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**