M4M Day 1–Audacity to Dream

Bixby (755ft) to Kansas City (1,027ft) to Newark (0ft)

#Miles4Missions Itinerary

Day1 (May 12th)–Bixby to Kansas City to Newark
Day2 (May 13th)–Newark to Dubai to Kathmandu 
Day3 (May 14th)–Kathmandu
Day4 (May 15th)—Kathmandu to Lukla to Phakding
Day5 (May 16th)–Phakding to Namche Bazaar
Day6 (May 17th)–Namche Bazaar
Day7 (May 18th)–Namche Bazaar to Dole
Day8 (May 19th)–Dole to Machermo
Day9 (May 20th)–Machermo to Gokyo Ri to Gokyo
Day10 (May 21st)–Gokyo to Namche Bazaar
Day11 (May 22nd)—Namche Bazaar
Day12 (May 23rd)—Namche Bazaar
Day13 (May 24th)—Namche Bazaar to Tengboche
Day14 (May 25th)—Tengboche to Thukla
Day15 (May 26th)—Thukla to Gorekshep
Day16 (May 27th)—Gorekshep to Kala Patthar to Everest Base Camp
Day17 (May 28th)—Everest Base Camp
Day18 (May 29th)—***RACE DAY***Everest Base Camp to Namche Bazaar
Day19 (May 30th)—Namche Bazaar
Day20 (May 31st)—Namche Bazaar to Lukla
Day21 (June 1st)—Lukla to Kathmandu
Day22 (June 2nd)—Kathmandu to Dubai to Newark
Day23 (June 3rd)—Newark to Kansas City to Bixby

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On the day the Lord gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the Lord in the presence of Israel:“Sun, stand still over Gibeon, and you, moon, over the Valley of Aijalon.” So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the nation avenged itself on its enemies, as it is written in the Book of Jashar. The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. 
There has never been a day like it before or since, a day when the Lord listened to a human being. Surely the Lord was fighting for Israel!
-Joshua 10:12-14

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”So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped.”

If I am honest; most of the time I don’t really know what to do with passages like these. They seem so ridiculously out of step with 21st century faith…and yet, I am drawn to them. It is tempting to dismiss stories like these, but be careful. If you remove too much of the miraculous from the text, there is perhaps not as much left as many might think. It is a bit like the time I convinced Beth, who is a tiny bit squeamish, to watch Braveheart with me. “Don’t worry babe…I will fast forward all of the violent scenes.” All that was left of the 2.5 hour masterpiece film was 15 minutes of a twisted medieval love story. Needless to say, we lost the plot entirely.

Something similar happens when we explain away a God who invites his people to live on the very edges of reason and possibility. God calls Abraham on an adventure with no destination. He shuts the mouth of lions when Daniel refuses the order of tyrant king. He chooses a shepherd boy who will rush the battlefield against a giant. He sends a murderer hiding in the desert to a palace with a message that God will rain down plagues on the oppressors of his people. He calls a fisherman to abandon his nets and later to join him walking on the waves. In truth, it is kind of hard to drop your Bible and have it not open to a passage where God is calling and equipping his followers for a bold adventure.

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”Hey, while you are here, we are going to fill up a truck with supplies and send it into Ukraine to aid the refugees. You ok with that.”

It was April 2022, the Russians had just invaded Ukraine and refugees were spilling over the border en mass into Moldova, Poland, and Romania. Our partners in Cluj, Romania were not planning on caring for Ukrainians, but here they were; confronted with a crisis…and in the least surprising news ever; they showed up as the literal hands and feet of Jesus for a broken people who had fled their homeland. Two years later; our friends are still serving the Ukrainians who have yet to be able to return to Ukraine—more on that in the coming days.

We gathered a rag-tag team from pretty much everywhere (another almost unbelievable story) and began our journey to Romania. Most of our team would meet in Chicago to make the trip and somewhere in the middle of a drive across central Missouri, I caught a call from our Romanian partner Florin. He said we have the chance to send a truck of supplies into Ukraine, and we would need to raise some funds to make that happen. We were excited about the possibilities, but—and this would prove to be a theme in my life—we had no idea the scale of what we were getting into to.

We thought perhaps we would send a pickup or maybe a box truck, but no. We arrived to discover that Florin had arranged a semi-truck to make the journey back into central Ukraine. The next few days are a blur, but the short version is we bought more than $30,000 worth of supplies…some 40,000lbs of groceries and diapers, and sent it to a desperate people in the midst of a war zone. When Florin called and told me we needed to do it again two weeks later (we have now sent more than 25 trucks of supplies into Ukraine), I began to sense that kind of a lot of things were about to change in our lives.

I told people that Project Doxa was small and nimble by design. The truth is I was just too cowardly to fundraise. I hated asking people for money, but when I came home from Romania in April of 2022, I knew I had to get over my aversion to fundraising. Our partners needed far more funds than we were raising, and I just didn’t want to be the limiting factor of what God can do in and through our missionaries.

”OK, Lord. I will fundraise, but I need your help. I need an idea…some sort of thing that will open the door for me to talk to people about investing in our missionaries.”

I sensed the Lord leading us to what we become our #miles4missions project, an absolutely ambitious attempt to raise more than $250k by running the World’s Highest Marathon. It took multiple months of logistics and nearly a year of training for this project to come together and it is still kind of surreal that it is finally here. Our goal is to raise $10,000 per mile of the marathon (26.2 miles) and we are asking people to choose a distance to sponsor and then sign up for a monthly or one time donation to help us make a $250k investment in our global partners (Click here to setup your donation).

It has been a great day of travel so far. I started the day in the car in Bixby at 5:30AM, drove to Kansas City to meet by buddy Tony who took me to the KC airport. If you are wondering why I flew from Kansas City, I got a really cheap flight from there…plus I am always happy to get to spend some time with Tony and his family. I had a pretty uneventful flight to Newark and I am about to board my next flight to Dubai. There really is no such thing as a short trip to Nepal, but Kansas City to Newark to Dubai to Kathmandu is about as efficient as you can get.

I will be blogging with updates and devotional content every day of this 23 day adventure (pending access to WiFi), and I would love for you to commit to making the journey with me by praying for me daily and by sharing our posts. If you haven’t already, you can sign up for our newsletter here.