How do you find creativity and inspiration every day? How do you get over your own words and try and get inside the head of the subject? I look at my interview notes, I browse through photos of the person I’m trying to write about, I think about that person and try to come up with a way to describe them and their situation accurately. I want people to care, but I don’t know what words and stories will move people’s hearts to action.

Our desire in this project is to help individuals realize their own potential to effect global change. But today, I can’t even convince myself of that.

On days like today, I cling to the truths found in the Bible and pray that, once again, God gives me the strength to continue down a road that is narrow and long and rocky.

Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.  Galatians 6:9

Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise Him, my Saviour and my God. – Psalm 42:5-6a

Please pray for us. We are so far behind where we’d like to be at this point and some days I fear I will be here until Christ returns or our baby comes. We both need to find gainful employment in the very near future, especially me as I need a set  number of hours of paid employment in order to collect maternity benefits. Thank you for your prayers, we covet them.

I wrote in that first blog entry how I was overwhelmed with God’s provision for us. And a year later, the Lord is still providing for our every need. He truly is a bountiful God, holding us after we jumped off the cliff of financial uncertainty. My last day of paid work was March 4, 2009, more than a year ago now. And yet we still are able to put food on our table and gas in our car. God has been so good, and I praise Him for that. Justin was blessed with some part-time photography work which has helped get us by.

Our work at the Hungry for Life office continues, slowly but surely forward. Days are often frustrating for me as I am seeing little progress over a long time instead of a lot of progress over a little bit of time. But we know it will get done. And we’re so thankful to be a part of the Hungry for Life team and doing this project together.

Anniversaries are always special occasions. So, on this momentous day, we want to extend our thanks to our faithful blog readers. Thanks to all the readers that check back often even when we’ve been inconsistent in posting, and for those that drop by the blog once in awhile and catch up. We really appreciate every person who has taken the effort to post comments on the blog, the feedback has been encouraging to us as we’ve travelled this Pockets of Change journey God has set before us.

Many people have sent us emails, phoned us up and told us in person how the stories we’ve shared have had an impact. To you, we also give a big thank you. It means so much to know that even before this project is finished, lives are being changed through the stories God blessed us to hear. We also want to thank those who have supported us by housing us, feeding us, and giving financially.

And most important of all, we thank you for your prayers. They mean more to us than anything, and we both firmly believe much of the reason Pockets of Change is a reality is because of prayer. We were safe in our travels because of prayer. Our marriage has stayed strong and grown stronger because of prayer. People shared their stories because of prayer. And prayer is what will bring this project to its completion.

Keep checking back to the blog as Justin is featuring a new amazing photo weekly and I will be posting some more stories from Sri Lanka, our final stop in the POC travel.

We invite you to continue with us as we work to completing the book. One day at a time, we are moving towards the end goal and would love to have you there with us right until the final i is dotted and the final t is crossed.

Until then, thanks for reading. Thanks for listening. Thanks for responding.

Thank you.

Pockets of Change | Numbers from Justin Keitch on Vimeo.

I lust after the American dream. I want the house. I want the dog and the backyard and the barbecue parties and the hot tub. I want the crafts room and the rec room. I want the kitchen with the double-wide fridge and ice dispenser. I want the toaster on the counter, the nice clothes in the closet and the recreational gear stored neatly in the garage.

We traveled around the world, saw the poverty and the despair, met the people who give up the little they have to serve the Lord. So how is it possible that I come home and I still long for a life the Lord has not blessed me with right now?

I look at house listings online and want to cry. We don’t even know what our future will hold, there is nothing certain about life beyond Pockets of Change. I know this is a period in my life. This is the place, the time, the life God has set before me and most of the time I praise Him for it. But today, I just want to go back to an easy life of earning money and spending as I wish. Today, I feel more human, more fallible, more caught up in the world than in the Spirit.

I guess that’s the reality of being human. Sometimes we soar, sometimes we sink. But through it all, God’s promises are true. God’s love for me is real. And God’s desire for me is to be in relationship with Him, not with the world. So today, I will set aside my own desires and seek His. I will put my requests before Him and leave them there. Because God is God, and I am not. And His will is perfect for me, even on the days I don’t feel it.

I will seek wisdom instead of wealth. I will seek integrity instead of financial interest. I will seek justice instead of jewels.

For the LORD gives wisdom, and from his mouth come knowledge and understanding. He holds victory in store for the upright, He is a shield to those whose walk is blameless, for He guards the course of the just and protects the way of his faithful ones.

- Provers 2:6-8

We are, as our newsletter stated, finished our travel portion of the Pockets of Change project. The Lord was so good to us as we traveled. We didn’t get any serious sicknesses which is a miracle considering the high risk of malaria in many of the places we went, all the food we ate that wasn’t quite up to Canadian food standards, and all the travel we undertook to climates our bodies were not used to.

Not one piece of luggage was ever lost which is astounding considering we went on more than 25 flights over the last nine months. The only items lost during all our travels were one hat in Huanca Huanca, Peru, and one cable lock which we’re pretty sure ended up somewhere in the Ukraine.

One of the big blessings to share is that we have a place to stay for all of January and February! A friend of a friend opened up his apartment for us to house sit. It is fully furnished, centrally located and ideal for allowing us to jump right into putting the project together instead of worrying about moving our furniture, unpacking and setting up house first. This way, we hit the ground running. Praise God!!

We’re both in good spirits and even though the project is huge and I have had some restless nights worrying about it, we know we have a great team at Hungry for Life helping us out and we have confidence that God will see us through this project. We’re trusting that God will equip us to complete the book and that He will continue to pour out His blessing on us to finish what we started.

Thank you for your continued support. We feel so blessed by all God has provided, and that includes the readers of this blog who have been with us every step of the way.

There’s an old familiar hymn I used to sing growing up: ‘Count your many blessings every doubt will fly,’ and the familiar chorus rings out, ‘Count your blessings, count them one by one / And it will surprise you what the Lord has done’.

I have felt spiritually discouraged lately. Feeling like what I’m doing has no Kingdom value, like I’m just taking up space and writing words and none of it is going to make a difference. I know these thoughts come from the evil one who wants to take us down, defeat us and claim victory in this battle. But knowing in my head these thoughts are not from my King and keeping it from affecting my heart are two different things.

So I spent some time this morning just reflecting on the blessings in the Pockets of Change project these last few months. It is not by our strength or smarts this project will be accomplished or be of Kingdom value. It is through Christ alone. When people ask how we’re doing this, I want to always point them to my King. Because He blesses His people and enables them to do His calling. We’re just thankful He chose us to be a part of it.

We’ve been on the road three of the last six months, between our Canada and abroad travels. We’ve enjoyed the travels and have enjoyed the time in Chilliwack as well. It’s been a good experience thus far and we’re now looking to prepare for our final leg of travel.

Going way back to June, we arrived back from our South America travels at the beginning of the month. After in-depth debriefing and catching up on sleep, we spent a couple weeks sorting through interviews and photos and preparing ourselves for the Mexico trip in July. We also spent a fun-filled week in Cranbrook to attend my 10 year grad reunion and catch up with old friends.

The first two weeks of July were spent in Mexico with a team from Coquitlam Alliance Church. That was an extraordinary trip; we saw great need and great compassion. I sometimes still fall asleep at night thinking about the Tarahamarans and what the missionaries there are doing to help, and feel blessed we got to see and be a part of that ministry if only for a few short days.

Friends of a friend of ours heard we were looking for a place to stay for the two months we were back in Chilliwack between Mexico and our Fall travels. The couple offered to let us stay in their rental apartment for almost no cost at all to us for the time we were back in Canada. This has been a huge answer to prayer for us! From March to mid-July we had been living with other people and we found that four and a half months was a long stretch to not just be together in our own home.

When we arrived back from Mexico, this generous Christian couple had the keys waiting for us. And when we got to the apartment, Corrina (our close working partner at HFL for Pockets of Change) had given us everything needed to settle in: pots and pans, towels and a mattress, dish soap and even some KD – our favourite meal! It was an amazing blessing for us and we have been grateful to stay in this wonderful apartment for the last month and a half.

We also had another Godsend in the form of a brand new storage facility to put all our worldly belongings. We had originally stored them in an old dairy barn. We were grateful for the space and prayed over protection for our stuff as we couldn’t get storage insurance. But the family that opened their storage space to us built a brand new barn complete with locking bay doors and an alarm system and invited us to move everything over. Wow, what a blessing that was!

After settling into our apartment, we spent a week on the island with my family and came back to Chilliwack refreshed and ready to jump in. For the last month and a half I have been sorting through interviews and writing recaps as well as getting into story writing for the actual book.  It’s been a good exercise in discipline for me as I work through the more than 100 interviews conducted so far in this project.

Meanwhile, Justin has jumped off the deep end of the publishing pool, trying to assess what the best route will be for getting the book printed. We have again been blessed in this area. The HFL office is located in the same office building as the Blessings Christian Marketplace head office. One of their employees took a publishing program and has helped us greatly in getting started down this route. She has provided invaluable tips and pointed us in the possible directions we can go.

Outside of the Pockets of Change project, we have been able to do some hiking, spend time with our near and dear friends and were very blessed to be in the country for the birth of our friend’s second child – a moment we would not have wanted to miss!

And now, unbelievably, we need to start preparing for the next leg of our journey. The time has gone by in a blink of an eye and I have to look at my computer clock about two times a day to remind myself it is indeed the end of August. We leave for the Ukraine the third week of September and from there head to Uganda, Kenya and lastly Sri Lanka.

I felt remiss in not sharing all that God has done for us as we do this Pockets of Change project. We have trusted Him to provide for us as we live on no steady income and yet I guess I never pictured what that would look like. To have every need met above and beyond has been faith building for us. And to count our blessings truly does encourage me spiritually. I am struggling still and ask for prayer as we spiritually prepare for our next travel leg. But at the same time as we struggle, we praise God for all He has done to take care of us through this phase of our lives. As another old familiar hymn puts it so aptly: ‘Praise God, from whom ALL blessings flow’!

While we were only gone for five weeks, in some ways it feels like much longer. There was so much we saw, so many incredible stories we heard, that it’s hard to know where to begin to sort through it all.

I feel a deep sense of responsibility over these stories now. I received a gift each time someone opened up their heart to me in an interview, and I don’t take that lightly. I feel at a loss for words to describe what we’ve experienced. It’s a funny spot to be in as a writer, having no words to write.

But we have many stories we want to share with you. We’re back in Chilliwack and have had some time of total rest and relaxation away from the computer, the stories and the project. The focus now is to sort through what we’ve seen, and we would ask for your prayers as we do that .

I want to mention how very much we appreciated those of you that commented or sent us emails along the way. I cannot tell you what a world of good they did for us while we were in unfamiliar places with new faces all the time. While we didn’t have a lot of time to touch base with people back home, hearing your thoughts on what we were hearing and photographing was encouraging.
Our actual travels went well, and we want to thank you all for your prayers as we went from Canada to Haiti to Peru to Ecuador to Mississippi then back home last week. There were lots of opportunities for mishaps and while we did have some travel delays, we always had a place to sleep in safety. We never had one bag go missing and the only thing we lost was my hat. Not bad considering the amount of planes we flew in, vehicles we rode in, beds we slept in and stops we made along the way.

While we are back in Canada for the month of June, I will be posting more stories from the first leg of our journey. Thanks for reading, for praying, and for supporting us as we work on the Pockets of Change project.

Did you know that one in four children living in developing countries are considered underweight and at a risk of having a blighted future because of long-term effects of undernourishment? Meanwhile, there are an estimated one billion people who are overweight, according to the World Health Organization. One in four kids starving, while one billion people eat more junk food than their bodies can handle.

According to the United Nations, more than 500,000 prospective mothers in developing countries die annually in childbirth or of complications from pregnancy. But in the United States alone, The U.S. Centre for Disease Control conservatively estimates there were more than 800,000 abortions in one year. A child born in a developing country is over 13 times more likely to die within the first five years of life than a child born in an industrialized country, yet hundreds of thousands of children in North America are killed before they even have a chance to live.

These types of statistics bother me. It bothers me that I can complain about the temperature of my coffee being not quite right while around the world, people drink unclean water just to survive.

It bothers me that I can choose to have or not have children, in clean safe sterilized hospitals, while around the world more than half a million women die because they do not have the same options for safe preganancies and birth.

It bothers me that while me and my fellow countrymen grow fat, children die of starvation.

It bothers me.

So, I am doing something about it. How? God has gifted my husband and I with photography and writing skills. We are preparing to travel and document the changed lives and changed communities that happen when people who are bothered take time out of their lives, and bother to stand up and make a difference.

In less than 48 hours, we fly to Haiti. I’m bothered by that too.

We are back to our home base of Ryan and Jenn Toyota’s place in Chilliwack, and feel so relieved and grateful to get to spend our days here as we prepare to leave the country. It is hard to believe, but we only have 11 more sleeps until we leave for Haiti!

It seems the Lord already knew, before I humbly came to Him early this morning, just what I needed to hear. It took forever for me to get to sleep last night, then I was awake again early this morning. That is not characteristic for me, and I usually find when I awake either in the middle of the night or early in the morning it’s because I need to spend time with my Lord. So I got up this morning, feeling heavy burdened with the weight of this project. I tried to pray, and nothing came. So I went to the family room, sat by the fire and began to read.

I have been making my way through 1st and 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, and now Philippians,  as our pastor had been doing a series on Ephesians before we left and I wanted to personally study the books surrounding that one.

I opened up where I left off last, at Philippians 3 and 4. The verse that stood out to me not only gave me a renewed sense of hope but also reprimanded me because of how easily I forget that Justin and I have never been, are not, and will never be the ones in control of the Pockets of Change project. It is His will we are doing, not our own, and He has given us the strength to move forward whether my weak self feels ready or not.

“… I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength.” Phillipians 4:12-13