One step closer...

We are one step closer to becoming real missionaries. We spent this past week in Fishers, Indiana at MTI (Missionary Training Institute) which is our last week of training before we can go to the field! It was a very long week but incredibly rewarding. Each day was complete with 4 different sessions on various topics that will help prepare us for the ministry we are going to do. To give you a snap shot, these included Intercultural Communication, Missiology, Contextualization, Ecclesiology, Conflict Resolution, Personal Security, Hostage Survival, Evangelism, Church Planting and MANY more!! We came home last night and slept for 12 hours...I think our brains needed a little bit of rest. We enjoyed getting to the know the staff of Global Partners that will be behind us and getting to know other missionaries!

We had a small group at our training. There were 3 other girls-Lauren Gross who is going to Zambia, Nicole Schara and Katie Hawkins who are going to Albania. It is so neat to be able to meet other people our age who are all passionate about going and serving the Lord in other parts of the world. I love being able to see how God has given us each different passions and gifts and to see the way he is going to use them to further his kingdom. The 5 of us stayed at the Shunem House which is run by Jim and Jeanette Vermilya who are former missionaries (they're pretty fantastic!). Katie and Nicole are making a promo video for Shunem that we can put on here later!

Now the only thing that stands between us and Australia is a few thousand dollars and a visa! We still need a little less than $6,000 a year. We have 5 churches scheduled between now and March 6th. Thank you so much to all of you who already support us! If you feel like the Lord is putting on your heart to become a part of our team, you can either email us at schwarze12@gmail.com or click the link on the side on our blog! And the visa...we are hoping to turn in our application at the end of next week because we are still waiting on a few documents to return to us. Please pray that things will go smoothly and we will receive our visas quickly. After that, we are free to book our plane tickets :) We can't believe that everything is coming together so quickly. It has seemed like a dream for so long and now it's actually happening :) Thank you all for your prayers and support!!

**Our official name tags**

**At training**

**The missionaries at training-Katie, Nicole, Lauren, Sam and Sean**

**Playing Settlers of Catan during lunch**

He is so good!!!

Are you ever just completely humbled by God's goodness? Ever so completely blown away that you are speechless?? Well...that's is exactly how we are right now! Are you ready for the good news?! A family from our church in Australia has offered for us to live with them for FREE for 2 years. That means that we no longer have to raise money for our housing! They took care of somewhere around $28,000 in our budget! This means that we have raised about 80% of our money. Crazy right?! We only have to raise about $7,000 more a year for a total of $14,000. Are you as amazed too???

As you've read in our blog, we were almost completely out of all of our resources. We did not know where to turn next and God showed up big time. Sean and I were constantly thinking of different ways God could perform a miracle and provide this money. We never even thought of this option! God's pretty creative, isn't he??

Thank you so much for your prayers! We are praising God right now for the way he continues to provide for us :)

Happy New Year!

Here are some photos from our Christmas Travels!

**We're with Sean's family at a Murder Mystery dinner (SO FUN) in Pigeon Forge, TN**

**Sam's family at Christmas***

**Us and Bowden (my sister's dog)**

We hope that you all had a wonderful holiday. We had a great time visiting all of our family! In the matter of 2 weeks we were in 13 states and drove for 53 hours! Needless to say, we're a little tired of traveling! But it was great to be able to spend a lot of time with friends and family.

Before Christmas, I asked you to pray for Sean to find a job once we returned to Marion. Well...thank you so much for your prayers! God is so faithful and provided Sean with a job our first day back! He is now working at Tree of Life which is a bookstore/coffee shop. He is excited about the job.

Right now we are 53% funded, which is awesome in the short amount of time that we have had, but obviously we're not leaving next month. We have had a few church cancellations which is discouraging, but we know that the Lord will grant us direction in what to do next. We have 5 dates set up so far this year. Although we are sad we're not leaving next month, we are still excited to be spending more time with our family. There are a lot of good things that can come out of our time still in the US.

I think our biggest prayer request right now is that the Lord would show us what to do next. Thank you so much for your support!!