Hey met.

Hey what's going on Alex and Loke here.

Thanks for joining us.

Right before I became a Christian, my dad asked me to come along with him on a mission trip to Africa.

They needed somebody to like play guitar here and there at the campsite

and lead and worship a little bit.

Also, we were doing like a vacation Bible school thing over there in Congo

and so they needed younger people to help out with the kids and stuff and I didn't want to go

but that particular summer I had gotten into a lot of trouble. I was a freshman becoming a sophomore in college and I

grudgingly went to all the meetings. my parents really didn't give me a choice, you know, they were still paying for my car insurance, my cell phone. I was living at their house, and so I had to go.

Around that time, I really realized that the life I was living in the party world was leading nowhere that had no true friends and it led me to like start reading scripture and when I did I you know was

reading through the gospel of Mark and it just hit me that Jesus really is real

and that he really is God and that he really loves me and it just broke me to my core and all of a sudden I wanted to go on this Africa trip.

I was like excited to do it.

Just thinking about how Jesus was, you know, how he himself was a missionary from heaven.

He came here, incarnated and came all the way down here to a forgotten and messed up place to help us.

And that's what I had the chance to do now in Africa.

And so I was baptized over there.

It was really cool, but I always thought about that trip and how the flip the switch just flipped out of

nowhere like all of a sudden I wanted to go what happened all of a sudden I was able to deny myself in what I wanted and where I wanted to go, my own will for my life. I was able to deny that with a power that was not my own.

And it makes me think of, you know, passages like Mark 1346,

this is where we get the power to do this.

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