Many of you have heard about our “Buy a story, help tell a story” fund-raiser that we’ve been working on this fall. We’re selling donated books and using the proceeds to tell stories from around the world that are being written, but have yet to be heard. With the holiday season approaching, we wanted you to see some of the titles that are available at our Amazon storefront because books make pretty great gifts! Here are some books you might want to check out:

St. Augustine Confessions: This classic book written by the 4th century philosopher and theologian St. Augustine covers his life and conversion to Christianity. You can buy our copy here.

Maybe you’ve seen the movies, but have you read the books? J.R.R. Tolkien’s second novel in his Lord of the Rings triology is worth the read. Our copy was actually purchased in New Zealand where the breathtakingly beautiful movies were filmed! Purchase The Two Towers by clicking here.

Their Eyes were Watching God is a novel about Janie Crawford, a black woman who lives in Florida during the 1930s. This novel follows her on a journey that brings her through three marriages, one murder trial, and several moves as she experiences life’s sorrows and joys. You can buy this book by clicking here.

You can browse through more of our books at our Amazon storefront. Thanks to everyone who has donated or purchased one of our books!

As I lay here in the guest bed at my parents house for Thanksgiving listening to the sounds of everyone preparing for our big meal today (except me at the moment!) I want to express my genuine thanks for many things. It’s really truly amazing, the things that we’ve seen, the places that we’ve gone and the stories that we’ve heard this past year.

Two and a half years ago I’d never left the comforts of home and to look back and realize how much my perspective has changed since my first trip to Mexico really blows my mind.

While we sit at our homes today with our families and friends, while we eat our meals and enjoy some football or the parade on t.v., while we drive or fly home again this weekend to go back to our jobs to continue making our money…

Be thankful.

More than 1 billion people — nearly a sixth of the world’s population — are faced with chronic hunger.

According to the World Bank, 1.2 billion people lack access to a reliable water source that is reasonably protected from contamination.

Those numbers have become more and more real to me as I’ve seen them first hand. As we’ve tried to share the stories of the forgotten and the neglected, of the widows and the orphans and of the persecuted, we hope that you have been able to take something from them. We hope that they’ve changed your worldview, even a little, that they’ve altered your thought process.

And in doing that…we truly hope that they’ve made you thankful.

On a quick personal note: You have supported us, encouraged us and followed us as we’ve journeyed around the world to share the stories that we’ve shared this past year. I am thankful for you. Thankful for your time, your commitment and your willingness that’s continued to make it possible for us to reach out to others and make a difference.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

-S

downtown Cairo…a trip and a place that I’m incredibly thankful for

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! In light of all of the feasting that is happening across the nation this week, I wanted to focus on an organization that is putting food into the hands of people who need it the most: Magic City Harvest, the only food recovery program in the Greater Birmingham area.

For the past 14 years, Magic City Harvest has recovered food, prevented food waste, and educated the community on topics such as nutrition, poverty, and hunger. Using a network of over 800 volunteers, MCH collects donated excess food from places like grocery stores, restaurants, and cafeterias, and transports it to more than 30 feeding programs in Jefferson, Shelby, and Talladega counties. All of the recipient feeding programs are non-profit organizations that include soup kitchens, shelters, and food pantries.

Magic City Harvest has distributed over 5 million pounds of food to hungry people since its beginning, and over 1 million pounds of food in just 2008 alone! They also hold an annual World Hunger Day event, and at the most recent one in October they fed a meal to approximately 3300 people. Other programs include their Empty Bowls annual fundraiser and their current “U-CAN” food drive in which they are partnering with Starbucks stores in Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, and Oxford to collect cans and other non-perishable food items.

There are 80,000 people in the Greater Birmingham area who fall in the category of “food insecure,” which MCH defines as “a condition in which people lack basic food intake to provide them with the energy and nutrients for fully productive lives.” One in five of those 80,000 are children.

These might just be statistics to you, but each number represents actual hungry people and malnourished bellies. So please, as you spend this holiday being thankful for the blessing of family, friends, and food, consider sharing your bounty with those who are in need. Magic City Harvest has some great ways to get involved, donate food, and reach out to people in our community. Find out more at their website.

Each week Bedouins International posts a story. Maybe it’s one we’ve helped to tell, or a story we hope to tell, or it maybe it’s just a story we think deserves to be told. In any case, we hope you find them inspiring and motivating. Read more stories here.

Where to start.  Just over a month ago I boarded an airplane at JFK in New York City with about 20 strangers.  We were bound for 2 weeks in Cairo of ministering, medical missions and, for me, photographing.  About 10 hours of flying and we found ourselves stepping off of the plane and into a new world.  This trip was my first time to Egypt, and although I’ve been to Africa, Egypt was a unlike anything I’ve experienced before.

The entire trip was a blitz…from the moment we stepped off of the airplane we were going.  The first night, after checking into our hotel, we headed out to a church known as “the Foundation”, where we would return several times throughout our trip.  Within moments of arriving our team leader was asked to preach a service and that was the beginning of a beautiful and exhausting trip.

As I’ve begun sorting through and editing photos for the project it’s been fun to stop and think back to some of the adventures that took place during my time in Egypt.  This will be the first post of many telling the stories of the trip and I hope them all to be as inspiring and captivating as the trip itself was.

That first night, sitting there in a tiny church listening to our leader preach, literally as we arrived, was a beautiful experience.  It set the pace and the tone for what was to be an amazing trip.  From that moment on we didn’t stop.  I, for one, am glad of this.  More soon.

-S

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of a story. These are my thoughts, so please take them for that.

While I was in Africa I didn’t use the word story, but it was on the back of my mind the whole time. See, what I’ve been doing for the past several years of my life is telling stories. And in doing that I’ve been writing my story. Every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Sometimes the middle stretches on for a long time, but the beginning and the end are pretty well defined.

So what we’ve been doing at Bedouins is finding stories in the “middle” stage, joining in and then telling them. By joining them at the middle and then sharing them with the world we hope to help steer them to a good ending, a fulfilled ending…a happy ending if you will.

I guess our attitude and thought process (or at least mine) has been that if we jump in to a worthwhile story and share it, others will see that worthwhileness that we saw, and then want to help write that story, making it a part of theirs. We hope to see stories being written…stories being joined together and stories heading to a beautiful end.

The thing that I didn’t count on when I started this was the simple fact that every single story that I’ve been a part of telling for the past 3 years has become a part of my story now. My story, which before a few years ago was about college, girlfriends, money, and Auburn, now is about orphans, widows, the hungry, the forgotten, the forsaken, the victorious, the redeemed…in short, my story is about “their” stories.

It’s a weird realization, that your story suddenly has little to do with you and everything to do with others. Not a bad one, just a weird one.

Last week I heard Donald Miller speak about his new book and he talked about our life as a story and how to make it a meaningful one. At one point he asked, “If you were to die today, what story would your life tell. Is it the story of the car you drove, the books you sold, the friends you had or the money you made? Is it a story worth standing up and cheering for. Is it a story worth remembering?”

I don’t know what your story is about…but as long as the idea of story is on my mind I plan on making mine a worthwhile one. I didn’t really have a solid direction with this post, but I feel like it’s going to be the beginning of a series that I’ll be writing as I start to unpack the last few years of growth as God has written the story of Bedouins International.

I don’t doubt that He has HUGE plans for Bedouins, or for you, or for me. I guess the real question is what story do you want your life to tell. I could sit down with any one of you and tell you a hundred worthwhile stories or people and organizations and churches all over the world working not for themselves or for money or fame or anything else other than the satisfaction that they did what they were here to do and they lived the story that God gave them. It’s a beautiful thing. A really really beautiful thing.

- S