Hi everybody!

I hope this letter finds you all well and serving the One and only true God. To borrow a line from the apostle Paul, “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.”

So, where do I begin? The last time I wrote a letter like this was to invite you all to my graduation open house, so I’ll give a brief summary of what I’ve been doing since then.

Last summer my whole family (plus my grandma on my mom’s side) took a month long trip to Taiwan, where we got to see my older brother (Chad) get married. It was indeed a very special honor to be in the wedding as a groomsman, even though it was incredibly hot and the ceremony was almost all in Chinese. After we left Taiwan, we had a short mini-vacation to San Francisco and Yosemite national park to celebrate my parent’s 25^th wedding anniversary. Then we finally came back home and Chad and Grace had a wedding reception here in the states and then Glen and I left for a week long bible quizzing camp at a place called Camp Dellwater.

Last September I started up school again at the University of Minnesota, coming in as a “freshman” with a course load of 16 credits. I had already been going there full-time through the PSEO program though, so I wasn’t technically a freshman. In late November of last year I started attending a Christian bible study group on campus called Prepare Ministries. The U of M is a very secular campus so it was really great to finally meet a group of on-fire Christians on campus. In March of this year, during spring break I, along with 9 other people from Prepare, was able to go on a missions trip to the far far away city of… Minneapolis, MN. So we didn’t actually travel too far away from home, but it was still an awesome time of growing and serving at the same time. The main focus of the trip was to reach the homeless and those who are less fortunate. We did a lot of volunteering at homeless shelters and some street evangelism in downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul. It was a very eye opening trip and we got to see God move in many ways.

Additionally, thanks to the generous gifts I received at my graduation open house, I didn’t have to work as much and was able to have time to coach the first ever bible quiz team from our church in Eden Prairie, MN. The team consisted of 4 rookie quizzers and we placed 22^nd out of 36 teams going into the last quiz meet. This year we have some more rookies joining the program and will probably have enough quizzers to form two teams from our church! Last year the four quizzers memorized a combined total of over 400 verses from the book of Acts, and some of them have already started memorizing for next year. After the regular season ended, I had the pleasure of assistant coaching one of the league all-star teams from Minnesota. Our team name was Geliebt (German for “Beloved”) and we took 31st place at the national tournament in Lake of the Ozarks, MO. I’m pretty sure that I must have won some sort of award for being the craziest assistant coach in the history of quizzing, but it was a very good experience and I am very proud (in a good way) of how hard everyone on the team worked.

Going on to more recent events, I finished up school about a month ago and have been keeping busy since then. Just recently I got summer internship working full-time at a company called MTL (Measurement Technology Laboratories), which has been a huge blessing. It’s an excellent place to work and there are a lot of people of very godly character there. (And I get to wear jeans to work! Woot!)

This brings me to my reason for writing this letter. In about 17 days I will be leaving with a group of 36 other people to go down to the Dominican Republic on a missions trip. We will be working primarily with YWAM down there doing evangelism work, construction, VBS, and various dramas and skits to aid in sharing the gospel. One particular drama that we’ll be doing is a Christian version of Stomp. It has a drum corps in the background that keeps up a beat and does all sorts of cool rhythms by banging on trashcans, plastic bins, or almost anything else that makes noise, and in the foreground is a skit that uses choreographed martial arts and stick fighting to portray the salvation message. My friend Eli and I are in charge of getting a Stomp team ready for the missions trip.

We will be leaving for the trip on June 21^st and get back on July 2^nd. The total trip cost is $1400 dollars, of which I still have a good amount left to pay for. I could definitely use financial support for the missions trip, so if you feel that the Lord is leading you help support the missions trip I would definitely be grateful. However, what I would really like to ask for is your prayers. It’s difficult to put it into words properly, but I would value prayer far far more than any monetary gifts. If we’re to accomplish anything worthwhile for the kingdom down there this summer, we must have God working with us.

Psalms 127:1 “Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain.”

Some things to pray for:

·        That God would begin to work in the hearts of the people that we’ll be reaching to down there.

·        Team unity

·        Finances

·        That my passport would come in on time (it should come in about a week early, but please pray that there would be no delays)

·        That I would have a God-centered heart attitude while down there

·        That we would be able to get the Stomp team up and running in time. (This is the least amount of time that we’ve had to prepare for a Stomp team, so please pray that the practices will be productive and that we will be able to bring it all together before the missions trip.)

·        This is my first time teaching the “drum corps” section of the Stomp group, so please pray for extra grace while I’m teaching the group and getting things in order.

Thank you all very much! I’m looking forward to seeing God work down there this summer.