First of all I knew that I wanted to
take a gap year between high school and
college even before I knew that I wanted
to come with Wycliffe. I wasn't feeling like 
I had a lot of direction for college
study. I had no idea what I wanted to
major in.
I decided it was better for me to take a
year to try to get more direction
and kill two birds with one stone and
learn a lot about missions.
With the amount of need there is out in
missions that's something everybody
should be considering.
I talked to my missions pastor. I asked him
what kind of opportunities are there to
see somewhere that's as
far separated and completely different
from America?
I wanna go experience what it's like to be
in the missions field and understand what that
kind of life is.
That's Papua New Guinea, and he jumped straight
to it. My missions pastor connected me with
Ben Pehrson.
Actually we were expecting Ben to say, "I'm sorry
but
there's no way I can fulfill my mission
and also babysit
a 19-year-old who doesn't have any
expert
studies under his belt who's really gonna
be relying on us and be more of a burden
than not." But as soon as we emailed him, he said, "Me and my wife, we usually talk about things
like this
but as soon as you sent us this message
I knew it was a yes."
Like, wow. I do like a lot of the things that are
going on in this
Aitape West program where they try to equip the
Papua New Guineans to do as much of the work 
as possible,
really trying to train themselves out of a
job. It's definitely
led me to think that there's a lot of power
behind
giving people some Scripture in their own
word, and they feel like they've
owned a part of it, and that they've made
conclusions for themselves.
Sort of like until they figure it out for
themselves and don't just have it
spoken at them, it's not really
sinking in deep and impacting them. You really
can't get a good picture of what it's like
to be doing
the hard stuff in missions by a two-week
missions trip. You don't deal with the
the stress of being in a country for
a long time and feeling homesick or
knowing whether you'd be able to make it
without
having family nearby or your favorite
restaurant.
There's a lot of things that they're
intangible that you can
you can read about, but it's a lot
different when you
actually come and try it out for yourself.
