Half A Year Recap & 2023 Year in Numbers

After our five weeks in seven countries in April and May, we had a little bit of a breather at home this summer before departing for projects in Peru and Romania. If you search flights from Lima to Bucharest, there’s a connection Paris. Reluctant, but not wanting to fly all the way back home for just two nights, we decided to spend four days in Paris. Now having been, I’m not sure why two art-lovers were so reluctant to go to the City of Love.

Wait a minute, Paris was a pitstop between Romania and Peru (there was also a side trip to the longest wave in the world that Jordan surfed in Peru…) so what about our work before and after Paris?!

LIFE Romania is reaching the next generation for Christ and equipping them to impact the local Church as disciples who make disciples. Their biggest avenue of evangelism and ministry is through summer camps for Romanian youth, but the ministry is much more than a camp outreach. Check out the video below to see and hear how they are spreading the Gospel in Romania by disciple making.

Another cool part about our trip to Romania is that our 13-year-old niece (who’s taller than Cassie!) was a participant on the mission trip! It was awesome to see her connecting with the Romanian youth and showing interest in our documentary storytelling work. We had one tourist day and it was fun touring castles (including Dracula’s!) in Transylvania.

In the dusty suburbs of Lima, Peru, La Roca Christian School was founded to meet the educational and spiritual needs of Peruvian children where no bilingual Christian school exists. The school serves as an important evangelistic outreach tool for the children’s families while also instilling Christian values and principles, training children to serve the Lord for all eternity.

“Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.”

Proverbs 22:6

After a jam-packed travel schedule for the first half of 2023, we didn’t have a single international filming trip for the remaining six months of the year, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t busy. We had a ton of editing to catch up on, and we continued to film several projects for the Foundation of FirstHealth in Southern Pines throughout the rest of the year, but we also found time for foster kids, family, and fun. Staying put may not sound like the most exciting thing to write a blog about, but there are a bunch of benefits. For one, it provides time at home where we can offer respite care for kids in the foster care system. We had the opportunity to foster a brother and sister two separate times during these months at home, and, well, we got pretty attached to them. The second time we had to say goodbye after two weeks with us was hard and we have been praying ever since about adopting and starting a family. Speaking of family, time at home also offers lots of chances to spend time with loved ones. We had a big celebration for Cassie’s dad’s 80th birthday, which was really special, and each of his children prepared speeches to honor their father.

Then there was Cassie’s annual family vacation, Thanksgiving, more birthdays, and Christmas with both sides of our family. And, of course, time not traveling also makes us a bit restless so we couldn’t resist the opportunity to cross off some personal bucket list items, including hiking the Art Loeb Trail in western NC (in 2 days), canoeing down the entire length of the Neuse River (in 5 days) and soaking in a hot tub in the Outer Banks during a meteor shower. We did some local camping with friends, introducing their two kids in kindergarten and first grade to the wonderful world of car camping with a massive borrowed 10-person tent and all you can eat s’mores. It was a great fall filled with hiking, canoeing and camping!

Cassie’s family vacation

Art Loeb Trail

This 30.1 mile trail is one of the longer and more difficult trails in our home state. We hiked the leaf-covered trail in two days, had amazing views and carried the required bear canister for all our food and scented items, but thankfully didn’t have any black bear encounters!

Paddling the Neuse River

We’ve been working on completing the 1,175-mile Mountains-to-Sea Trail that stretches across North Carolina from the Great Smoky Mountains to the Outer Banks, and we’ve always been most excited to do the optional paddle route down the Neuse River, which avoids a lot of road walks since the MST is still in the process of getting land permissions to be moved off paved roads and fully onto trails. With our 121 miles of paddling in our canoe for five days and camping along the way, we’ve now completed 695.5 miles of the MST to date!

As you may or may not know, many of the international projects we embark on each year (including the two videos we shared in this update from Romania and Peru) are ministries supported by Providence Church in Raleigh, NC. Since 2019, we’ve traveled to 13 countries as well as documented church plants in two different states just through Providence’s missions work alone.

In November, Providence Church hosts their annual missions festival where they showcase the work God is doing around the world through their generous support. The church brings the missionaries they support around the world to Raleigh to share about the work being done in God’s name and be a blessing to the missionaries giving them tons of love and encouragement from their church body. We were finally able to attend the missions festival for the first time this past November, since we had no international projects, diagnoses or deaths in the family that have kept us away in the past, and we were so blessed to see how our videos get used to further God’s Kingdom. Typically, we deliver our videos to the ministry or organization and then move on to the next project, never getting the chance to see our videos unveiled or seeing how God uses our work to inspire others to support the organizations. It blessed us tremendously to see a church packed with 3,500 attendees interested in missions whose eyes and ears were focused on several of our videos which proceeded each missionary’s introduction and really paved the way for their conversation, showing the church members what life is like where they work and answering their questions about their mission work before they even began speaking. It was a powerful weekend, and it was also a happy reunion for us, reconnecting with missionaries we’d interviewed on 15 different trips and shared life with the 100+ mission trip attendees over the past couple of years. Below is a video we  compiled highlighting all the missions work we’ve documented worldwide for Providence.

We are already filming for projects in 2024, starting with a refugee ministry in Raleigh followed by a three-week trip to four countries in Southeast Asia and a project in Africa in March. It’s shaping up to be a busy year already and we have a lot to look forward to, but first let’s take a look back at 2023 with our annual Year in Numbers!

2023 YEAR IN NUMBERS

  • 171 Days away from home 

  • 121 miles paddled in a canoe on the Neuse River

  • 91 Videos produced

  • 45 Flights flown

  • 33 beds slept in

  • 14 Countries visited

  • 13 Nonprofits served

  • 10 books read

  • 6 art museums visited

  • 6 Nights in a tent

  • 5 Kids fostered

  • 4 publishers we sent our Appalachian Trail memoir to

  • 4 countries surfed in

  • 3 States visited

  • 3 delayed pieces of luggage

  • 2 car accidents survived
  • 1 complimentary upgrade to first class
  • 1 Independence Day celebrated (Israel)
  • 1 solo album released (sunstruck.bandcamp.com)
  • 0 REGRETS 

  • COUNTLESS BLESSINGS!

Thanks for being with us on this journey— we are so grateful for you!

7 Countries in 5 Weeks

What a great year this has been for us so far! We enjoyed the most perfect spring in Wilmington, with unseasonably cool days and not having to turn on our air conditioning until mid June. Despite a much busier than usual first half of the year, we’ve been able to catch up on our editing projects before each international trip, leaving with the weight of a to-do list off our shoulders and coming back from video travels with a clean slate. We are feeling very thankful that God has been working all these details out of our control and giving us a nice rhythm. 

Back in May, we returned from a FIVE-WEEK overseas film trip to document several seminaries for one overarching video. This was our longest stint of time abroad since having a home base, but because our time was split between seven different countries, it really didn’t feel long at all!

The start of our trip began with a day in Singapore before heading on to India. 

Next we filmed on three islands of Indonesia, even getting to spend a few days in Bali for Jordan to surf a world-class wave in Uluwatu (his second world-class wave this year, after getting to surf at Fiji’s famous Tavarua Island in February where he caught the biggest wave of his life!). 

From Southeast Asia, we continued on to the Middle East, stopping about halfway for a relaxing retreat on a private island in the Maldives where we snorkeled with colorful fish, sharks, stingrays and sea turtles in the crystal clear Indian Ocean. 

After we each got impressive tans, we headed to meet Cassie’s parents in Israel for an 8-day private tour of the Holy Land. Taking a private tour led by an Israeli Messianic Jew (“Jew for Christ”) allowed us to create a custom itinerary of the sights we wanted to see and also connect with Jordan’s cousin, a Franciscan monk in Nazareth, and friends from Wilmington who now live near the Sea of Galilee. 

To be 100% honest, Cassie wasn’t super excited about taking a trip to Israel. She prefers thrilling adventures rather than historical trips and since Jordan had already been to Israel 14 years ago, this trip was really intended for her parents. Little did she know how much this trip to Israel would impact her, and not just during our trip. Our time in Israel only continues to build in significance as we read our Bible daily, now having personal experiences with historical places from more than 2,000 years ago. The parts of the Old Testament where Cassie’s eyes used to glaze over now carry so much meaning as she can visualize these places as they are— real places where she walked. The same stories we’ve read over and over in the Bible have a new richness after walking in the footsteps of the Israelites 2,000 years ago, understanding the Hebrew context, and how that relates to us today. 

After our amazing tour of Israel, we dropped Cassie’s parents off at the Tel Aviv airport and hopped on an overnight bus to the Kingdom of Jordan for our next filming project. Jordan’s name was a huge hit with all the Jordanians, starting immediately with the immigration officials at the border crossing! We had a couple free days before our filming began, so we stopped in the desert wonderland of Wadi Rum, where we hiked through Mars-like terrain and did some glamping, and then continued on to Petra, one of the new seven wonders of the world. Petra is a historical site along the Silk Road, once inhabited by the Nabateans who lived in caves. When the Romans came along, they carved traditional Roman architecture out of the pink sandstone landscape, creating a surreal city with impressive facades complete with massive columns. They even chiseled out an entire amphitheater! Despite hiking for miles, we barely scratched the surface of all that Petra is!

Leaving the desert and heading to the city of Amman, we had just one day of filming in Jordan before traveling on to Serbia for another single day of filming and then we were finally hopping on a plane for home just for a short weekend back. We landed at home around midnight, went to a friend’s wedding the next day and then were off for filming at the hospital in Pinehurst. We made it back to Wilmington just in time to celebrate our 10th anniversary with a day trip to the B&B where we had our surprise wedding, and then we enjoyed a delicious vegan sushi dinner downtown before seeing a play at the historic theater downtown. 

It’s hard to believe it’s been 10 years since we surprised our immediate families with our wedding ceremony, and we are so thankful for all that God has done in our lives! We are looking forward to many more years on this crazy journey and getting the opportunity to share it with you. 

Thank you for reading, watching, and praying. We love you!

How Far Would You Go?

Papua New Guinea is REALLY far away, and that’s coming from a couple that has traveled to Antarctica! We had to take six flights just to get there, crossing the international date line and arriving three days after we left. But as far away as it is, God is in this place, and we had the amazing opportunity to witness His presence and power moving in the lives of the people in PNG.

Psalm 139:7-17: 

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

 

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2022 Year In Review

2022 has been a really big year for us in many ways. We served a lot of organizations and ministries near and far with trips to Malawi, Tanzania, Serbia, Portugal, London, Stockholm, Pittsburgh, and Black Mountain, NC as we continued to follow our calling to serve with our cameras, but we were pushed and challenged in ways like never before with bigger and more complex projects. For instance, we were approached by FirstHealth, the hospital in Cassie’s hometown that has become a regular client since we first worked with them in 2019, to pull off a creative project similar to something they found online— something very different from what we’re used to doing. The production was technically challenging, which involved hiring a lighting company to build a scaffold system for the lighting design we needed and hanging pipe and drape to transform a church auditorium into a film set. It was also our first time directing a large group of people during a video shoot, as 50 hospital employees took part in a social experiment about unconscious bias. It was a challenge, but the film day was a success and we were all extremely happy with the outcome, so take a look!

Another example of a project that pushed us this year was with an organization we have worked with in the past, World Villages for Children, which operates schools around the world where the poorest children are cared for, educated, and prepared for a career that will end generational poverty in their families. They had just opened a new campus in Tanzania and sent us to document several stories, producing six videos total. That all probably sounds like par for the course if you know anything about what we have done in the past, but the catch here was that we would be producing each of those six videos subtitled in eight different languages – a total of 48 videos! The complexity involved in keeping everything straight between the different versions and incorporating changes specific for each international charity’s country-specific branding and language was a new challenge. They also wanted the videos to be in formats that could be shown in theaters, but that was no problem for our new Sony cameras. Wait, did we mention that we completely switched out all of our camera gear in the middle of this year, changing from the familiar Canon brand that we have used for 14 years to a completely different system with Sony? Talk about a challenge! The videos came out great though and we are excited to share these stories showcasing the impactful work World Villages for Children is doing in Tanzania.

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Six Month Summary & 2021 Year in Numbers

How do you sum up half a year, especially one that has been so full of intensely different experiences? Our typical travel work schedule was interrupted by an unexpected diagnosis, which turned into a complex surgery, followed by a long recovery and complete healing. In just the past six months, we’ve traveled to 6 continents, crossing off our 7th continent just a few days ago— Antarctica! As you can expect, this update covers a lot, so let’s jump right in! We’re going to look back in time to catch you up on all that’s happened.

JULY in Moldova & Greece

The fields of sunflowers in Moldova were in full bloom when we went to document a mission trip for Moldova Mission, the same organization we served with in 2017. But this trip to the landlocked Eastern European country felt completely different than last time because the summer camp was being hosted in a new location, a beautiful plot of land that the local church bought to develop into a camp of their very own. The property was beautiful and progress was amazing. The amenities were much better than the first camp location where they offered a 30-minute window for hot showers, boiling the water to make that possible. The new camp had plumbing to make hot showers possible for all, a luxury experience for the campers, compared to the homes they come from. The camp was also able to host twice as many campers in the new space, giving more kids the opportunity to hear and respond to the Gospel. The Gospel was shared each morning and evening in the form of Bible studies, prayer time, skits, worship, sermons, and sharing of testimonies. This year, we were asked to participate and share our testimonies too, which was a humbling experience to stand up in front of 200 people and share the good, bad and ugly of our lives and how God transformed us from broken individuals into the Jesus followers we are today. 

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Four Corners States Camping Roadtrip

After our Colorado project with Christ Church Windsor over Easter, these Appalachian Trail thru-hiking veterans couldn’t leave the area without doing some hiking. We hope you take the time to enjoy this epic blog post of our 11-day epic camping road trip where we visited SEVEN national parks and crossed off several bucket list items along the way, setting up camp from our economy rental car as our base of operations. Because of the pandemic, our plans had to be formulated well in advance, booking campsites and national park shuttle tickets in very specific timeframes, leaving not much to chance. Our plan for this trip was the Four Corner States: Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, and we were psyched for it to finally begin!

COLORADO

I guess technically we got to do some hiking DURING our project, because the team did take a trip out to Rocky Mountain National Park where we strapped spikes on our shoes so we could hike a few miles in the snow to Emerald Lake. The lake wasn’t visible because it was frozen over and covered in snow, but the view and backdrop of the Rockies was surreal.

UTAH

Upon picking up our rental car in Denver, Colorado, we took a local’s recommendation to head to Fisher Towers outside of Moab, Utah. When we arrived, there were only four car camping sites total, and just one was taken. We immediately snagged a spot and hit the desert trail for our first hike on our own.

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Liberia to Raleigh

We’ve had a lot going on and we have lots of videos to share with you in this post. We can finally share the fruit of our labors from our filming trip to Libera in November 2020, as well as some from a more recent project in Raleigh, NC.

In the below mini documentary you will hear about The Last Well’s 12-year mission to bring clean water to the entire nation of Liberia by 2020. Spoiler alert: they did it.

Going into 2021, we really had no idea what God had in store for us. But, then again, do we ever? International travel was still on hold, so we were excited pretty early in the year when we were contacted by Refugee Hope Partners to do a series of videos called “Stories of Hope” in Raleigh, NC. If their name sounds familiar, it’s probably because we have worked with them a couple times in the past, and we are big fans of their ministry to love their refugee neighbors with the hope of the gospel in partnership with the local church. We produced five videos for them, one of which might be our best video yet. Take and look and see which one you like most.

For many refugees, life doesn’t get easier once resettled in a new country. New challenges arise and many children are forced to grow up quickly and take on the responsibility of an adult in order for their family to survive. Elysee’s story is much like this, helping to carry the weight of his family on his shoulders, but his story is not over yet.

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2020 Year in Numbers

In November, we boarded our first flight of the year.

It’s a telling sign of how unusual this year has been, not boarding an airplane until the eleventh month of the year, but we know we’re not the only ones who have been affected by this pandemic, and certainly not in the worst way. We went from six months of no work to several months of an outpouring of work thanks to the Foundation of FirstHealth, the nonprofit arm of the hospital in Cassie’s hometown. In fact, we were so busy that we didn’t have much time to think about our upcoming trip to Liberia until we were sitting in the airport. Masked and with our negative PCR covid tests in hand (required by immigration to enter Liberia), we were traveling nearly 30 hours to a country in West Africa to document the work of The Last Well. 

We had the opportunity to travel and document this same nonprofit’s work in Liberia in 2015, during the ebola outbreak and now we were returning during a global pandemic. Arriving in Liberia felt oddly familiar, with the temperature checks and hand-washing stations, all things we had experienced on our trip in 2015. To read the blog post recap from our trip in 2015, click here. 

We walked across the street from the Monrovia airport to our hotel around midnight, went to sleep, and were up and filming the next morning at 8am. This became a pattern for our four days in the country— long days of filming in the field with long stretches of driving on the red-dirt roads in a Land Cruiser with no air-conditioning, which meant windows down the entire time. Jordan shared a window crank with the driver as we drove behind three other Land Cruisers with the windows down and got covered from scalp to toes in the red dust. When we pulled up at our destination hours later, we looked like we were sporting spray tans. Wearing a mask was actually a blessing for those long, dusty drives. We had the same driver and vehicle the whole trip, and on the last day another team member got shuffled around and ended up in the front seat of our car. When he saw our janky set up, the hot-wiring to start the car, the peeling tint every time we put the windows down, not to mention the passing of the window crank to put the windows down, he joked, “Next time I know how to pick what car to ride in— whatever car the Timpys are NOT in!” 

Five of the American team members on the trip were also with us on our first trip in 2015, so it was a welcomed reunion, and we laughed about our shared experiences from the last trip we were all together, including the horror story that made it to the top of the list of our worst night’s escapades from our travels. To see our hilarious list of top 5 worst nights, it’s at the end of this blog post recap from our trip in 2015.

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Feast or Famine

It always seems like time gets away from us. Even when our work was halted for six months because of Covid-19, we kept ourselves busy with projects. At first we spent time doing things that had been on our to-do list for months, neglected house projects we always talked about doing, like converting the solid wood door from our dining room to our sunroom into a full glass door and finally putting house numbers by our front door. Then we moved on to the neglected yard projects like graveling our driveway and putting in a paver walkway to the front door. Eventually our to-do list dwindled and we started doing things that we had never even thought about or had put on a to-do list like pressure washing the shed and making and installing an outdoor shower. Cassie even got so desperate for something to accomplish that she literally washed the mailbox. Jordan weeded and de-thatched the entire yard and I got a black eye from hanging the hammock. We worked tirelessly on home and yard improvements until we couldn’t think of anything else we wanted or needed to do (with the exception of cleaning out our garden shed, which we didn’t want to touch with a 10-foot pole), and our house and yard looked better than it ever had.

All along, we kept a positive perspective, never taking for granted the fact that we had a home during the “stay at home” order. We often thought about how perfect God’s plan was to bring us here, in a home of our own for this pandemic. If we had still been living out of our suitcases as we had for nearly five years, it would have been a strain on us and our families to live together for months on end. Despite not having work, we felt blessed. Each day, we trusted in the Lord to provide for us in His time as we’ve relied on Him to do for years. We knew work would come eventually, we just didn’t know when, but that’s always the nature of our work and God has never let us down. As spring came in full bloom and the cardinals nested in our blooming azalea bushes, we were comforted by God’s promise in Matthew 6:26, “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”

By April, we had 20 cancelled flights, and many more to come. Our grueling spring and summer travel schedule to Philadelphia, five islands in Indonesia, Malaysia, Central Asia, Serbia, Greece, and beyond was no longer even a possibility. But we continued on with our to-do lists, getting to enjoy some of our neglected hobbies that give us much joy. Cassie scrapbooked years worth of photos, airline tickets, foreign currencies and other things from our travels, filling hundreds of plastic covered pages with memories dear to her heart. Jordan brewed beer upon beer as the seasons changed from his Pandemic Pale Ale and Leftovers IPA to his very tasty coffee blonde ale in late summer. We worked on creative personal projects too. Jordan is a talented songwriter and musician, so he wrote and recorded an entire album from fragments of songs that he’s had in his head for nearly a decade and some he conceived and brought to fruition in just one day. After recording his guitar and vocal parts, he then recorded his childhood best friend playing the drum parts on all the songs. The editing and perfecting of the songs (which is called mastering) took the longest, but their band, Scraps, digitally released the album, Decades, which is available to purchase on Bandcamp and iTunes and to stream on Spotify. Cassie started writing a book she never thought she’d have the time to write about our experience thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia. Writing a book is no joke and takes a LONG time, but she’s about halfway into it.

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The wait is over

Usually by mid-February, we are anxiously waiting for spring to come. This year however, we feel like we’re still waiting for winter to arrive! Forecast after forecast brings us days in the 70s and sunny skies, making it hard to stay inside and edit. Most days we do, but then on some occasions, we ditch work early to paddle out on our canoe in the lake across the street from our house or take a quick bike ride to feel the wind on our faces and the sun on our backs. With some of the azaleas already in full bloom, the tulip magnolias gracing front yards and the daffodils popping up, we don’t feel like we are waiting for spring. Instead, we feel like we’ve been waiting sooooo long to share quite a few videos with you, but now, the wait is FINALLY over!

If you recall, at the end of September we documented the New Wineskins Global Mission Conference, an Anglican global missions training conference that happens once every three years. More than 1,200 people gathered from more than 60 nations to celebrate, reconnect, learn and grow, and hear God’s call afresh for their next season of ministry. We had the opportunity of interviewing 25 attendees to produce nine video stories of the conference’s impact on a wide range of people — from those who have attended every conference for the 25 years it has been in existence to first timers who were financially sponsored from faraway places. It was a crazy four days of filming and photographing in the beautiful setting of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina, and we were inspired by the stories we captured as well as challenged by the speakers we overheard while filming. With no further ado, below are just a couple of the nine videos we produced, but if you like what you see and want to watch more, CLICK HERE for ALL NINE VIDEOS.

The impact the New Wineskins Global Mission Conference can have on someone is huge. Rev. John Chol Daau is one of the people we had the pleasure of interviewing, along with his friend and co-author Lilly Ubbens. They co-authored the book God’s Refugee  based on Rev. John Chol Daau’s incredible, true story of surviving the genocide in South Sudan by running through the wilderness hundreds of miles to live in refugee camps for more than a decade. Many, many years later at one of the New Wineskins Global Mission Conferences, Rev. John Chol Daau heard the voice of the Lord calling out to him. This video is hardly the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Rev.’s story of being one of the lost boys of South Sudan, so we highly recommend reading the amazing book (we already did!).

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