My squad is already in Lesotho, but I wanted to back track and tell you about our Christmas spent in Malaysia!

I wasn’t sure how I’d handle Christmas away from Kansas/Missouri. I’ve never not been home for Christmas. While Christmas Eve was far from traditional—this holiday season was one of the best I’ve honestly had, and one I will never forget.

Christmas Eve was fairly low-key. We decorated the house we stayed in, baked cookies, and just got to spend some time in fellowship with some squadmates. My squadmate Morgan and I needed some downtime, so we actually had Mexican for lunch, in Malaysia, while listening to Elvis & *NSYNC holiday music at Holy Guacamole. Oh, it was also 90 degrees and 80% humidity—quite the change from the normal season in Kansas!

Christmas Day was just so much joy. There were two major things missing for me from Manhattan—wassail from Bluestem Bistro, and A Hallelujah Christmas at Cloverton’s show. I got both—kind of. Same, same, but different. One of our squad leaders, Alex, actually played A Hallelujah Christmas in our living room, and my squadmate Ryan actually made wassail on Christmas morning. I can’t begin to tell you how much those two things meant to me. God knew it, though, and gave me those two sweet gifts just because. How wild, how intentional?!

About half of our squad was together for Christmas dinner, and it was such a great night of fellowship and remembering how Christ came into the world. I could write so much more on this (and will when I have WiFi access for longer)!!

Ministry in Malaysia was wild, and looked NOTHING like I thought it would. I actually ended up designing about half the time we were there! I was pretty much set up with a home office and got to do some design work for the ministry we got to work with! What a gift! It was truly a blessing to be able to use giftings like graphic design on the field. I never would have thought it would have even been possible.

Updates on our current ministry coming SOON. Just wanted to tell you all about our Christmas before more current updates!