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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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!).

Continue reading →

A 10-Year Summary by Cassie

It’s hard to believe we’ve officially started a new decade. When I think back on all that has happened in these last 10 years, it brings tears to my eyes. God has done so much. In 2010, I graduated from college with a dream to be a photojournalist and to make a difference in the world with my camera. I gained my sobriety and put my life in Jesus’ hands once and for all. I documented relief efforts in Haiti after the devastating earthquake, experiencing terrifying aftershocks, a hurricane and a cholera outbreak. In 2011, I lived in Nicaragua for half a year, serving with my camera for a Christian medical nonprofit. While I was there, Jordan came to visit me, gave his life to Christ and we got back together — this time dating as Christians with the intention of getting married. In 2012, we dated long distance, Jordan in NYC and me in NC, until Jordan got some sense knocked into him (literally) and moved a bit closer to the South when he got a job in Northern Virginia in 2013. That year we got married and plugged into our church, which filled us up spiritually, connected us socially, and gave us great fulfillment in life. Working desk jobs in our field from 2013 to 2015, we learned that there was so much more to life than having a fancy title and getting a fat paycheck. In 2015, we took the biggest leap of faith we’ve ever taken — we quit our jobs to do what we do now. We had no idea how much it would change our life forever. In 2015, we traveled to the ends of the earth documenting Kingdom work being done in God’s name all around the world and met so many beautiful people with stories of hope. Now five years in, we’ve worked in 35 different countries and have produced more than 350 videos. In 2016, we worked out of South America all year. In 2017, we did our second world tour, which continued into 2018. Mid 2018, we took a sabbatical to seek new vision as we thru-hiked 2,200 miles from Maine to Georgia on the Appalachian Trail. We prayed continually every step of the way, especially for Jordan’s mom who was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer during our thru-hike. We finished our hike just in time to witness our prayer answered — Jordan’s mom was cured of her cancer only halfway through chemotherapy treatment! In 2019, we bought a house, a basecamp of operations for our documentary missionary work after living out of our suitcases for five years straight. We renovated our kitchen, and got more photo and video work than ever before in North Carolina. We plugged into our church home and have gained a stable community for the first time since our nomadic life began five years ago. Whew! What a decade!

Continue reading →

What a great feeling it is to be all caught up with our video projects—a feeling we rarely get to experience! We’ve been traveling, editing and hiking like crazy, and by God’s grace, we have delivered 11 videos to some awesome causes around the world. But before we share videos with you, we wanted to give you an update on what we’ve been up to since our last blogpost.

 

Continue reading →

Hello, friends, it’s been a while.

Since our last email, we’ve been on assignment in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, Thailand, Pinehurst, North Carolina (twice), NYC (twice), Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and Cartago, Costa Rica. Ahead, we’re gearing up for Cassie’s family vacation in the mountains of North Carolina (what used to be an annual occurrence but since our life of travels has made that impossible for the past four years), more filming in Pinehurst, a project in the Czech Republic, and a kitchen renovation.

Continue reading →

It’s hard to believe it has already been more than one month since we summited Springer Mountain in Georgia and completed our 2,200-mile sabbatical thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail. Time has flown by as we’ve celebrated Thanksgiving, Christmas and multiple birthdays with family, but overall the transition off the trail has been surprisingly easy for us. We heard from other people that we would be “weird” after the trail (we probably already were), or that we would have trouble sleeping indoors in a bed (ridiculous, we sleep like rocks), or that we might experience post-trail depression, but that hasn’t happened (probably because we weren’t trying to escape from our everyday lives and actually really love what we do). We mostly feel more aware and grateful for all the little comforts of the modern world that we live in.

If there is any drawback that we’ve noticed since coming off the trail, it’s how many distractions exist and how easily we can be distracted from what matters most. While we were hiking it was easy to be praying for extended periods of time throughout the day, but it can be hard to carve out that time off the trail. Continual prayer is just one of the many habits we developed while hiking that we have tried to adopt into our lives off the trail. Another more obvious one would be staying fit — hiking close to 30 miles a day became a breeze, stopping not because we were tired but only because we ran out of hours in the day. We were in the best shape of our lives by far and didn’t want to lose that physical ability and endurance just because our hike was over, so we’ve taken up trail running, easily jogging six miles a day. Another habit we wanted to continue was waking up early. Although we’re no longer waking up at 4:30am like when we were on the trail, we do enjoy getting up before the sun to see the sunrise and enjoy the stillness of the early morning that seems so much more peaceful than any other time of the day.

Continue reading →

The past couple of months have been a heavy editing time for us, mostly in North Carolina, but if you know us you know we are always on the move. So of course we also made a trip to the D.C. area to visit our home church, in addition to traveling to South Carolina and Guatemala for filming projects. We celebrated five years of marriage and even managed to take a good ole fashioned road trip to St. Louis for a family wedding.

Continue reading →

We’re back from our first international trip of 2018, which took us to several places in Asia for lots of different projects including an international Christian school in Thailand, a university ministry in Malaysia, a foreign exchange program in China and more. But before we jumped into those filming projects, we crossed off a few things on our bucket list and visited New Zealand and Australia.

Continue reading →

If you missed Timpys in Asia Part 1, click here to read the blog post about our time in Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia and to see more pictures like these…

Picking up where we left off on our last blog post, we departed the hot and humid jungle town of Sanggau on the island of Borneo in Indonesia and 36 travel hours later [via car, plane, and train], we arrived in the chilly city of Busan, South Korea. All our projects for this overseas mission were in Southeast Asia where summer is in full force year round with the exception of this project in South Korea. Busan city is about the same latitude as North Carolina and since it was now November, we got to experience the beautiful colors of autumn but had to pack a whole different wardrobe for this one project. Our down jackets and close-toed shoes were definitely necessary, since temperatures were between 30 and 50 degrees! On the three-hour train ride from Seoul to Busan we traversed the entire length of the country from the northern border to the southern tip, and got to see the changing landscapes from bustling city to beautiful mountainous farmland. South Korea appeared to be a very well off country, far more advanced and Westernized than all the other countries we’d visited on our tour of Asia so far, and that’s precisely the reason why we were there!

Continue reading →