The Day Family Blog

Watch as my bump grows. I will try and keep this somewhat regularly updated!   

Most people that know anything about me know that I’ve always wanted to be a mom. Since I’ve been young, I knew that I wanted to have a family of my own some day. And hopefully a large one! I can’t tell you how many hours upon hours I’ve been dreaming my entire life about my future family. On November 18th, 2014, that dream had finally come true with one big fat positive on a pregnancy test. Friends, I can’t even tell you how elated I was. I burst into tears thanking God to give me this amazing gift, to be carrying a child in my womb. It was better than I could have imagined. For those first 14 days, Josh and I were so joyful with our exciting news. As elated as we were, seeds of fear started to creep into my heart during those first 2 weeks of my pregnancy. I was holding on so tightly to this gift, that I began to fear God would take our baby away. My worst fear was confirmed on a ultrasound a couple weeks after our positive pregnancy test. That was the absolute hardest day of my l

This past Thursday, we put on a Princess Party for all of the little girls coming to the New Punlok Thmey Girls Center. Since I first started working with the girls three months ago, I kept getting this vision of them in a nice house where they were all cleaned and showered with new clothes and combed hair. It was so difficult to see what horrible living conditions many of them lived in and how dirty they were; old and worn out clothes with messy and sometimes lice filled hair. I just want so much for these girl's lives because they had grown such a special place in my heart. It was so awesome because God was able to make this dream of mine come true for these girls that day. It was so great to decorate the Girls Center the day before the party and make it look fun and beautiful for the girls.  It was awesome to see them walk in the front door and watch their faces fill with delight.  The first thing they did when they walked in the room was go to the balloons and

There is a little shop here in Phnom Penh ’s touristy Russian Market that sells these beautiful embroidered banners. The labyrinth of stalls in this market, which we unashamedly frequent, is often very repetitive. A whole row of jewelers; there are your North Face backpacks, there’s your Cambodian-tourist parachute pants… the items go on and on. This one stall in particular is a one of a kind. It is backed by a local Christian NGO and helps at-risk women with employment by teaching them the trade of screen printing. The result is these beautiful banners they sell which display scriptures from the Bible. Gretchen and I put our order in a couple weeks ago for a customized banner. We wanted to get the first verse from a passage of scripture in the book of Romans which memorializes many of our experiences here. Romans 8:18 is the verse on our banner. The text speaks the promise God gives us for persevering through the pains of the present world. It urges us to consider the present

We have been here for two months and we have one more month to go. Lately I've been feeling emotionally drained.  There is so much suffering, pain, and brokenness here that we encounter everyday. One of the little girls this week told us she has been raped, luckily we already know about her story and our staff at Hard Places has been working hard to get her into a safe home. I saw a man beating his 3 year old child with a stick and there was nothing I could do about it. We consistently see older men (40s-60s) with younger Khmer girls (12-20s) at restaurants we eat at, we all know what is going on there. " For my thoughts are not your thoughts,      neither are your ways my ways, declares the  Lord . 9  For as the heavens are higher than the earth,      so are my ways higher than your ways      and my thoughts than your thoughts." -Isaiah 55:8-9 This verse has been an incredible comfort lately. Here, God tells us, that His ways and thoughts are so far above and beyo

Here are some random updates :) I've posted earlier how I've been helping out with the girls that have been coming to the boys center. Well we had been meeting in the front lobby and I had unofficially become in charge of playing and hanging out with them every morning. We were supposed to get a girls center on July 15, but sadly we didn't have enough funding and staff to open one. But we officially get to use the library of the boys center to meet with the girls in the mornings! This is exciting because we have started to create a curriculum that will be a mini version of what the girls would be getting at the future girls center. We teach English, play games, do crafts, sing songs, teach bible studies, and have lots of fun! Planning all of it takes a lot of time and research, but it is so fun when we actually get to teach the girls.  This past Saturday we got to take the all of the kids (I think about 140 of them) to Dreamland, which is an amusement park that reminds