Ride On: The Great Conclusion of the Cowboys/Mongolia Saga

Well, here we are. This is the end. Well, sort of. It’s the end of a great adventure that started in November of 2015, when I first heard of Cowboys With A Mission. But as my sister’s tagline says,

“Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t.” –Richard Bach.

Once we got back from Mongolia, we spent a few days just kind of readjusting to being back in the U. S., and getting over the jetlag. I also had my third and final infusion in Billings. One of the men from the community took us to the ghost town of Kerwin as a treat, and that was very pretty. Apparently it was a gold mining town destroyed by an avalanche. It was pretty cool.

That week we went through some debriefing and re entry classes, and on Thursday we graduated from the DTS. Here we are at graduation, trying not to cry.

Then, the very next day, we all took off. My family and I spent the weekend at Yellowstone, which, as a side note, I was enamored with. I think it deserves all its hype, though, being from a place where I can visit the Smoky Mountains Nat’l Park anytime,  I’m a little perturbed by the fact that you have to pay to get into national parks in the West. My only critique is because of the boardwalks (which of course are there only for our own safety), the whole place feels a little like a zoo, and there’s pressure to take a quick look at the hydro-thermal features and then move on so someone else can have a look, which wasn’t conducive to truly appreciating the sights. But that was my only disappointment. I must go back someday.

And finally the time has come to give you the full scoop on the drastic blog changes. Let me just tell you the story as it happened.

While we were in Zhunhaara, I started to feel really restless about the future, because it seemed like there were so many things I could go do now that I couldn’t pick one. My “halfway farm” was still the goal, but I was trying to find some stepping stones between it and college. So I started praying about it. I prayed about it every day for three weeks, and then every few days for two or three more weeks after that.

I began to feel like I hadn’t given my halfway farm to God. I think it’s an excellent idea, but I hadn’t really asked God’s opinion of it. So it took me a week to come to grips with that fact, and “give up” the halfway farm, so to speak. To be OK with doing it or not doing it, whatever God led me to do. College was included in this release of my plans to God’s safekeeping.

A week into my prayer marathon, I felt like God was telling me to skip college, which terrified me, of course, because I’m NOT a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants type person. But I’d made a decision: that whatever I felt like God was telling me to do, I would do. So I very quickly came to grips with skipping college. Way more quickly than I could have if I’d made the decision on my own.

Then of course, the question was what I was to do instead. That answer took me two weeks to get, though in hindsight, I’d been getting the answer since mid-lecture phase through a series of unlikely coincidences and unintentional prophetic words. There is a YWAM base in western Montana, and I got a very clear feeling that spending the next two or three years there was the answer. Even knowing next to nothing about the ministry, I felt (and feel) confident that it’s the right direction.

So that’s my new plan. When we got back from Yellowstone, I wrote a letter to Montana, explaining the situation, and have since received a text, phone call, and email, and am now in the process of filling out the staff application.

I wavered really painfully for about a month about whether or not I should take community college classes while I work to get to Montana, or if I should just work, but eventually enrolled so as not to waste my scholarships and to be in a better position if I ever wanted to go back to school.

Then, because it will likely take me a while to get to Montana,  what I’m hoping to do is spend 9 months learning to shoe horses at trade school, so that I can be a self supporting missionary. The cool thing about this particular horseshoeing school is that it is the only one in the country accredited by the Dept. of Education. This means it’s the only one giving an accredited certification, which is required by every other country in the world in order to work on horses. So with a certification from this school, I can shoe horses anywhere in the world, which would be great if I ever end up overseas for an extended period.

If you’re wondering what became of the halfway farm, I haven’t completely let go of it. I think it’s probably still in the works somewhere, I’ll just get there a different way than I thought. I may just be doing some globe-trotting first.

Long story short, this is why the blog has changed. The direction of my life has (just kind of) changed, and my priorities have gone through a continental shift. That’s why I’m so sure I’ll be doing adventuring. Cause it’ll be a close scrape to afford horseshoeing school and a long haul to Montana. But it’s coming. The Adventure Continues.

–Rhoda.

Mongolia 4

This will be my last post for Outreach, I think. And even though it’ll cover three full weeks, it probably won’t be that long. Then, to finally wrap up this saga, There’ll be one more in the chain after this, and then you’ll be up to speed! Won’t that be nice?

Our last legs in Mongolia were spent in Zhunhaara.

As an aside, I know my spellings of Mongolian cities vary a lot. That’s because I’m pretty much just spelling them phonetically, as close to what I’ve seen in English as possible. I apologize for my lack of accuracy.

Zhunhaara is a small town to the north west of UB, and it’s the headquarters for Tribal Bridge, which is the organization we went through. These two pictures are our building and the outdoor kitchen the guys built on the first day that we did all our cooking in.

Tribal Bridge building

our kitchen

We did a lot of prayer walking during our three weeks in Zhunhaara. I’m only going to tell you about one of them, we did so many. The first week we were there, we did work projects. This picture of the building is from before we washed all the windows and the doors (they had brick mortar on them), and before the sidewalk at the front door was poured.

Weeding the garden and potato patch

Painting the decks

Washing our clothes

That first week we also weeded the back yard, which was growing sunflowers, carrots, radishes, watermelons, pumpkins, and lots of potatoes. And we painted the deck. Those decks actually took us the full three weeks to paint cause we kept running out of one color or the other.

The last two weeks we spent teaching English classes. We taught kids in the morning (split into beginner and advanced classes), and adults at night. We weren’t able to share the Gospel any in Zhunhaara, unless it came up naturally in conversation, because we kind of felt like we were being spied upon, and we didn’t want to ruin opportunities in the future.

But our English students were really fun.

We went to the market at least once, and sometimes up to three times per day buying our meals, and naturally we bought a lot of ice cream, because a fresh, soft-serve cone is only 15¢ there. You should be jealous. Stuff was good.

We went to the same church the whole time we were there. I think we went four times. I shared my testimony once, and once, some other missionaries came through during the week, and left everyone in the church some chocolate.

The gate to go into the church compound

The church building

The congregation

Messing around after the service

Sharing my testimony

I’m really skimming over a lot, though I promise this section of outreach was definitely not as dull as I’m making it seem. For one thing, it was here the thing happened that makes me so sure I’ll be doing some more adventuring in the future, which I PROMISE I will tell you about in the very next post.

These next few pictures are from our last day of English class.

We gave the kids ice cream and soda.

This is our adult class

We were intending to go back to UB a few days early, and say hi to the Ger District church again, but we had no place to stay, so we ended up staying in Zhunhaara two days longer than we had planned. We made good use of it, though, and I’m glad we did. On our first extra night, we went down to a park by the railroad station to play with the kids down there. That was fun, and as you can see, the kids were all kinds of adorable.

Showing them how to do pull-ups.

Playing volleyball

The girl in the upper left in the pink was born in England and so she acted as a translator a little.

On our second extra day, we took a prayer walk to the small Buddhist temple near the market place. Sadly, I have no  pictures of that. But anyway, we had gone in and prayed in the courtyard and around the prayer wheels and things, and were almost ready to leave when a man came in who walked with a limp and used a crutch. All of us stood up, but I started stressing out a little cause I knew I was supposed to pray for him. So even though we had no translator, I got C to walk over with me, and was able to use sign language enough to figure out which leg was injured and to sort of get permission to put my hand on his knee and pray for him. I didn’t watch, cause I had my eyes closed, but C and M were, and they said as soon as I said “amen,” and took my hand off his knee, the man looked startled, and looked at his knee kind of surprised, and then they said as we were leaving that his whole family had broken into smiles, and M used the words “awe” and “wonder” to describe how they were staring at us as we left. So I can’t tell you for sure what happened, but something did.

We left the next day at 2:30 in the morning, and walked to the train station with our bags, and took the night train to UB. Here we all in all our glory. I’m stuffed into the luggage compartment, cause it was 3 in the morning and why not? C, in the right of the picture, managed to stuff himself into it after I got out. Again, why not?

The train at 3 in the morning.

Once we got to UB, it was straight to the airport and a sad goodbye.

L to R: Back row: Enkush, C, Tumero, B, J, B, Nara. Front Row: M, me, K, and L on the floor.

I WILL be going back to Mongolia someday, hopefully not too long from now. I hope you enjoyed the journey with me. It’s not over yet: the adventure continues…

Mongolia 3

I promised y’all a post about our adventures with reindeer, and though it’s been forever, here it is.

The third portion of our outreach, we took a grand expedition to the reindeer people. Here’s a map to show you roughly where we were, though there’s no way to tell exactly. I lifted it from ontheworldmap.com.

I hope y’all can see my little drawings on this. The reindeer people’s approximate location is circled in red. Ulaanbator is circled in yellow, with our route to the reindeer people roughly lined in orange. Kharhorin is circled in green, and Zhunhaara, which I’ll talk about last, is circled in blue, with our route to it from the reindeer roughly lined in a darker orange.

There was so much going on at the reindeer people. I don’t even know where to start. We embarked from Ulaanbator in an old Russian-made van. We were in that thing (home sweet home) for three days, only the first of which was on the blacktop. The rest was off-road.

There she is. Our sweet home, the Russian van.

We were goofing off in a river, waiting for Enkush, or main contact to join us.

That was an adventure in and of itself, as you can see from this cluster of pictures. A fantastic one.

Our camp on the first night of travel.

Where we ate supper on our second day of travel.

Our camp on night 2 of travel.

1. These were 13 massive shamanic shrines lined up in the middle of nowhere.

2. The spiritual atmosphere was tangibly ifferent on one side of them versus the other.

3. It was like the unofficial, but very real, gateway to shaman country.

4. So, of course, we sang worship songs and prayed over them.

LOOK AT THIS BRIDGE.

The last place we stayed (evening of Day 3) before embarking on horseback.

After that grueling three days of overland van travel, we met our horsemen and guides, and set off on horseback, in true Mongolian style.

1. Packing the horses. Morning of Day 4 of travel.

2. Me on my valiant steed.

3. Gahna; only 19; one of our horsemen.

4. Mendeh; another of our horsemen.

5. Me resting on our first break. Not sure why I look so mad.

6. lunch break, halfway up the mountain, about 3.5 hours into the ride.

8. LOOK T THIS SNOW. OUR HORSES GOT STUCK AND WE HAD TO WALK A BIT.

9. Within a mile or two of the reindeer people.

We actually rode with a couple families and their strings of reindeer as we neared the top. It’s really funny to see reindeer carrying solar panels and satellite dishes. You can’t escape civilization, no matter how far you go.

Here’s our tepee, and what the inside looked like.

We did all our cooking on that stove. Everything we ate there was delicious.

It was pretty cold the whole time we were there. I’d say it didn’t get above 40°F the whole time we were there, was very windy, and it rained most of the time we were there. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Just maybe with a warmer sleeping bag.

So, while we were at the reindeer people (total of three full days), we taught English in the mornings of the first two days, and then rode out on our horses to evangelize in the evenings. There were several groups of tepees in the valley, and we split into two groups and spoke to every single tepee in the valley. Which, as far as we know, is the very first time anyone has been able to share the Gospel with that particular group of reindeer people. The third day, we hosted Naadam, which is a big festival and competition.

On the evening of our first day there (not a full day) we got to help tether all the reindeer.

On our first full day, we also got to go help get wood in the afternoon.

I’m sure I’ll sound like a spoiled Westerner when I say this, but it was really hard to adjust to the fact that we were not at a dude ranch or a reenactment. The culture was amazing, and I loved it, but it was so wildly different than anything we had experienced before, I for one, had a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that it was real.

These next four pictures are from my groups evangelism of the surrounding groups of reindeer people.  Even on our way there, we were praying together and singing worship songs, and Gahna was wondering what was going on. Our translator, who was a Christian, was telling him, and when we got off our horses at the tepees, Maidar, the translator, announced that Gahna wanted to become a Christian. So we prayed with him right there in the rain, and Gahna was so genuine. I’ll probably never have the words to describe the atmosphere that night; I can only tell you the events and hope it translates.

I chose to separate this picture from the other three, because the team from last year met this guy before. He’s a powerful shaman. In fact, he’s the son of the shaman in the documentary film The Horse Boy, if anyone is familiar with that. I haven’t see it yet, but I want to. Anyway, he was very open to hearing what we had to say, and even though he told us right off the bat that he was a shaman and wasn’t really interested in changing religions, he accepted the Mongolian Bible we gave him, and seemed to really appreciate it.

You can see how in the last two pictures Gahna joined our “family.” He was going to share his new testimony on one of the days, but he got shy at the last minute. Both he and Mendeh really became part of our team, even in the three short days we were all together, and Mendeh turned from being downright cold to being a goofball. He’s the only person I’ve met that could laugh with a straight face.

Reindeer are SUPER friendly. This is morning of full day #2.

These next few are from the second full day. The one under this is presenting the Gospel at the end of our last English class. The two older girls in the front (and three more behind them that you can’t see) accepted Christ.

These next four are evangelism on the evening of the second day. You can see how Gahna totally just joined us, and even Mendeh, in the blue with a baseball cap. He really enjoyed being our photographer, so he’s not in many of our pictures. He told our translator he’s an atheist, but in one of these four tepees, he rattled off a few sentences before we could get started, and Maidar told us, “He just told them ‘Jesus is good and you should follow Him,'” even though he said he was an atheist.

On the third day, we hosted Naadam, and evangelized at our own group of tepees. Naadam consists of three sports, generally, and it takes place every year. Wrestling is a staple. Then there’s horse-racing (or reindeer-racing) and archery. Archery is traditional, but we did tug-o-war instead.

Wrestling was first, and Gahna actually ended up coming in second in the whole thing.

Our school leaders, C and B, didn’t have a choice but to wrestle.

If you’re a male of high school age or older, you’re wrestling. At least that’s how it was at our small Naadam.

Then we had the children and adult reindeer race.

Winner of children’s race

Winner of adult race

Then tug-o-war! I’m in my signature green beanie, somewhere in there.

This last one is us with the people in our own group of tepees, on the late afternoon of our last full day.

On the morning we left, we all got a picture with this bull. The guy is Tumeruu, Enkush’s husband. By this time I had finally learned that I could wear almost all my clothing at the same time, and thus actually be warm enough, but this day was close to 60°.

Then it was a 9-hour trail ride back down the mountain, and a sad goodbye at the horsemen’s house. When we got to the bottom of the mountain though, the Russian van was waiting, but Maidar asked if any of us felt like riding our horse back to the house, so that the horsemen wouldn’t have to lead them all. I was one who said yes, and riding them back soon turning into racing them back. At top speed. Leaping bushes and holes and ditches like Red Rum. Getting gravel flung in our faces passing people. And whooping and screaming like idiots because of the adrenaline. I thought I was gonna die a couple times.

At the big Naadam horse-race near UB, the horse are trotted from the finish to the start, and then galloped from start to finish, a distance of about ten miles. That’s the info we got. We only ran between 4 and 6 miles, with several rests, but that was after a 9-hour ride down a mountain, and stands as a testament to the durability of Mongolian horses. I’d love to import one and do endurance with it. Anyway, I’m on the white horse in the middle of the right-hand side. I came in 2nd place. Before our last heat, Gahna stopped us to pray, and he prayed for safety and speed on our last stretch. That’s how genuine he was about it.

The way back from the reindeer people was fairly uneventful. We spent two more days in our good old van to Zhunhaara, which is where Enkush and Tumeruu live, and where we spent the last three weeks.

One last thing, though. Remember this town?

We also stopped here on the way back, and Maidar actually led a man to Christ while we were eating supper. So when we finished, we went over to his house to sing praise songs and pray with him. K, one of our leaders, felt like someone’s hand needed healing, and it turned out to be the man who had just accepted Christ. He’d had pain in his hand for years from an old dog bite, and limited range of motion. So we praised for his hand, and he got this really surprised look on his face, stretched it out, and told Maidar that it didn’t hurt anymore and he could move it all the ways he was supposed to be able to move it, something he hadn’t been able to do for years.

So I’ll leave you with that. I’ll get around to  chronicling the last bit of outreach sometime soon, and FINALLY explain the blog change and everything.

Mongolia 2

Welcome to installment number 2 of my adventures overseas. I’ve decided actually the easiest way to do this is not week by week, but by location. There’s four locations, so there will be four posts (unless I need to split a few  because of the length). Just so you know.

After our stay in the Ger District, we traveled to a town south of UB called Kharkhorin. We weren’t intending to go to Kharkhorin, originally, but after some group prayer back in Wyoming, we felt like we needed to. So we did. We spent a total of three days (including travel) doing prayer walks. There’s huge shamanic shrine there, as well as the main temple of Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia.

I pulled this picture from Google Images because I have no pictures of the outside of the temple. But this is kind of the characteristic photo you’re likely to find if you look it up in a textbook or something.

I guess the best way to do this is to give you the story pictorially.

B and I on the bus as we embarked from UB

A view of a mounted shepherd and his sheep, as seen from the bus.

We took a bus 7 hours or so, and got to stay in a ger! This ger has been all over Mongolia, acting as a temporary church until a permanent church can be planted. The church we stayed at in the Ger District was originally housed in this ger.

The interior of our ger.

Starting a fire in the stove

Nara, our translator.

We got to stay in a ger! Which also doubled as a church.

The yard of our compound

“Genesis,” our hosts’ grandkid, showing us where the best stores were, so we could buy our supper.

On our first evening there, after we had eaten and gotten our thing arranged we took a prayer walk by the river to pray for our activities the next day. All those little white things you see in the distance are like guest cabins, except they’re gers.

The site of our first prayer walk.

The next morning, we got up and walked to the big shrine overlooking the city.

On our way to the shrine. The big thing on the hill is it. It was enclosed by 3 curved murals depicting Mongolian history.

You know how in the Bible (and other ancient books) it talks about people worshiping their scary myriads of gods on the “high places?” Well, that’s a thing. Nearly every shrine we saw was on a high point, and there’s so many of them in Mongolia that when I got back to the States, my first reaction whenever I saw any pile of rocks or sticks was to mentally label it as a shrine.

The shrine; in the shape of a tepee, wrapped in prayer flags

Prayer flag

Kharkhorin, as seen from the “high place.”

Small Buddhist shrine by the big shamanic shrine. There were a dozen or so smaller shamanic shrines around as well.

On the way down the hill from praying at this thing for quite a while, we heard a man praying in English. We looked around, found its source, and went and introduced ourselves to an Australian from Perth who had been coming back and forth to Mongolia for 16 years, building a prison ministry with one of the local churches. So we joined in and prayed for his ministry.

This is the dormitory the Aussie’s prison ministry was in the process of building.

We got back from praying at the shrine at about lunchtime, so we ate lunch and then took off to pray over the big temple/monastery.

Heading into the courtyard

Inside the main area

Inside the first room

Inside the first room

We prayed in nearly, if not every single, room in this temple, and then we walked all the way around the outside walls, praying and singing worship songs.

Praying all the way around the walls.

That evening, “Genesis” had his birthday, so a few of us bought him a little basket of candy from the supermarket for his birthday. I think he turned 11.

Then, the next morning, we took a bus back to UB.

Once we got back from Kharkhorin and embarked on the next stage of our adventures, we stayed for one night in the Ger District again, and got the warmest greeting from the pastors and their family there. Being a Christian in Mongolia is like family, or at least that’s the vibe I picked up from my brief contact with them. Christianity is only about 25 years old in Mongolia, and Christians make up a tiny percentage of the population.  I don’t know if it’s cultural, or the fact that there are so few of them, but Christians in Mongolia are tight.

Stay tuned for adventures with reindeer.

Mongolia 1

Here we are. This is the first installment of my adventures in Mongolia. As a matter of necessity, I’m going to write these entirely from memory. I kept a meticulous journal on outreach, but if I used that to write these, I would feel like I couldn’t leave anything out, which would mean it’d take me three days to write one post, and a day and a half for you to read it. So if you’re someone I know in real life, and this account differs from something I told you face-to-face, or read you straight from my journal, please forgive me. This is the ultra-condensed version.

We embarked from the base around the first of June, and drove to Denver. Our plane in Denver was two hours behind schedule, so when we got to LAX, lucky for us there was someone at the desk waiting to tell us the fastest way to get to our plane. He told us the way, but warned us that it was basically in the basement, so there would be no nice moving sidewalks, and it was rather complex. He didn’t exaggerate. When he finished his directions, he said it was about a 15 minute walk, and we had 20 minutes. We jogged a good part of the way, and they were calling our names as we sprinted around the corner. We weren’t on the plane 5 minutes before it took off.

In the Beijing airport

When we arrived in Ulaanbaatar (or UB), we found that our trekking backpacks hadn’t followed us there, so we left for a lady named Doiya’s guesthouse to wait for them there. We spent the first couple of days of outreach there with no bags. On the whole, those first few days were rather flat because we had no bags and no work to do. We met an unusual number of shamans on outreach though, and that theme began on Day 1. We took a walk by the river on our first evening there, to try and stay awake to beat the jetlag. As we were thinking of leaving, we heard drums beating, and went to check it out. We found a husband-wife team of shamans performing a ritual for a couple on the riverbank, and got to watch and pray for them for about two hours. While we were at Doiya’s we hiked up a big ridge in front of the house and did our devotional at a shamanic shrine.

Doiya’s guesthouse

the street outside

Devotionals

the shrine

Our first full week in Mongolia, we moved to a church across UB in the Ger District, where we launched into teaching English, which is what we were using to bring people in.

The church in the Ger District

We taught children in the morning, and adults at night, and Monday through Thursday also had a Bible study for the women in the church. We were invited to share sermons and testimonies on Sunday morning both Sundays we were there.

L and I preaching the second Sunday

Several days into English classes

playing duck-duck-goose

First day of English class

English Day 1

Before class began

During our stay in the Ger District, we also got to take a trip to the Black Market, and had the wild experience of public transportation in Mongolia. It was really pretty fun.

This is an eight-passenger taxibus, into which were crammed 21 people, at the peak of our trip.

Towards the end of our stay there, a very drunk man wandered in, babbling in Mongolian. We sat him down and got Dawa, the pastor, who was also our translator and Doiya’s sister. Forgive my run-on sentence, but this is what he said. He said he didn’t know why he’d come into the church today. He’d walked past it a million times and didn’t know why he’d come in today, but he felt like he had to. Then he started sobbing, saying he hated being drunk, and his dad had been a drunk and he never wanted to be like his dad, drunk all the time, but now here he was, drunk, and he hated it. When asked if he had ever heard of Jesus, he stopped crying and at first seemed really interested. Can Jesus really help me? he asked. Then this drastic change came over his face, and he got angry. He started babbling again about how he was a shaman, a powerful one, and he could tell if we were lying. He thought we were lying and he could put a curse on us, he said; he could tell if we were telling the truth. Then he started sobbing again about how he never wanted to be like his dad, and he didn’t feel like a real man because he was drunk all the time, and he never wanted to drink, but the spirit inside him told him to and he had to. Those were his words. Not mine. We weren’t able to pray for him directly, though he had all eight of us praying for him the whole time he was there, though he didn’t know it.

That concludes the first week-ish of our Mongolian outreach.  Stay tuned for more adventures, the reason behind the blog’s new name, and why I’m planning on more adventuring soon…

Cowboys-Meeteetse to Miles City to Mongolia

You guys, this will probably be my last post for about 2 months. “But, why?” I hear my rabid fans chorus. Because, you see, at the time of this writing, I have a mere 6 days until I and my valiant team skip across the ocean to go save the world. Like Superman.

The word “excitement” doesn’t even touch the level of emotion and eagerness we’re all feeling. As of yet, we don’t really know for sure what we’ll be doing when we get there. We have the first week laid out, and we know we’ll at some point be riding to see the reindeer people. Even amidst all the uncertainty though, we’ve been laying a game plan. Through most of the lecture phase, we’ve been gathering each night in our common room, where we chat about everything that’s been happening, talk about our struggles, and then pray together. We’re going to continue this on Outreach as much as possible. We’re also going to try and have a weekly meeting for the express purpose of encouraging each other. We are doing all of this because we are expecting there to be resistance.

You see, I had this dream. I’m not going to go into detail on it, because that’s not really what I’m writing about today, but the gist of this dream was to warn us of the nature of some of the spiritual attack we might face. And here’s the funny thing: nearly everything in the dream that was a point of concern has become a point of concern. For example, the biggest part of the dream was a warning of division in the team. And guess what’s been our biggest, longest-running issue, and the whole reason we began praying together nightly? Unity.

All of this to say that we’re getting really revved up, even though we’re expecting there to be pushback. We’ve got a plan. Not to mention, you know, the God of the universe on our side. Or more accurately, we are on His side.

We leave in a week for Mongolia, but just a few days ago, we got back from what was essentially a “mini-outreach” to Miles City, Montana. Last week we had evangelism in class, and that really helped change my perspective on the whole thing. I had the image of a televangelist in my head when the word “evangelism” came out of someone’s mouth. Or else of someone standing on a street corner yelling at people. But last week really helped to dispel both of those images. So we drove to the Miles City Bucking Horse sale on Friday, and evangelized at the street dance Friday and Saturday night. We didn’t have a bullhorn, nor did we yell at people.  Mostly we just talked and prayed. I prayed with several people myself, and honestly, I thought it was awesome. It was quite hard, at first, just to step out and go talk to the person you felt you were meant to talk to. But after you got the first step through, then you could just ride your momentum the rest of the way. It was quite interesting to feel how the atmosphere of the place “lifted,” so to speak, the longer we were there.

We met all kinds of people, and it was neat how most people were very open to being prayed for, and to chat afterward. We also talked to some of the same people both nights, which felt like it cemented the experience a bit. That Sunday, we had Cowboy Church at the fairgrounds.

We leave in six days for Mongolia. I have to pack. I hope you enjoy these pictures of the weekend.

We stopped at Scheel’s in Billings on the way and rode the Ferris Wheel

These two are our work projects at our host church on Saturday afternoon.

This is the street dance on Saturday night

Crystal Lyons, our Cowboy Church speaker; she preached off her horse.

Cowboys-Fun Updates

If you’ve just stumbled onto this series, click here for the first post, and go from there, following the “Cowboys” tag.

So, it’s been a while since I posted. I think nearly a month, which is crazy, because it means we’re now on the last 3rd of our DTS. I just thought I would share some pictures of some of the things we’ve been doing lately.

If you follow me on Facebook, you’ll probably be disappointed, because I stole all of these pictures (with permission) from there. I never take my own pictures.

One thing I can’t give you a picture of is my friend J’s ear. She’s the one from Down Under, remember. Why would you want to see a picture of her ear, you ask? Well, because she’s had trouble with pain and pressure in it for years. When she changes altitude, it has never popped. The pressure just grows and hurts. So a few weeks ago in class, we were praying for each other at the end, and one of the staff felt she needed to pray for J’s ear. So she did, and as soon as she said “amen,” J’s ear popped and has’t hurt since then. How cool is that?

This is me and 2 staff unearthing Clive, the bison skull I talked about last post.

This is our whole group on a trail ride, crossing a steep gully called a buffalo jump.

The same trail ride.

This is us moving all that hay I talked about last post.

These next 5 are of the branding we were invited to help with last weekend. We branded something like 110 calves. This was a lot of fun. I’m the one in the green hoodie.

I know that’s not much to get you through a whole ‘nother month, but I’ve got homework to work on, so that’s all for now, and happy reading!

Cowboys-I Am Still Alive!

I would have made “I am“ into a contraction, but I`m writing this on my Swiss DTS-mate`s laptop, because mine refuses to pick up the wifi, and it is really hard to get used to the German keyboard.

I guess it must have been two weeks go when I last posted, and so much happens here that to try and record all that was going on would take way more time than I have to write and you have to read. Just as a proof, I started my current notebook/journal on January 3 of this year, and I already have more pages chronicling the time since I`v been here than I do from before.

It`s weird to think I`ve been here for a month already. On one hand, it feels like we just arrived. On the other, it feels like I`ve been here forever. We were contemplating that very thing at the 1 week mark. On any other mission trip or conference, we would have been going home at that point.

I for one, am still very much in shock that I`m here and it`s all actually happening. These people actually exist, and they`re great, and the stuff God is doing is amazing.

We`ve had all kind of adventures on the horses. We`re to the point where all of us are loping, and we`ve been on a long trail ride on some BLM land. On that same BLM land, we went hiking several weeks ago, and found a buffalo skull way up in a draw, who we named Clive. Last weekend we walked into town to see the museum and the chocolatier. It was about 7 miles round trip. That was fun. We loaded hay last weekend, too. About 400 70lb bales. We went out to a larger ranch a while back to help vaccinate about 500 cattle. A moose drowned in a neighbor`s pond, and we had some of it in soup last night. It tastes like beef, but with an open flavor. It`s kind of strange. We`ve had elk, as well, which tasted just like beef. This is just a taste of the adventures we`re having.

All of this is completely disregarding the classes. We`ve had teaching on Basic Christianity, Christ-likeness, forgiveness, integrity, spiritual warfare, and taking risks. Some have been more challenging and emotional than others, but all of them have had something. It`s pretty cool how we all got here, and what we`ve all been learning.

Basically, what I`m trying to say is I`m having the time of my life and I`m falling in love with this place. If I explained why and all the things we`re doing here, it would take forever. So I`ll post again in a few days or weeks.

Cowboys-A Day in the Life

Because of this post, I now have the Beatles song stuck in my head. If you’re new to this series, click on these links for the full story in chronological order: I,II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI.

On the advice of my sister, I’m writing out a general description of our routine, to give those of you back home a frame to work off of when I refer to things we do. Also, as a disclaimer, this is just what we, the students, do. I have no idea how the staff’s schedule works, though it’s got to be fairly similar, since they’re in class with us.

6:30 – 7 AM Breakfast (except weekends, when we get breakfast whenever we wake up)

7-7:45 We have quiet time Monday – Friday, as kind of a devotional. I’ve been going through a study of Nehemiah that I brought with me, but we are also allowed to work on our required journal, read our assigned book, and listen to worship music. On weekends it’s pretty much up to us whether or not we take the time to do quiet time or not.

8-9:30 Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday we have worship and intercession, where we sing songs and pray for different things on local and national levels, as well as a social cause. On Tuesdays during this hour, us students have some unsupervised prayer time as a group, to pray for the things we each are having problems with, and on Fridays, have a small class on a different religion.

9:30 AM-12:30 PM Monday-Thursday we have class. These classes are on the kind of things you would expect at any Christian college: Basic Christianity, Evangelism, Prayer, Missions, etc. On Fridays during this time we have either a class on equine health or a group meeting.

Lunch is from 12:30 to whenever we get the dishes done, which on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, is usually pretty quick, because those are the days we get to work with the horses, and the sooner we get out there, the more time we have.

Horsemanship is from 1:30-4 on Monday, Wednesday, and every other Friday. So far we’ve been doing groundwork, and I, for one, feel like I’ve improved a good deal just during the two days we’ve had it yet. This Monday, we’ll probably start riding, and we’re all very excited. On Tuesdays during this time, we have a really interesting class on communications, which I’m pretty excited about continuing. I guess I haven’t mentioned much of my public speaking endeavors on this blog, but speaking is how I get my adrenaline rush. Some people skydive, I compete in public speaking. On Thursdays we talk to our one-on-ones, which is basically a staff member assigned to us to essentially be our mentor and sounding board as we try to get the most out of CWAM.

4-5:30 we have work duties. We clean our bunkhouse, the administration building, the barn, and the shop, on different days of the week. We may also start chopping wood on Thursdays. On non-horsemanship Fridays, we help out with bigger projects, like hanging posters in downtown Cody for Rodeo Bible Camp, which will be going on while we are in Mongolia. Also during this block, we rotate days of the week feeding horses in the evening.

At 5:30, we have supper. We wash the dishes and clean up. Usually we have the evenings free once we finish, unless it’s Thursday, in which case, we have Cowboy Church at 7 o’ clock. Cowboy Church is basically a Bible study for the ranchers who live in the vicinity to come and discuss points of scripture together. We’re going through Romans right now. If it’s Friday, and we didn’t have a group meeting during the 9:30-12:30 hour, then we have it after supper.

Tada! That’s pretty much a day in the life of a CWAMer. Weekends are generally free, unless we go do work on another ranch like we did this Saturday, or go hiking. Sundays we go to church, of course. I know this post wasn’t really all that exciting, but there will be exciting stories to come, and this slightly dull post was necessary for you to know what the heck is going on in future posts. In the meantime, let me remedy your boredom by showing you a picture  of the landscape.

Cowboys-Welcome to Wyoming

IF YOU ARE IMMEDIATELY RELATED TO ME, DO NOT READ THIS POST. I WROTE YOU A LETTER.

If you are new to this series, click here to go to the first post, and you can follow the pingbacks in the comments section from there.

Well, everyone, I was going to write you a real-time style post chronicling my adventures as I traveled 3,000 miles through 4 states on 3 planes in 22 hours, but so much has happened since then, I think I’m going to have to let that sentence suffice.

As you can tell by the title, I’ve made it. I have boots on the ground in Wyoming.   I’m going to have to just give you the highlights, I’ve done so many thing for the first time in the last four days that there’s no way I could give you the real deal.

There’s just 5 students, all girls, and about 9 staff. Believe it or not, I had the second-shortest commute here. I’m from the southern U.S., there’s a Minnesotan named B, who had the shortest trek, at a 15 hour drive. There’s also a Canadian named M, a Swiss named L, and an Aussie named J. It’s been really interesting with the accents and learning about each others’ slang and cultural staples. For example, I tried Veggiemite the first day, because the Aussie brought some. I thought it tasted what it would be like if you could smear beef bullion and soy sauce on a piece of bread.

On Wednesday, we got the grand tour. There’s about 40 acres, and we’re at about 5,000 feet elevation. I brought a sealed hot chocolate can from home, and when I got it out today, it was pressurized because the barometric pressure is so much lower here on account of the altitude. The ranch is hilly, and the Rocky Mountains are fairly close by, but we’re considered high desert, and they only get about 6 inches of rainfall here per year, so said one of the ranchers’ sons, which is about a tenth of what we get at home. There’s a whole bunch of sagebrush, that most famous of Western plants, and there’s still huge sheets of ice on the river. Bill, one of the staff, said it’ll stay there till May. We went hiking on Wednesday too, on a neighboring ranch about 1,000 feet higher up than our ranch, to see some elk. There must have been about 400 of them. They practically covered a hillside. There’s even still snow on the ground, which the Aussie had never seen before, so of course we treated her to her first snowball fight.  We also began roping. We’ve become a little addicted, even. But it’s a skill we’d like to have, so we practice.

Yesterday I had to give my testimony, because we were all telling our stories. I totally cried, and am still really embarrassed about that fact, and probably will remain so until the day I die. I was just so loud. After lunch, when we were done, we had several hours of free time, so we lounged around in our common room, which was very relaxing. That evening all the neighbors came over for a barbecue and a sing-along of cowboy songs to welcome us to Wyoming. All of them sing really, really well.

We were going to go hiking today, which is Saturday, but that was called off, so B and I and one of the staff went for a run. Once we got back, several of the local ranchers who were there last night were over again, to mess around a bit. So the rancher whose property all the elk were on gave us roping lessons, and then we got to act as ground crew, flipping cattle and tying their legs together for the staff, who were roping real cattle, instead of  dummies. It was a bit scary, because even when the staff had roped the heifer at both ends, sometimes she would still run, and we totally almost got run over by every animal in the pen. There was a couple of times that either a horse or a heifer or both would run crazily and we just completely broke formation and ran. There was no standing and shooing it off to be had.

Tomorrow we’ll go to church for the first time, and probably go hiking, since we didn’t go today. We’re also going into town tomorrow to buy supplies like Wranglers jeans, and hats and boots, for those of us who don’t have those things yet. I’m pretty excited. We start classes and horsemanship on Monday, as well as our normal chores, which include feeding the herd in the evening with the scariest staff member on the ranch.More updates to come. I apologize for any spelling or grammar errors. I typed this on my laptop, which is finicky about that, and I’m too tired to fix things. Enjoy!