I wish I could remember all of the different places I've been to write a blog entry over the past few months. But at least for this entry, I'm sitting back in my living room back in Lancaster with my dogs laying at my feet. As awesome as it was to travel around the world and see everything that I have, there is something about family and home that simply takes the cake. It's currently 4am and although I thought I avoided the jet-lag, apparently I was wrong. But because there is nothing else to do at this time of the night, I've got some time to write down my final thoughts. Although these surely are not complete and I will continue to learn things and remember experiences over the next few months, this will be a start.

When I started out on this trip I remember going in to everything with a blank mind. I didn't want to bring any thoughts with me about Africa or the people I would be living with because I wanted all of my thoughts to be formed from my experiences. That's probably what I'm most thankful for that I did, because that allowed me to go in and experience a completely different world. It's so easy, especially living in the States, to think that our way of thinking is the way that will decide the future of the world; or that our ideas will be the ones that solve the world's problems. It's simply how our culture shapes us and it's hard to avoid. I spent a lot of time in Australia looking in to how you approach aid work in developing nations, and every time I came back to this idea. The idea of aid groups going in to other communities, whether they be within a country in Africa or an inner-city in Chicago, and approaching the situation with the mind set that we have all the knowledge and creativity to solve the problems there. I'll be the first to admit that I used to get caught up on this. Sometimes we (speaking about industrialized countries) get the idea that because we are more "advanced" that we are the ones that will have to develop the technology and ideas that will drive change in the world. We seem to miss the key step of involving the people that we are actually working on helping. Unless you get to know people on a personal level, you never fully understand the creativity and ingenuity in these people. So that's the first thing that I learned, the importance of loving someone. It's easy to simply get to know someone and make friends with them, but loving that person is on an entirely different scale. It's easy to say but hard to do. Sometimes people can be hard to love. But sometimes it's in those people that God teaches us the biggest lessons. Life is too short not to love.

The second thing that I took from this trip was trust. From trusting God in making sure that all my flights went safely and that I got from place to place over the summer, to trusting my instructor that he knew what he was doing as we jumped out of a plane. Trust is scary. Trust can hurt. But trust is necessary. There's many times where I feel that I can take care of everything on my own, that I have all the answers and that sometimes people just get in the way. That was more of what my thinking was like a few years ago, but especially after this summer, I have come to realize the importance of trust and faith. I was lying in my bed last night and I was thinking back and realizing that there wasn't one point over the past few weeks in which I worried about the future. I was always at peace with how things were going and never got worried. Now granted I don't get worried very easily, but there was something different about this summer. The thought of being worried didn't really cross my mind. Maybe that was due to the culture I was in, maybe it was because I was by myself for the entire trip, but my faith seemed to strengthen itself for some reason and I was able to rely more fully on God, and more fully on others.

The other thing that I learned is that God is beautiful. God's creation is incredible and spectacular and his plan for each of us in crazier that we could ever imagine. I think this theme probably came across a bit in some of my other blogs, but it is well worth repeating. I'm in the process of transferring all of my pictures to my external hardrive (which if you're curious I have roughly 8,300 pictures from this summer) and after skimming through some of them I couldn't help but smile. I have been extremely privileged to see what I have and it has taught me to appreciate what is around me, both man-made and god-made, so much more than before. Yet as spectacular as a sunset over the Serengeti is, as wonderful as worshiping with Masaai is; there is still something incredible about the things around me here in Lancaster. Maybe it took a trip around the world for me to realize that. Maybe I had to experience what a sunset looked like in a couple other continents before I truly appreciated the sunset out my own bedroom window. But God has placed the same beauty here in Pennsylvania that he has in Africa and Australia. That's something that will always stay with me. Finding beauty in life. To wake up each morning waiting and wanting to see what God will be doing has really changed the way I look at things. It has changed the way I interact with people, changed the way I approach work, changed the way I approach prayer, changed most aspects of my life.

The sun rises a lot earlier here in Lancaster than it does in Sydney. A few dark clouds scatter themselves across the sky as it fades from red to blue. The field outside my window is slowly being developed with homes and the cell phone tower's light blinks in the distance. The distant tree line on the horizon seems to be all that separates me from Australia and Africa. The birds flying above the trees look much like those that flew in the southern hemisphere. The sun rises the same way as it does on the other side of the globe. But the people here are different. With different stories to tell, different jobs to go to, different families to care for, different passions which drive their daily lives. It feels like this summer happened years ago. The sky is getting more colorful and vibrant as I type this, flooding the ground below with light. Days can go by faster than you expect. I remember sitting in the Philly airport back in May by myself as my mom and dad drove off. The summer was finally happening and there were so many things ahead of me, that my flight from Sydney to LA seemed to be so far off. But now I'm sitting back in my house, faced with the daunting task of unpacking my bags, and that night in the Philly airport seems so far away yet at the same time feels like yesterday. That's how I feel with most of my experiences this summer. Rereading some of my blog entries and looking over pictures brings back those memories, and I realize how lucky I am. It's hard to sum up this summer in a few paragraphs, and I don't think I will ever be able to. But at least I have a rough outline of what I was thinking, and hopefully this blog did a decent job at expressing my thoughts. Thanks to everyone who's been reading and following this, now I can start telling the stories to people in person. It's been an incredible summer, but I am more than excited to start the next semester at Penn State. I found what I'm passionate about, and I can't wait to see where God leads this passion and how He forms it.

So for the last entry from this summer, it's time to end a couple months worth of entries. However I have a feeling that I will still be updating this every now and then, so check back to see what crazy stuff is next. It feels really good to be home and I can't wait to see everyone again and catch up on the past summer. Talk to everyone very soon, cheers! (sorry, I had to add some Australian slang in here somewhere)