Pray for this family...and the rest!

Check out this article about some awesome Americas workers! I am so blessed to know and count as friends so many individuals and families that are willing to go so far for the sake of the Gospel. Remember to pray for them and their work! 

Missionary family ‘blessed’ to reach hard places for Christ

Brad Connelly* watches thoughtfully as his daughter and sons splash around in the jungle river beside their small cabin.

Jungle Playground

A missionary kid swings out over a river on a rope swing suspended from a tree. In the jungle, nature itself is the prime source of entertainment.

Photo © 2013 IMB / Rebecca Springer

Oblivious to the rest of the world, the kids laugh and scream as they take turns flying off a rope-swing, plunging into the cool water and trying to swim against the current to a nearby rock. To them, the jungle is an exciting new adventure.

To Brad and his wife, Carissa*, it’s the risky place where they’re about to move their family. Still, sitting on his cabin porch at IMB’s new jungle training camp, Brad watches his children playing and knows it’s the right move.

The month-long training program is the final step to prepare the Connellys and their three children — ages 4, 6 and 8 — to venture deep into the heart of the Amazon jungle and work among one of the nearly 230 unengaged, unreached indigenous people groups in the Americas. Their people group is less than 2 percent evangelical Christian and no one is currently trying to reach them with the Gospel.

The community they hope to work in is restricted,  and permission to enter is hard to obtain. For the moment, the Connellys live in a nearby city, praying that God will soon open doors for them to enter and begin work in the area. Once that happens, He’ll be all they have.

They’ll be the only missionaries in their area, nearly 15 hours away from the next closest IMB personnel. Electricity will be a luxury for about an hour a day — sometimes. Food options will be limited, and Internet and phone access will be non-existent. The family will be up to eight hours away from the nearest decent medical care.

Living Off the Land

Children from a local tribe watch as participants in an IMB jungle training program learn how to butcher a caiman, a species of small alligator in the Amazon Basin. 

Photo © 2013 IMB / Rebecca Springer

They suspected a lot of this when they asked for the job.

“When we were looking through available [IMB] jobs,” Brad recalls, “we specifically asked to look at the hardest ones, the ones no one else wanted. Some of these jobs had been on the books for four or five years because no one else wanted them.

But moving their kids to a difficult and even dangerous environment wasn’t a decision the Connellys made easily.

“I was thinking a lot about my family and how this will work out,” Brad says. “One morning I was reading through the Bible about Abraham sacrificing Isaac. I was praying and I just felt like God asked me, ‘Would you do that and not ask any questions?’”

As a mom, Carissa had to come to terms with the threats she knows her kids will face with this life.

“In the beginning, I felt like I’m dragging them away from everything and putting them in a place where there’s malaria and dengue and all these sicknesses and no doctors,” Carissa says. “But the Lord had to teach me, do I trust Him? Because He loves my kids more than we could ever love them. If He’s not big enough to take care of them, who can?”

Washing Up

Missionary Carissa Connelly* washes clothes by hand in the river running alongside the jungle training camp.

Photo © 2013 IMB / Rebecca Springer

“It’s not just Brad’s call [to missions],” she continues. “It’s not just my call. It’s our family’s call. Sometimes the call to follow Jesus is painted as something very nice and pretty, but there’s a price. He says, ‘Pick up your cross and follow me, and you will suffer.’ That’s just part of it.”

The Connellys know that not all their stateside friends and family members understand their decision to move to a potentially dangerous place. But knowing God has called her family has kept Carissa confident in her family’s direction.

“Will they miss out on some stuff? Probably,” she says. “Will they get sick? Absolutely. But our kids are really blessed to grow up in the ministry and to know God as their Healer, as their friend and their everything.”

“You know, if the Lord wants to protect my kids, He will,” Brad added. “And we’re going to ask Him to do that. But if He wants me to lay them on an altar … to the American mind I know how that sounds, but I feel like that’s what He asked of us.”

In the face of uncertainty and risk, the Connellys look forward to sharing the Gospel with people who currently live with no eternal hope, understanding that while God’s plan may not be the safest place, it is always the best place.

“God is in control, and to me, everything else is fluff,” Brad says. “It’s like God just says, ‘There’s the rope. Are you willing to jump and hold on?’ And He’s going to swing it hard all over the place, and I’m going to get hurt and things are going to happen, but I just have to trust Him. He’s got this. I feel like we’re going to have the opportunity to see God do some amazing things.”

*Name changed

A picture is worth...

Mom sent me this article (see below) the other day about a neat initiative one woman started to return photos lost during this year's tornado in Missouri. It hit home not only because of my love of photography, but more so because of my love of personal photos. We're a photo-centric family, and every time we packed to evacuate for a hurricane or forest fire, boxes and boxes of precious photos were the first things we secured after important documents. With tornados, people don't have that luxury. Sure, I have my computer and facebook accounts loaded with photos I can peruse any time, but I also packed dozens and dozens of prints to bring with me down here. I couldn't decide which ones I wanted to put on my wall (and painting is a hassle) so instead, my wall is one giant scrapbook: 

It makes me happy. Every image is a memory of places traveled, experiences had, and people loved. It's my story sans words. There are thousands of powerful/pretty/impacting images out there, but the ones that we cherish are usually simple snapshots of the people and places that are important to us. The lighting might be bad, the subject mundane, and the composition uninspired, but we don't really hold dear the photograph so much as the memory. Speaking of memories, I just recalled that I actually did my I.B. senior art show installation back in high school about the relationship between photographs and memory. 

IB Senior Art Show- 2004

I'm so thankful for the blessing of photography and the ability to hang on to snippets of the past. I can only imagine the sadness of losing all of that in an instant. How wonderful that people are working to restore family memories to those who lost so much. 

first family portrait

Joplin Tornado Volunteers Seek Out Owners Of 27,000 Photos Found In Rubble

SHARON COHEN   08/20/11 

CARTHAGE, Mo. — White-gloved workers line the long tables, carefully sifting through photos of proms and weddings, baby's first day, proud soldiers in their uniforms. They gently clean off any dirt, dry rain-damaged pictures – and salvage a city's lost treasures.

The history of Joplin, Mo., is slowly coming into focus here, one snapshot, one portrait at a time. A church room in this nearby town has been converted into collection central for more than 27,000 photos buried or blown away in the monster May tornado that left 160 dead and obliterated a third of Joplin.

Amazingly, even as 200 mph winds reduced homes to splinters, fragile photos survived. Even more incredible was where some turned up: Trees. Barns. Barbed wire fences. In Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Tennessee. And, of course, all across Missouri.

Days after the May 22 storm, Angela Walters, a genealogist in Oklahoma, noticed some of these photos on Facebook pages. Many listed bare-bones information: streets where the pictures were found, a contact phone number. Why not put all of them in one place, Walters thought, so their owners could find them? So many people had lost so much, surely they'd cherish any trace of their past.

"When a disaster happens, as soon as you hear a family is safe, the next thing you always think about is photos," she says. "They're irreplaceable. We can go back to the time and place and people we don't have in front of us anymore. They're the record of our lives."

Walters created a Facebook page – the Lost Photos of Joplin – to post pictures found in the storm-ravaged city and far beyond. She joined forces with a similar local project, and the First Baptist Church in Carthage stepped up to help.

Volunteers at the church – about a dozen miles from Joplin_ clean and dry each photo. They record anything written on the images, then number, scan and send them to Walters. She plans to post about 1,000 a week. (DVDs, letters and other personal mementoes also are being returned.)

"We're trying to let people know there's a community here that wants to preserve their memories ... help them move forward and assure them everything is going to be OK," says Thad Beeler, head of the church's photo rescue team.

It's slow going. Almost 500 photos have been returned so far. For every "find," there's reason to celebrate.

 Judy Lowe, a real estate agent, lost everything in the twister; all that remained of her house were bathroom tiles. So finding a photo of her son, Scott, on the Facebook page "was like claiming a victory from the tornado," she says. "Every day you realize everything you had is gone," Lowe explains. "You think, I don't have this or that.' Then to get one part of your life back – it's overwhelming. You just cry."

The battered, orange-tinted picture shows Scott, then 2 (he's now 8) mugging for the camera in the bathroom, pretending to be shaving with foam on his chin.

"It's a day and a memory and a piece of time," she says of the photo. "That's all I have now. I don't have a baby blanket. I don't have his first little outfit he came home in. I don't want you to think I'm a pack rat, but it's honestly something that takes me back to happier times. ... Since the tornado, they've been few and far between."

Holly Wilson found comfort, too, in a photo, after losing her grandmother in the tornado. The elderly woman suffered a fatal heart attack while trying to ride out the storm huddled in a closet with her daughter (Wilson's mother) and another family member.

Wilson turned to the Facebook page, searching for familiar faces. "I thought maybe if I look every second of every day, I can find a little piece of hope," she says.

She did. She found a vintage black-and-white photo of her great-grandparents with their first grandchild. She was so excited she woke her mother – who'd lost her house and job – even though it was 3 a.m. "My mother was grinning ear to ear," Wilson says. "It was like my grandmother was there a little bit." Wilson says the picture was old so she wouldn't have known that was her family if the names weren't on it.

About 25 percent of the `lost' photos have some written information. Walters has used clues – school logos and team uniforms, for instance – to help identify others.

The photos span more than a century, ranging from sepia-tinted studio portraits to digital snapshots. They capture changes in cars and clothes, hemlines and hairdos, along with enduring milestones: a bride's glow, a child's glee at his birthday party, a graduate's proud smile.

This is one town's history through a lens.

There are individual portraits: One of the grandest is a giant 1904 photo of a man named Sylvester Clarence Couch, dapper with his hair parted down the middle, a derby and pearl-like tie pin. Noted on the back: his Oct, 18, 1884, birthdate, and the fact that he was 20 in the photo.

There are class pictures: The smiling first graders at Emerson Elementary School (which was severely damaged by the tornado) are seen in 1942, sitting next to a war-themed placard: "We do our part for V."

And there are family albums: One large cardboard collage features a faded image of World War I soldier, a handsome World War II soldier bookended by two women, little boys in cowboy hats and jodhpurs, a young man in a graduation cap and gown, couples in bridal wear, cars from almost every decade, and more. Will someone recognize a cousin or aunt and come forward?

The project is mostly about photos, but organizers also hope to match people with other lost possessions including recipes, wedding DVDs, military papers and letters, many poignant or funny.

In one, an aunt and uncle lovingly celebrate their niece's first birthday, writing: "You have brought joy to so many people." In another, a soldier updates his health in a March 17, 1945, correspondence: "The stitches are out and I can lay on my back a little – that is with a pillow. ... Ha, ha, they sewed me up with the silver wire, ..."

Walters hopes to post everything online, then have a public display. Anything not claimed will be given to a local museum or library.

The Facebook page is one of a handful of efforts to return cherished possessions to the people of Joplin.

The Joplin Museum Complex will give away tens of thousands of negatives of portraits, wedding and yearbook pictures to those photographed or their families. The pictures were taken by Murwin Mosler, a studio photographer who chronicled Joplin's people and buildings over nearly 50 years.

Some images belonged to the museum; others come from the late photographer's tornado-damaged studio.

"This is one thing that can be of value to people," says Brad Belk, the museum's executive director. "This is their history and we want to get it back to them."

There still is much collecting to do from the streets; hundreds of photos arrive at the church daily. Judy Lowe and her son, Scott, donated about 65 they found while walking the rubble-strewn street where their house once stood. Lowe is assembling a scrapbook of the tornado for her two young sons. It will include three photos of them that were returned to her. "It's something my boys will keep and hopefully," she says, "it'll bring them peace."

She says they've all learned a lesson – treasures have no price tag.

"All this other stuff is just stuff," she says. "It's the memories that count – and the photos."