I want to spend some time in this blog post unpacking what I’ve felt, what I’ve learned, and what I’ve found here in the past almost 3 months since I came to Albania. I really can’t believe time has gone by so fast. There’s so much to do, and so many new friends that …

What a great weekend!

This weekend we had some visitors from Dallas. Rick Howard, the missions pastor for Watermark, and Cheryl Boyd came to visit. It was great to see them, to be encouraged by some friends from home. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while!

Cheryl has been in Eastern …

This week we had our first young-professionals meeting! We had 17 people come to hear Dennis Beck speak on worldview. He did a great job telling stories which got the participants to think. He has a talent for conveying these high concepts in story form. The discussion went well also. I sat at …

I’ve been in Albania now almost 3 weeks. Prior to now, the longest I’d ever been outside the US was 10 days. It definitely feels strange, knowing I’ll be here probably 6 or 7 more months before I make a trip back to Dallas. There’s a lot of things I’ve been missing - …

Locked out!

I managed to lock myself out of my EC2 instance when I was managing my keys. So in order to update my blog, I had to deploy it to a new EC2 instance. I decided to take the opportunity to improve the way I’m deploying new versions of my site.

Note: This will be a technical post. …

I’m here!

It’s just as I remember it. All the buildings, streets, people. It almost feels like a 2nd home. I arrived at 2:30pm, and was picked up by my team leader Illir Stavro. He dropped me off at my apartment, which I’m sharing with two new members of the high-school …

Thanks to a good friend hosting an event last weekend, I have now reached my monthly goal! And I have some room to spare! I’m really thankful for everyone who’s contributed to help me. I’m excited to finalize my plans to begin this journey!

Speaking of which, I bought my plane …

In less than 2 weeks, I’ll be in Albania :) This time just for 2 weeks, but I’m ready to go for good. But, all things in their time:

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to …

So I wanted an app server.

How hard could it be right? Well, not really that hard at all.

I was tired of having a static site served by apache. I want to do some cool stuff with the google APIs, like maybe a form submit where the results end up in a google doc for me. To do that I need more than …

What is love? Is it just not hurting me, as the song goes?

The scripture has a different definition of love.

“This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends. You are My friends if …