Dear Family and Friends:
We hope that this update finds you doing well! We were blessed with a very merry Christmas, spending with our families and some friends. We hope you did as well.
Not much has changed for us since you heard from us last. We both are working the same jobs and enjoying the challenges that God continues to put in front of us for this trip. One such challenge has been getting the necessary gear together for our travels. Thankfully we have acquired many of our supplies already. Some of our more major purchases over the last couple of months were our tent, sleeping pad, a hiking pack, and clothes.
We have been blessed so far on our journey of raising support. We are currently around 34% ($10,000) of our total goal. We have reached our first goal/deadline of $7,000. That deadline won’t be due until two weeks before training camp (May 19th) so we feel good with where we are at. We are still avidly working toward our next goal of $13,000.
We have been praying for and brainstorming ways to raise more support as well as involve more people in what God has called us to do. So far we have come up with several possibilities. First we thought of having a fundraiser volleyball tournament at Grace University. Another would be to host a spaghetti dinner at church. Other potential fundraisers include a jeans day at Joe's work, and working with churches and youth groups. Right now we have had the opportunity to talk to four churches, and are waiting to hear back from them. We are passionate that the more people that can be involved, the more of an impact we can have.
We are very excited to put together prayer teams to support us as well. Prayer can move mountains, so with your prayer support, we know that God will accomplish amazing things through this trip. We would love to have your email address so that we can email you with the many prayer requests that we are sure obtain over our eleven month trip. We would like to ask you to commit to for choose a country that we will be visiting to cover in prayer. We are also looking for people willing to pray for us and our team or our trip in general. We will be sending specific requests for each country as well as our individual and team prayer requests. If this is something that God lays on your heart, please email us at [email protected]. You can also visit our blog: joeabbybeard.theworldrace.org.
Thank you for your love and support as we seek God and pursue His plan for us.
Love,
Joe and Abby
