Around Christmas, I found God leading my heart to missions in

South Africa.

I designed a fundraising event called
walk till you drop.

      
In walk till you drop, I would get people to sponsor me some money
per kilometer to walk as far as I can, not until I give up because I'm sore, but until I can't possibly walk anymore. I would leave Camrose

Alberta heading north on April 27^th, and have someone following me by vehicle.

            Here are the reasons that I initially started this fundraiser.

1. It would be cool to be
intense and crazy by doing this.

2. I was apprehensious about asking people for large amounts of money, and I would sidestep the issue by having them donate tiny sums of money per kilometer and be faced with the sum afterwards.

3. I lacked faith that God would provide for me in fundraising. This was an attempt to take getting to
Africa and put it under my own physical power. If people weren't donating enough, I would simply walk to the North Pole and make what sponsors I had pay up big.

Then God took a hold of my heart in the walk till you drop. The day after getting the idea of walk till you drop I hurt my knee jumping down a flight of stairs, and later developed a crazy back pain which made it hard to stand straight. A series of other humbling events quickly showed me that I was not the one who planned my life, and it was not my life to plan.

            As soon as I surrendered my
walk till you drop to God, thing s began to fall into place for it, people began supporting it, and before it started I suddenly had $2000 Cdn before it even began! The day before the walk, April 26^th, I went for a walk with my good friend Francois Hugo. He told me in amazement about how the day before his mother had destroyed her ankle stepping in a hole, but when he prayed over her, she was nearly instantly healed and her pain was completely gone. I asked him then and there to pray for my knee and back to be healed for the walk. We sat down and prayed, and I couldn't feel anything. I was so scared that it would hinder the marathon, but I held some blind little string of trust that God would be faithful to Francois and I asking in Jesus' name.

            The next day I was walking to the statue of Martin Luther on Campus, the starting point for my
Marathon, and I remember thinking how my knee still hurt. But the very first step of the walk, it was gone completely! I didn't have any pain in my knees or back the entire marathon!

            That day and the next I walked 71 kilometers without sleeping, over 17 and half hours, and never once did they hurt me. When I dropped on the pavement of highway 14 at the end of the marathon, my knees instantly seized up and could hardly move. Then my dad helped me into the truck and I slept.

            I feel my knee and my back sometimes now, but that can't even compare to the feeling of realizing that they were fine on the walk, and would be as long as I was walking the marathon for the Lord's work in
Africa. After I got home - and my knees aren't
 seized up now - I was rummaging through all my stuff, packing what I wouldn't need until I was back from
Africa. I came across one of my notebooks and a something I had written while I felt God telling me to prepare my heart for a year as a floor leader in the freshman dorms at

University of
Alberta. It was written 4 months before I even knew I would do the walk till you drop.

                        I want to run your marathon

                        In your steps Lord. In your steps

                        I will not follow your selfish courses

                        You show me the way God

                        I will thank you for my marathon

                        I will thank you for my prize

                        All my days

                        I will not question your paths

                        Just lead me on,

Through the twists, and the spots it seems

Another way would be easier.

Your prize is my goal

Please take my burdens God

And give me living water,

For my aches and pains

I want to live a life worthy

                        Of that I cannot be worthy of on my own.

                        You know my troubles

                        And my inmost thoughts

                        My ways, habits, and future

                        I will pray praise and thank you

                        Lead me on, show me how

                        No matter how good it may seem

                        I need your help now