Hi friends and family and all the people I love dearly!

 Well I went on my first international missions trip and is was amazing. It taught me so much about other cultures and about how to share Jesus with people who didn’t speak my language. That was a cool experience, I got to lead a young girl about my age to Christ through a translator. It was scary and exciting ad more challenging than I had expected, but the fact that I got to lead her in accepting Jesus was pretty cool. I left my heart with a little girl who spoke little English and the only way we communicated was through hugs and smiles and her playing with my hair, but having to leave her made me realize how the language barrier didn’t matter. I have stories on top of stories to share about being there but I wont bore you with inside jokes you wont understand. Thank you for the prayers and encouragement it means so much to know I have people who are rooting me on through this journey.

Now for the hard part: I wanted to go out on a limb and completely share with you where my heart has been. Ministry is HARD. And I’ve gotten the amazing rewarding side to it, and then I’ve experienced the challenges of it. I have had my faith tested in extreme ways over the last four years. Moving to four different schools through high school was hard. But it taught me how to live by faith. It also taught me to live in the moment and I’ve never struggled with that. I’ve even preached that to multiple people through the years, “be where you are, don’t look back and don’t look too far ahead.” I love my job but for the last couple of days I’ve been thinking about my normal comfortable high school life in Colorado living with my parents. My heart hurt as I thought: remember when I had… a routine, my parents, and home cooked meal, the mountains. Remember when I was working a comfortable job as a nanny. I thought to myself why do I have these thoughts when I love my job now and this is so clearly what God is calling me to. Then as I was reading Genesis 19 it talks about how Lot’s wife turned to look at her old life as it was being destroyed and she immediately turned to a grain of salt, and I thought, these thoughts are not of God. Yes, I’m aloud to miss things, people, places, circumstances, but those desires aren’t what God has in mind for me. We are called to leave our comfort zone and do what God is calling us to. I began praying, God refocus my eyes and my heart to you, let me see what you see, desire what you desire, remind me whose I am and what you have called on my life. So I’m sharing this because it was heavy on my heart and I need prayer and maybe this can encourage some one who’s walking in the same scary journey of transitioning to the real world.

 Thank you so much for reading. Love Ally.