Hitting the Road!!

Wow! What a busy couple of weeks we have had.We have been shopping for a travel trailer, and let me tell you, it's tough work! We had a limited amount of cash and we weren't going to spend more than our limit so we have been really shopping hard to find the best deal. We drove about 5 hours north to buy our rv, it was in north central Florida. And the best news, we came in under budget and had money to spare! :)


The travel trailer is 31 feet long and has a super slide, which means the kitchen and living room area slide out. It has bunk beds in the back and a queen bed up front. The couch and the dinette also fold into beds. From the outside, it isn't that pretty, but on the inside, it is immaculate! We really feel like we got a good deal. ( sorry, not a good picture, but you get the idea )

So why I am telling you this you ask? Our family is planning a mission trip for 3 months to Liberia in March, so we plan to travel the US visiting churches and friends to try to raise the financial support we need. Crazy, right? 6 kids and a travel trailer, well, we can make it work, and the Lord will provide for all of our needs. 


We plan to hit the road as soon as TJ gets out of school, December 13th, I think. We will hitch up and head out ( that is rv talk ) that day and drive straight through to Texas!! First stop, San Antonio. TJ's little brother Montana is graduating from boot camp and we are going to be there to see him!


Then we will head to the Dallas/ Ft Worth area to visit family. We plan to spend Christmas with all of our family and hopefully be able to see everyone! Then, we head to East Texas! That is where our church family lives. We plan to be able to spend a lot of time with all of our FFBC friends! I think December and some of January is devoted to spending time with family and friends, but we hope to be able to speak at a few churches in that area. 


After Dallas and East Texas we plan to spend a few days visiting PaPa in Oklahoma. He is TJ's grandfather and we are all very close to him! He is a wonderful man!

This is Papa and his buddy, Ethan.

Next stop...... wherever the Lord leads us. We hope to make it as far west as California. As far north as, well we'll see. I'm not crazy about the snow :) As far south as Texas. And as far east as Florida. On our way back towards home we will be stopping in Pensacola to visit all of our dear friends from Mt Zion Bible Church. We will be driving many miles and we will get to see many people we have dearly missed!


So, if you have a church that you think we could speak at, we will jot it down in our scheduler and plan to be there. We will be traveling from mid December to mid February. We could really use the help to fill our schedule up, so please pray for us.

I am not sure if I mentioned this earlier, but we are packing up our entire house and putting it in a storage building for the next 6 months, so home will literally be where ever we are. We have so many plans, and our goal is to glorify and exalt the Lord, so our prayer is that he will bless us in this endeavor. 


We will be homeschooling on the road, so lets hope that goes well. We are going to put most of the boys school on the computer so they can work on it at each stop, but I know this part will be stressful. I have high energy boys that don't like to sit still on a good day, so I hope they don't get burnt out on school since they will be so limited. We will probably have lots of "hands on" learning opportunities, and that is always more fun anyways! 

I will keep you all updated as our travel schedule becomes more set in stone, we are still in the planning phase for a lot of it. Please continue praying for us, we appreciate it so much! And....We can't wait to see everyone!

Liberia Bound!!

We have been working hard the past few weeks preparing for our upcoming mission trip trip to Africa. We have been working all hours of the day and night to get everything ready for our departure in March.

A Little History About Liberia
We will be going to Liberia, a small country in West Africa. Liberia is also known as "Little America", it is a developing country located between Sierra Leone and Cote d'Ivoire in West Africa. Liberia is known by many for its destructive Civil Wars that raged from 1989 until 2003 and for the tyrannical rule of it's former leader Charles Taylor.


Liberia was founded in 1822 by freed American slaves and is a very americanized country and by the mid 1900's, the Liberian economy was the second-fastest growing economy in the world and Liberia continues to develop and a fast pace.


Liberian development came to an end in 1980 when president William Tolbert was overthrown by Samuel Doe and killed in a military coup. Doe ran the country very harshly and by the end of the decade, a faction led by Charles 
Taylor led an insurrection and the country fell into a violent civil war.


Liberia was known for the child soldiers that roamed the streets with machine guns and rocket launchers. The Civil Wars devistated the people of Liberia and there are hundreds of thousands of orphans and disabled people in Liberia now because of the wars.


In fourteen years, there were an estimated 350,000 killed in the fighting, out of a population of less than 4 million people. Therefore, Liberia lost 1/10 of its population and hundreds of thousands more were gravely injured.


In 2003 the United Nations sent a large peacekeeping force to Liberia to stabilize the country. For all practical purposes, the effort has worked and Liberia is much safer than it was ten years ago.


Although the country is now safer, it is very poor and most of the infrastructure that had been developed prior to the wars was completely destroyed.
Liberia is very rich in natural resources but many people are starving. Food prices are high and electricity is a luxury. What electricity is available is intermittent and not available on weekends and the wealthier citizens use generators for more reliable power.


Clean water is only available in certain areas and many people drink from the same rivers and streams where they wash and bathe.

We will be taking all six of the kids with us when we go. The kids are very excited as are we. We have so many projects we will be working on while we are there, and as we add projects, we extend our length of time we will be staying in the country. We started off planning to stay one month and now it looks as though we will be staying at least three months.

This is a picture of the location where we will be building one of the two bridges. People from up to five different villages use this make shift bridge several times a day to get to the market. There are many sick people who cannot get out of the village to the hospital because there is no way for a vehicle to get in and out.

We will be building two bridges for these people to cross. This is another location for the bridge. The bridge we build will be big enough for motorcycles and small off road vehicles to cross. This is going to change the lives of these people. They will be able to buy and sell at the local market so much easier.


 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in,  I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me."


We will also be providing clothing and food for these children in the Bilimu village. They all put on their best clothing for the photo's so that we would like them and want to help them. It brings tears to my eyes everytime I look through these pictures. We are all God's children, no matter where we live.

All of these children are malnourished. Even though they get full on rice, it isn't enough to provide them with a balanced diet. We hope to bring them meats and vegetables as well.
This little girl put on her best dress for the photo. She is such a doll, I just love her already! She is only two years old.

This little boy is so funny! He put on his best shoes and he is showing them off! We are going to buy him new shoes when we get there.

This little boy has malaria. We will take him into the city to get medical help when we get there. Many children are infected with malaria each year. He was not feeling well when this picture was taken. 

We also want to help feed the "bush" kids. They have no food and no clothing. These children are naked, and we are going to bring them clothing. Many of them have probably never even seen white people.

We have so much to do while we are there. Please visit our website and consider making a donation to help these children. We are praying we will meet our financial goals, please pray for us as well.




http://billrogersyouthfoundation.org/




Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. James 1:27

Our Not So Brief History

I suppose for our very first blog post an introduction to who we are and how we got here would suffice. I will start from the beginning, TJ and I (Jackie) married in January 2004 and shortly after that, our adventure began. It is funny, when you look back at your past, you can see God’s hand at work! He was certainly working in our lives, although we did not know it yet. About one month after marriage, TJ loaded up and shipped off to Iraq with the Marine Corp, yes, the biblical mandate to stay home with your new wife for one year before going off to war did not apply here. He was over there for three very long months while I was back at home, in Ft Worth Texas, house hunting, being the military wife, and holding down the fort on this end, oh yeah and growing that precious baby Asher, who we were eagerly waiting to meet in July of 2004. After some heart breaking news that our first little baby was going to be very sick, TJ was rushed home by the Red Cross to be with me while we went through testing, sonograms, and more testing. We soon found out that Asher was a perfect little boy and a mistake had been made on the part of the testing, whew! But, praise the Lord, TJ was able to stay home with us. Asher was born July 1st 2004 and we brought him home to our tiny house in West Fort Worth. Now finally, life could begin. TJ began showing symptoms from the war and our life together quickly fell apart, it was easy to see things were going to get tough. I am so thankful that we were both stubborn and we didn’t give up on each other, or our dream of a family. In November of 2005 our next blessing, Isaac, was born. Right before Isaac’s birth, TJ was medically discharged from the Marine Corp, he was happy to live his newly gained freedom, but scared to support his growing family without the financial security of the military. Now this is about when things just got bad, TJ spent most of his time in the hospital, and we lost everything we had, our little house, our cars, everything. After a very long road, he began treatment in the VA, and this is when life began looking up for us. About this time, Ethan was born, April of 2007. Now our adventure was about to really take off! After spending a short time in Keller Texas, we got the wild idea to move across the country to Pensacola Florida. We moved in July of 2008, three baby boys and I was about to give birth to our daughter in August. We put everything we owned in a Penske truck and headed out, we had no destination, other than Florida, of course. But, we had that truck for one week and that was about how long it took us to decide where to live! Shiloh, was born in August of 2008 in Pensacola Florida, and by September, I was homesick and ready to come back home to Texas. So, in October we put everything back in that Penske truck and made the 700 mile trip back to Texas, this time with four babies. We landed just north of Dallas in a small town called Anna. This is where the Lord grabbed our hearts and things began to change. We started in a small community church in Anna and God had repalced our hearts of stone with a heart yearned for Him. In our prayers, TJ and I begged the Lord to use us, but we were not quite ready yet. He was still conditioning us. We moved closer to Dallas, in Little Elm Texas. We rented a house from a man named Fola (remeber this part, it’s important) and TJ decided to go back to school. He started photography at the Art Institute in Dallas. Fola had a friend, Bill Rogers, that he brought with him when we signed our lease. TJ began talking with Bill and decided he could help him, some how. The Lord was quickly changing our hearts and lives, He opened our eyes to the blessing of children, He put it on our hearts to be more modest in our dress and our lifestyle, He was showing us to live a more holy, sanctified life. Around this time, Seth was born, December of 2009. TJ soon felt the profession of photography was going to cause him to have to sacrifice a godly lifestyle since he was constantly faced with temptation. So, before he started school at Le Tourneau Universtiy in East Texas, we decided to spend the summer in Pensacola Florida doing beach photography to earn extra money. We rented a house in Orange Beach Alabama and attended a wonderful church in Pensacola, Mount Zion Bible Church. The devastating oil spill in the gulf ruined our efforts to take any beach portraits. So, we made the most of the summer and spent our time evangalizing, fishing and sun bathing at the beach. Summer came to an end and we were off to East Texas to start TJ’s new endeavor in pilot training. We made the 700 mile trip, again, this time with five kiddos in tow. We rented a farm in Jacksonville Texas, a house and 37 acres, it was perfect for our growing family. There was so much for the kids to do, we raised chickens, we had cows for a while, we attempted a garden, all this and we managed to homeschool Asher and Isaac and TJ went to school five days a week. We attended a wonderful family church in Tyler, we found our home. The people at Family Fellowship Bible Church became our family. It was a family integrated, home-schooling church busting at the seems with large families. We were ready to be settled here, TJ would be training in airplanes for the next five years and we planned to stay put for awhile. Our family has received the call into the mission field, and we were ready to go wherever the Lord called us, as long as it wasn’t somewhere cold, ha ha, just kidding. We were prepared to go anywhere. Now, remeber earlier, in Little Elm, when I briefly mentioned Bill Rogers? Well, now you will really see the Lord’s work, he sent TJ an email with some questions about the military, well a few phone calls later and Bill was on a plane to Texas. He stayed with us through the Thanksgiving holiday. This is when he began to share his heart for Liberia, his home country. He told us of the history of Liberia, what his childhood was like, the horrific civil war the Liberian people faced and his dream for building a foundation to help the children in Liberia. God linked our hearts and his dream quickly became ours. Well, Bill was a rolling stone, as were we, and he moved on to his next adventure. In January of 2011, as TJ was eagerly beginning his spring semester at Le Tourneau, we received the news that the funding on the GI Bill had been changed and we could no longer afford to attend a private school. We began searching for a public school that he could continue his training in, and that is how we found Palm Beach Florida. So, we finished out the school year, gave birth to our sixth child, another daughter Cana, and prepared to make the move back to Florida. Only this time we would be traveling to the southern part of Florida, 1300 miles with our favorite Penske truck and this time six kids, one of which was three weeks old. We settled in to Boynton Beach Florida and TJ began classes at Palm Beach State College. Now, Bill is back with us in Florida and we have began the plans for the foundation he has been dreaming of, The Bill Rogers Youth Foundation. We are still here in Boynton Beach for the time being as we work day and night on all the details of beginning this ministry. We have planned an upcoming trip to Liberia in March of 2012, and TJ has decided to take off a semester of school to get this foundation up and running. Please follow us on our journey as we serve the poeple of Liberia.