Gracefully Broken

    Welcome, welcome! I am so excited to start blogging and giving you a piece of what it's like to live as a missionary in an African country. I will do my best to explain the pictures, as well as the highs and lows of missionary life. A couple of things that I would like you to keep in mind. Please feel free to ask questions, email me, and share this blog with others! I also request that you do not share or post any of the pictures posted here without asking. Many of my pictures will be of people and their lives here, that I have asked permission to take. Therefore, please do not post these pictures without asking! Thank you for understanding. 

    The title of my blog, "Gracefully Broken", will be continually explained throughout different posts. But I would like to briefly explain why I chose the name of my blog. I grew up in two places. I grew up in a first world country that lives a fast pace life with everybody racing towards success and allowing for little time to relax and enjoy the little things of life. I also grew up in a third world country where most of it's citizens struggle everyday to simply survive. However, both of these countries are filled with broken people that are longing for something in this life to heal them. They turn to different things, earnestly trying to numb the pain that this world has scarred them with. This morning a friend sent me a video where the narrator said that people look at Christians and think they have it all together, living a perfect life with a perfect family, group of friends, job, etc. However, the reality is that Christians are just as broken as the people around them. The difference is how we look at our brokenness. 2 Corinthians 12:9-10, the passage I based my blog on, says

     "But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weakness, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weakness, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong." 

    What if we looked at your weakness as an opportunity for God's power to radiate from you? What if we looked at what Christ is doing through our broken circumstance? I believe that God breaks us so we learn to depend on him. For, when we lose everything familiar and comfortable to us, that's when we rely on Jesus most. Please listen to this song:

   Gracefully Broken

Thank you for your time and support. I hope you not only enjoy viewing a part of my world but are also challenged by what you see.