good at standing by himself. It's crazy to think that he is only 8 months and trying to walk. It's been so much fun to watch him grow and the new things he does everyday. Here are a couple of pics of eli from the last couple of days...


I have also been reading a couple of books. I started out reading "Letters to a Young Evangelical" by Tony Campolo. It was a really good book with lots of challenging thoughts in it. I would encourage everyone to read this book. I'd put some quotes down but one of our friends is borrowing it right now.

Then there are a couple of books i have to read for our worship department at church. But they have been really good reads. The first one was "Facedown" by Matt Redman. It was amazing and only around 100 pages. It had great thougths on worship and worship truely is. Worship needs to stop being about us and about bringing glory to God. Great little nuggets in this small little book.

The last book that I'm attempting to read right now is "Cat and Dog Theology". It's a really good book as well. It's about the difference between the way that Cat's and Dogs think. Cat's are always looking for ways that they can be blessed, but dog's bless you just because they can. It's how we always look for God to bless us, instead of looking to bless him, even if things aren't going well in our life.


Well that's it for now...i will try to blog again soon...

4th of July

Well we attempted to watch the fireworks on the 4th in Pismo, but so much fog rolled in you could only see the fog change colors. Oh well...we saw some as we were driving back to San Luis Obispo.

We hung out with some friends every tuesday night and play some games, have pizza, and just hang out. Well this last week, with everyone having wednesday off. We had a sleep over at their house. I had this great idea to make funnel cakes. The only part that sucked was that we started this at 1am. Then we realized we didn't have enough oil. So i headed out at 1 in the morning. Everything was closed, Vons had closed an hour earlier. So i ended up getting it at 7-11 for the smallest bottle of oil for 4$. I finished making the funnel cakes at 3 in the morning. We ended up getting about 4 hours of sleep, because there were 9 kids there all under 6 years old.

We went to the park in the afternoon on wednesday. Here are some of Elijah's first time to the park pictures...

Eli vs The Chair

Here's the story. We left San Luis Obispo around 7am yesterday morning and made it to Portland around 1 am this morning. The fight of the century took place this morning between Eli and The chair. Here's the stats on both...

Eli the fly guy
Height: 2'6"
Weight: 22lbs
Hometown: San Luis Obispo, California
Advantage: cute
Weakness: cant walk well

VS

The Chair

Height: 3'4"
Weight: 12lbs
Hometown: Portland, Oregon
Advantage: hard steel parts
Weakness: not cute

So it was a interesting fight. Eli started out very aggressively crawling over to the chair. He was making all the first moves as the chair stood still as a post...or chair. Eli took the first moves at trying to climb The Chair. But it was The Chair who came out victorious. Eli fell fast and hard with a blow to the head. After some ice on the head, Eli was back to his smiling self again. Here are some photos of the first battle wound on Eli.
We made it about 4 or 5 hours from Portland and the traffic came to a complete stop. This was us standing outside the car on I-5. We were there for about 2 1/2 hours. Apparently two big rigs got in a accident and one of the drivers died. It was really sad. I took a picture of the truck. While we were waiting on the road we stood in the shade of the big truck in front of us. I took a picture of Eli next to the trucks wheel.

DTS has come and gone....

It seems like only yesterday that 15 students from all over the place showed up here in Pismo. We started the DTS on January 7th i think. It's crazy how fast the time goes by. Lori and I ran this DTS with Mary one of our staff assisting us. We also had two other staff Brandon and Cindy who led the outreach to Kenya and Rwanda.

This has been the best DTS I have been able to work with our be around. They all had amazing hearts and all had a call to missions in some form. Here are some pictures of the group.

The whole DTS group

The Boys of the DTS and Will's small group
(left t0 right - Matt R., Me, Eli, Matt H., Cody, Coffe, Zach, Brandon)

The girls

Lori's small group
(left to right - Shelly, Katrina, Beth, Lori, Eli, Amy)

Cindy's small group
(left to right - Lauren, Stephanie, Katie, Cat, Cindy)
Mary's small group
(left to right - Crystal, Rhiannon, Mary, Kara)
The surfing track that me and brandon worked with.

So most nights the boys would go to sleep like this on outreach....
and wake up like this.

We really miss all of these guys. they are at home for the most part now. I look forward to hearing about the amazing things they are going to do.

For us, we take a little bit of a breather and start preparing for the next DTS to come next january. We start meeting with the staff that are going to work with the next school, figuring out speakers, and housing.

We are going to Portland on Monday to visit Tierney who use to be on staff with us but left to go and start YWAM portland. We look forward to going up there and encouraging and spending some time with her and her staff.

more of Rwanda

Here are some more photos from my time in Rwanda. It was a good time. This are some of my favorite shots that i got.

one of the orphans praying during church

a family at the church that we worked with

my favorite picture. we saw this kid when we
went up to a village to play soccer. It had just finished
raining and this kid was so muddy.

another kid that came to watch our soccer game

i loved having my new camera and getting great portraits

this man was one of the coolest people i have ever met.
his story was amazing. the stories of him surviving through
the genocide and how god protected him are wild.


we met this man that was crippled on our street. we saw him
almost everyday. our last day there i printed him this
picture and took it to him.
he was so happy.

this is a picture of beth among all the people that came
to our soccer game.

Cards from Africa

Well after the excitement of last week, and my new baby. I thought i should post some pics from my time in Rwanda.

So my last day there the DTS team moved from theplace we had been working with over to the YWAM base in Kigali. One of the guys on staff has this ministry called Cards from Africa. It's located just down the road from the YWAM base so I walked down there right before i had to go to the airport.
This little guy followed me all the way down there holding my hand. It was really cool once i got there. They have this nice building where all the youth work.

Their mission is to employ orphaned youth of Rwanda, and teach them about business and to give them fair wages. Our YWAM base in California sent me with 50$ so that we could sell some cards in our storefront, and hopefully continue supporting them. They had worship music playing as there were probably about 30 youth sitting at 6 tables working on cards. They make all of their cards from recycled paper. You can actually see on their web page how they make the paper.

Once i got their i asked them if i could take some pictures of them working. It was fun going around and taking their pictures. Some of them were shy as i started taking their picture. Then i would show them their picture on the back of my camera and their faces would light up. It was a really good time. And a great last day in Rwanda. I'll post some other stuff tomorrow...

Our new baby....

So we got a new baby and her name is Taylor. She is made out of sweet sitka spruce and sapele wood. She's a beauty...and here are some sweet pictures of her...


So it was such a good deal. It all started this morning. I just got back from Rwanda on Wednesday night. Yesterday was kind of a blur and so i thought i'd call my friend Jeremy and see what he was up to, maybe go and catch up at Starbucks. He didn't answer, but called back and told me he had amazing news. That he was at the guitar store and that i needed to come see this guitar.

So apparently the first time i called he was talking to the guitar store guy...his name is butch. Jeremy was in the middle of telling butch that the guitar would be perfect for me and then i was calling him. So i went down and looked at it. It was really nice. It was on sale for a really good price. So I came home and talked to lori about it. You can read about the conversation on her blog here. i'm definitely going to have to take her out somewhere nice or something like that.

I've been wanting a nicer guitar for a couple of years now. I had been playing a samick for a while. Then when me and lori got married i've been playing her samick which was a little bit better than mine. It had a pickup and was a cutaway. But you could tell in the sound that it wasn't the most expensive guitar. But it has served us faithfully over the years. We've used it for a ton of worship times. It's been to mexico, and canada. It's gone lot's of places. I'm so excited for this new guitar. I thank jesus for this sweet new guitar and the blessing it's going to be.

So thank you jesus for the sweet new guitar.

In Rwanda

So we have been super busy. As i stated in our last post. We left our house at 7:00 am on Friday and got to Kigali, Rwanda on Friday at about 11:00 am. We were pretty tired but i figured the best way to beat jet lag, was to not rest at all. So on Friday afternoon i went with all the guys on the team and we played football(or soccer) with a bunch of street boys. We played for about 2 hours.

Saturday we went and changed money and then went to a church that has about 50 orphans at it. It was pretty cool. Saturday afternoon, we went and baptized a bunch of people. Brandon and Cindy, two of our staff got in the water and baptized some local people with one of the local pastors.

Sunday we went to church and it was a great time. In the afternoon we had a time of intercession with the students.

Today we drove about an hour and went and visted a aids clinic. We spoke on hope and tried to encourage the people. We gave them our lunches as they had nothing to eat. We then went up the street and the girls on our team played against the local girls. We got smoked 4-1.

Lori sent me an email and told me that both of our cars broke down. So we need prayer for that. Hopefully it all works out ok. I have taken some pretty good pictures of the people of Rwanda. It is amazing here. It is nothing like what preconcieved ideas of it are. We are going on Wednesday to see some sights. I don't think it's going to be a very exciting day. We are going to try and go to the hotel mecolines, and some other memorials.

Talk soon

Heading to Rwanda

So today is my last day here before I head to Rwanda. I'm leaving tomorrow at 7:00 to drive up to San Jose. Then begins the crazy journey of flights. We leave San jose at 12:00 noon and get to Minneapolis at 5:44 pm. Then we leave Minneapolis at 9:30pm and get to Amsterdam on Thursday morning at 10:00. We then have to spend the whole day in Amsterdam until 9:00pm when we get to Nairobe at 6:30 on Friday morning. Then we have to wait until 10:00 to catch our flight from Nairobe to Kigali.

So once i get to Rwanda and hopefully not super tired. I'm going to be working with the DTS while I'm there and partnering with them. We are going to be working with a local church that has ministry that works with the local street kids.
I'm looking forward to our time there. It should be really good. We are also going to be working with the church there. The DTS and possibly me are going to be speaking at a conference there and praying for people. We can't wait to see what God is going to do during this time. This is a picture of some of the local street kids. Please be praying for my time there, and for Lori and Eli as they are going to be staying home. I hate traveling and being away from them. Please also be praying for my time with the DTS, and that i can speak into their lives and encourage them while we are there.

family

So it was good to be in Canada like i said in the last post. We had a great time with my family and Elijah got to meet everyone. He loved getting to see all his family and definitely loved all of the attention. He had a great time playing with his uncles especially.

He's definitely feeling better. He's sitting in his swing with his big smile. He's going with Lori to her family girls get together. Here are some photo's of our time in Canada and Eli with his family.