Two Things I Never Thought I'd Do

Some of you have heard of these latest changes in my life, but for those family and friends whom I have not had the chance to update, here you go! 

First.  After much prayer and thought, I have decided to go to college to get a degree in psychology.  I have always been fascinated by the way our minds work and have always wanted to understand why people do the things they do. With that, I would like to go into counseling of some sort and maybe even focus on child development or behavior analysis. With a psychology degree I'll be able to explore all of those options as well as move up in my job as a therapist for autistic children. I have never really had the desire to go to college and for a few years I was very much against the idea. But now that I have a direction that I want to go in and something I actually want to work towards I see that college is the way to get there. 
So I will be doing the PACE program at Central Baptist College in Conway Arkansas where I can take classes at night and still work full time. I'm also planning to take CLEP tests for the majority of the general education classes to save time and money. 

Second. As probably all of you know, I very much enjoy the adventure and freedom of being able to jump from place to place. In fact, I have lived in 14 different places in the last 5 years and none of them for more than 9 months, so what I am about to say may shock you. 
My parents are buying me a house; well, a condo to be exact. Paying a mortgage will be cheaper than renting a 1 bedroom apartment and you get a lot more space and it will give them a place to stay when they come to visit, and since I will be going to school for the next 3 or 4 years, I will be at least somewhat planted. So, I'm going to have a home of my very own! And it's in Arkansas!

I am also helping out at the Arkansas Dream Center in Little Rock with the children's program they do on Saturday mornings. I get to run all the sound and tech stuff and it is definitely the highlight of my week getting to hang out with those kids as well as getting to play with all the fun light and sound equipment :)

The moral of this story is, never say never because the things that you think you'll never do (go to college or get planted in AR) just might be the things God leads you to do. 
I'm very excited for this next season and will definitely need all the prayers I can get as I will be doing things far out of my comfort zone. 

Well, that's it! I wanted to make sure that the family I didn't get to see over the holidays as well as my friends that have moved away all heard the latest big news on the life of ZuZu Ford. 
Happy New Year!

Around the World in 15 Days

Every mission trip should start off on an exciting note right? Well ours started off with snow in Texas and Arkansas and Canada that meant delayed flights for both Jon and Dad and strep throat for yours truly. If that's not exciting I don't know what is!
Jon, Ellane, and I were supposed to all fly out of Dallas together on Dec 26th but Jon was not able to get to Dallas in time so Ellane and I left on our own.

We made it to Canada right as a snow storm was hitting and managed to fly out before it got too bad. My dad was not so lucky. We went to Frankfurt Germany for about 10 hours and got really familiar with that airport and then finally made it to Delhi where we sat in the airport for about an hour trying to find Joel, who was supposed to be picking us up. Little did I know, you can't get into the airport without a plane ticket so he was waiting for us outside the whole time.
If you ever wonder what people did before cell phones, I can tell you, they waited for no reason in airports to be picked up when their ride was outside the whole time.
But we did finally make it to our hotel and got to sleep.

The rest of the team made it just in time for us to fly to Bagdogra.

One of the biggest highlights of the whole trip for me was meeting these two ladies.

 Moneema and Sanju are two of the strongest wisest women I've ever met. They were such a huge encouragement to me.

Our first place of ministry was Mungpoo. We got there just in time for their New Years Eve Watch Service and then had a bonfire at midnight.

 It was really cold there!









We got to be a part of 3 different youth conferences in 3 different locations. The next few days in Mungpoo consisted of lots of speaking, praying for people, and tea:)

And tea, lots of tea:-)

Over all, the trip was amazing. We have been getting reports back that the people are very encouraged and doing very well. It was such a huge blessing to be able to go and speak to them and in return be more encouraged and blessed than we could have ever hoped to bless and encourage them. I was sick the whole trip but that did not keep me from enjoying every minute I could.  I learned so much from theses people and I'm excited to hopefully go back next year.
God did some really cool things in our team and I hope He did the same in the people we came in contact with.

Getting back home was a very very long process that would be a very long story so I'll shorten it as much as I can.

January 8th at the Bagdogra airport to fly back to Delhi all flights got cancelled due to fog for the next 2 days.
So, we took a taxi through the night to Calcutta that took about 13 hours and flew from there to Delhi. But by the time we got to Delhi we had already missed our flights so we had to get new ones which resulted in Ellane and I flying out of Delhi on the 9th at like 9pm to Tokyo (that's in Japan....in the opposite direction from how we got there, in case your geography is a little rusty)
Now here's the part that took me a while to understand. We left Japan at 12pm on the 10th and got into Dallas at 8:30am on the 10th. Yep that's right, we went back in time.

From there, Ellane flew home to Kansas and I flew to New York City to help my good friend Nati move to Arkansas.
We started driving at about 11am on the 12th and after lots of driving through rain and road construction and several states, we reached Conway Arkansas around 2pm on the 13th.
We were a little tired.

Now that Nati is finally here, the search is on for an apartment for us to live in. It's been quite a long process that is still not over but we are praying and believing that we will find a place soon that we can afford. We would appreciate all the prayers you can muster for that situation and I'll be sure to update again when we are moved in!

That's all folks! Thank you to everyone who prayed and supported this trip and made it possible!