The first story of the year. I’ve been wanting to write about my time in Africa for a while now, but busy-ness has kept me from it. So today, as I lie in my warm bed on one of the coldest mornings of the year, I decided that it was time to start story telling again.

In October I had the amazing opportunity to travel to Cairo, Egypt with a team from Times Square Church (the Church that we will be working for this next year in New York). There were two distinct purposes of the trip: to send a medical team into areas that needed medical attention and to send an evangelism team to work with and support the local church.

I spent the first part of my time in Egypt with the Evangelism team documenting the work that they were doing, which varied from teaching kids clubs, to leading worship services with local churches, and much more. We spent a day working in an area of town where the Sudanese Refugees have been living for the past ten years. It was a really incredible experience, to get to go visit families from the local church in their homes and to pray for them.

We spent the majority of that week doing a wide variety of things, all aimed at sharing the gospel and supporting and encouraging the local church. It was beautiful to see a group of people give up their money and time to fly across the world and invest into the lives of others, not knowing day to day what they’d be doing, only that whatever it was, they were going to do it well and do it with the love of Christ.

After my time with the evangelism team I ventured across town to meet up with the “On Call” (medical) team. When I arrived they were doing free medical clinics for a Sudanese Refugee Primary school. It was a really awesome thing, working all day long to give the kids the same sort of medical screenings that we would’ve gotten going into a new year of school. These kids may not have seen a doctor in a long time and it was obvious that the parents and teachers were very grateful for the blessing.

Later in the week the two teams joined together at the school and while the On Call team was doing the medical clinics the Evangelism team performed skits, gave testimonies and sang songs with the kids.

We ended the week by going to the Garbage City, a place where people live in and amongst the garbage, making their living by digging through it and finding anything of value to sell. It was a very dirty and very very poor place…removed from the city and outcasted by society. We provided a full day of games and bible lessons for kids and just spent some time loving them. It was a beautiful way to end the trip…trying to teach these egyptian kids how to play whiffle ball and American football, and just hanging out and loving people who so seldom are even acknowledged.

Times Square Church sends missions trips all over the world, and it was a blessing and a privilege to get to be a part of this one to Egypt. They are doing some really great work and are reaching out and touching lives in a tangible way through their efforts there.

As I got into my taxi and left my hotel for the airport, headed for Kenya alone, I was really sad to leave my time with the team there in Egypt. It was an amazing period and a wonderful story to be a part of. I’m so excited about joining up with them this next year and can’t wait to see what stories come from our new partnership!

it’s crazy to lay here in a nice bed in a nice house with my nice new christmas gifts typing on my nice computer and looking at this photo that I took in October.  There are people living here right now.  They didn’t have a Christmas.  They dug through garbage again for stuff that they could sell in order to survive.  To them, yesterday was just another day of digging.  Pretty crazy to think about that.  Even crazier not to let things like that change you.  This new years, be changed…and in turn…change the world around you.

- S

So in honor of our story telling tonight I wanted to post an image from the body of work that I’ve been editing through lately. I’m really excited about wrapping this stuff up and getting it to TSC so that we can start sharing some of the stories with you guys, but until then, here are the pyramids. I hope to see you all out here tomorrow night!

To view it larger click 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