Ashley's Updates

So far this year has been looking absolutely nothing like I expected. One might say my expectations have been shattered, and honestly? It's been really hard. I have been so grateful for my faith community back home who have been praying for me and pouring into my life. In one of his sermons from earlier this year, the pastor of my home church said "we tend to resent God when our expectations aren't fulfilled," and it's so true! I was so frustrated, saying "what the heck, God, you promised me X, Y, and Z, and circumstances are saying that's not going to happen!" I was not only doubting God, but I was also doubting my ability to hear from God. It was after seeking some wise council, I was encouraged to run back to God again and again and again and again. The enemy wants you to doubt God when things get hard, he wants to create a rift in your relationship with him. That's why it's so important to run back to him no matter how hard it...

God is good. Even when it doesn't feel like it. I've been back in Papua New Guinea for about two weeks now, after a lovely and refreshing time visiting with family and friends in Canada. Although it hasn’t been very long, it feels like it's been much longer. I was excited to come back; I missed my friends aboard the ship and was itching to get back to work, and while those aspects of being back are really great, there have been a lot of challenges and spiritual warfare surrounding everything. They're all really petty things to be honest, but when they're all happening at the same time it gets to be really discouraging, and I look back at all that happened that first week, I can't believe it was only a week! It started with losing my neck pillow in the airport half an hour before my 14 hour flight to Brisbane. Petty, right? I was annoyed, but I bought an overpriced one in the terminal and was fine. Well, turns out that was just the beginning. Some freak b...

In the last month I have been a part of two land based outreaches to inland villages surrounding Port Moresby! I spent hours and hours riding in the back of our truck, and although they were both challenging in different ways, I still saw God move so much, and we had so many impactful encounters with people! I think the first miracle worth mentioning is that I led an entire outreach on my own and it wasn’t a terrible disaster! There was hiccups, yes, but God proved himself so faithful throughout each and every situation, and I also wouldn’t have been able to do it without the awesome supportive team of leaders on board the ship, as well as the extremely flexible team God gave me who were so full of grace! There was one day that we were driving back to the ship after clinics, and our truck broke down in what I found out later was a super dangerous area. The vehicle behind us pulled over to help, and the driver just ~happened~ to be a mechanic from the enclosed company comp...

  When I was twelve my parents took our family on a trip to Disneyland, and there was this one ride called the Mali-boomer (like Malibu but boom, yeah?). It was kinda like a drop of doom, but you started at the bottom and it would launch you up and then you would free-fall, and it would do this over and over for a few minutes. That’s pretty much the best way I can describe how these last few weeks have been. There has been so much uncertainty, so many great blessings and so many challenging things all along side each other, and it keeps coming so fast I don’t even know how to process it. The last month has been an absolute whirlwind. We traveled up to Mount Hagen on October 2, not knowing if we would be there for two weeks or two months, because our plans for the last two outreaches had fallen through and we weren’t entirely sure of what God had in mind for us. We didn’t know what type of accommodation we were going to have, but that the hospital was providing it and w...

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