And We're Off!

     We made it to Alaska!
Travelling was a little more intensive than I would have guessed.  Natali and I fly stand by almost always, but usually we have great luck on catching flights on the first try.  Well…..we got bumped from both of our Thursday flights, which made for a long day of accomplishing nothing.  But Friday we were ready and got out on the first flight to Seattle.  A couple hour lay over preceded our connection to Anchorage.

     After 18 hours of travel time, we arrived in a time zone 4 hours behind Eastern Time in a city where the sun is still up at midnight.  Our bodies haven’t figured out when it is time to sleep or wake up yet.  We still have a little bit of adjusting to do in order to catch up with any type of schedule.  Our midnight fishing trips and late night wildlife-watch car rides haven’t helped us on that front.

The moose and bear were within feet of the car!! All on the main road to the house!!

     Sunday was our first opportunity to see the church plant.  Catalyst Church was started just over a year ago in Northern Anchorage and was planted by our good friends Tim and Robin Allred.  The church is running about 80 people at worship and has 3 different discipleship groups during the week.  We attended one this past week and it was wonderful fellowship and digging in to God's word. The church plant is one of the big reasons why Natali and I are in Alaska so it will be a common theme in our blogs and newsletters.  You can find more information about Catalyst Church and its vision at www.catalystchurchanchorage.com .

 These three picture are at our Catalyst Staff Chik-fil-A party! There are NO Chik-fil-A's in Alaska so... thanks to our friend Jessie at Chik-fil-a Truett's in Morrow we had 20 frozen and safely delivered! There are 8 staff members from the lower 48 and more family members SUPER pumped for this celebration because it had been months since their last REAL chicken sandwich!!

      Our first week here has been slow by design.  Tim wanted us to ease into the work and allow our bodies to acclimate, but starting this week we are on full alert and excited to see what God has in store. This last week we went to a couple ministry outreach and serving opportunities and look forward to many more!
Thank you for all who have encouraged and prayed for us. We will share more to come!

For anyone on Instagram, you can follow ministry quick pics at Streams4319