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8 Weeks in Long Beach!

by Puck

Yesterday marked 8 weeks since we moved our family across the country to Long Beach, CA. The time here has certainly flown by.

I traveled to Long Beach 2 weeks before we moved, having called to set appointments to see 70 different houses. Of those 70, I was able to set appointments to see 15 of them in 3 days. And I had to do it on my own – as Kelly had to stay in NC with the kids. Talk about trust! If a house was a good candidate, I would FaceTime with her to walk her through it. This resulted in a top 5 list. I applied for all 5 and then flew back to NC to finish packing and close on our house. Just 7 days before we moved, the Lord answered our prayers. He gave us the house he wanted us to rent! It is the perfect house, in the perfect neighborhood, in the perfect part of town for our family. I’m not sure that I’ve ever been so keenly aware of needing the Lord to provide something as in this situation. We had plane tickets purchased, a moving truck reserved, and a move out date for our old house. It was real. God was faithful.

Our connecting flight from Charlotte to Phoenix was Emily and Silas’ first experience on a plane. Overall they did pretty well. It was a long 4 hours, but it wasn’t bad at all. Ask me some other time about how I left 2 of our suitcases in the security check line… The 3.5 hour layover in Phoenix started to wear on us. Missed naps and uncomfortable arrangements add up. We were still hanging in there, though.

The 1 hour flight from Phoenix to Long Beach was 4x shorter than the first flight but 4x more difficult. Silas was inconsolable. We couldn’t pass him lap to lap due to a certain restriction, and we were policed by an overly stiff flight attendant.

But then we landed and walked down the stairs from the plan to the tarmac and walked into the airport. We made a quick exit into the late afternoon breeze and setting sun. It was amazingly refreshing – and then we were met by our whole team! It was such a beautiful and unexpected welcome!

It took us 8 minutes to drive to our new home – which Kelly had never even seen (as I didn’t even FaceTime her when I first saw it). We fell in love with the house and knew immediately it was exactly what we had hoped for!

My dad drove our 26′ moving truck pulling our SUV by himself all the way from NC to Long Beach over 4 days and after some tough delays on the last day, he made it around 10pm that first night.

It had taken us 2 full days of packing to load the truck, and in subzero windchill the whole time. The local crew from Bridges Church that helped us unload got everything in the house in 27 minutes!

From that moment until now has been 8 weeks of settling in. We have had about as soft of a landing as we could hope for. The Lord has been so gracious to us.

Below are a few pictures of our life and ministry in SoCal so far. It is such a joy to be in the place where God has called us.

If you’d like to receive additional updates about our work in ministry, you can sign up for that here. If you would like to give to support us as we work to establish 500 missionary teams across California towards No Place Left, you can do that here.

Media, Training

Our 4Fields Training Process

by Puck

At first encounter, our training process can sound complicated or foreign, even despite the fact that it is simple and elegant. It is reproducing all over North America and the nations.

Our teammate Rick Preato created this graphic to illustrate our process. I have also included a Spanish version that Don Waybright shared that was translated by Allan Lorenza.

If you are interested in any part of this training, please reach out to me!

My Life

House Hunting in Long Beach

by Puck

Today I’m flying out of Charlotte to Long Beach to see 15 houses over the next 3 days! Lord willing, I will have our new California home secured by the end of next week! Please pray that the Lord will provide the one home he has for us out there!

  • Our house is selling
  • We have our flights to move on December 1
  • We have our moving truck
  • We have my dad’s flight home from California

Now we just need to find our new home!

Media, My Life

Our House is on the Market!

by Puck
And just like that, our house is on the market!

One of the major projects we have been working on for some time now is getting our house on the market to be sold. Saying it has been a challenge to get it ready while chasing two small kids and taking care of everything else is a bit of an understatement. 

This house has become our home. We have raised our kids here. We have hosted church here. We have tested our maximum occupancy limit with college students. We have filled this place with memories of all kinds. In many ways, Boone has become more of our home than anywhere else, and this house is really home. 

It has been a wonderful season here. It is bittersweet to consider that this season is coming to a close, but we are so excited for the next stage in our lives and calling – as hard as it will be to leave Boone, it will be so exciting to finally get settled in Long Beach, CA!

If you would like to join our ministry support team to help us make the our cross-country move to the West Coast, you can hit the button below!

Join our Ministry Support Team
  • Front Porch
  • Back Deck Patio Set
  • Back Deck
  • View from the back yard
  • View from the neighborhood road
  • Living Room
  • Living Room & Dining Room
  • View from Front Door
  • Dining Room
  • Kitchen
  • Kitchen
  • Master bed
  • Master bed
  • Master bath
  • Nursery
  • Bedroom
  • Guest bath
  • Hallway in Basement
  • Basement Hall & Laundry
  • Basement woodstove
  • Basement living space
  • Basement living space
  • Office in Basement
  • Garage
  • Garage
  • Back yard
  • Back yard
See the MLS Listing
My Life

Beach Vacation 2018

by Puck

We spent all of last week at Holden Beach, NC. This was our 4th year in a row going to Holden. It has definitely been a crowd-pleaser. This year we had more beach to ourselves than ever before and an unbelievable house to stay in. This is a big week for the Young family, and we are SUPER grateful that we get to do this. 

This year, Emily confronted her fears of the water – both at the pool and in the ocean. She has always been afraid of it, but this year, she decided that she wanted to change that. By Day 2 she let us take her in the pool to kick around, she sat in the surf, and she was “body boarding,” which means she would stand on a boogie board at the shore and lets low tide waves flow over her feet. By the end of the trip, she was LOVING all of it. 

We are pretty sure Silas is already the lone extrovert in our little family. Time will tell, but he always wanted to be where the party was. He loved sand on his toes, and he didn’t bat an eye when we walked him around in the pool. 

On our last full day, I went with Kelly’s dad and brother to take “the bigs” (the bigger kids – there were 7 kids ranging from 5 1/2 to under 2mo) up to Southport to ride the ferry across to Fort Fischer to go to the aquarium. That was an awesome adventure for all of us!

It is such a joy to have these experiences with our kids at such young ages. They are so fun and watching them grow and develop in a true blessing. Now that we are back, we are digging in and working out our plans for what needs to get done so that we can move our family to Long Beach late this fall!

Media

Puck & Chuck Test

by Puck

Chuck Wood and I had a good time testing out some software for doing interviews. There are some amazing tools available to us for serving Jesus and his people.

4 Fields, Baptism, Disciplemaking, Harvest Story

Breakthrough in Quebec

by Puck

Our team of 6 has been in Quebec for the better part of a week now. Yesterday, two of our students led a guy named Maxim to Christ. Today they baptized him in the river!

Quebec averages around only 0.5% evangelical. It is one of the most lost places in North America. Tonight, we are praising God for new life in the kingdom in Quebec!

4 Fields, Decentralization, NPL Boone

NC City Leaders

by Puck

We’ve been pursuing #NoPlaceLeft for almost 3 years in Boone. In that time our work on campus has spread into the community and into the Hispanic population. Things like this tend to spread and we want to help healthy things spread. The same thing is happening across North Carolina, among many other places.

One of the foundational structures that helps us to develop leaders and support them over the long haul is what we refer to as a coaching call. They often look like this. These men represent kingdom work happening in most of the major regions of North Carolina. We will spend 3 months meeting weekly and then shift to quarterly group coaching, called Iron on Iron.

It’s all free and there are no positional leadership roles. I love the purity of faith and conviction in these men. They are kingdom giants.

4 Fields, Decentralization, Disciplemaking, NPL Boone

Network Effect: One Campus to Another

by Puck

There are some unique opportunities presented when working in a collegiate context. This summer we sent a few of our students to serve with other leaders on other campuses. Two of them went to Charlotte, NC to serve with Caleb Sprinkle, one of our student leader alumni. One went to Miami, FL to serve with “Scuba” Steve Carswell, one of the key leaders for NPL Florida.

  • Matthew and another student (L) led a student from Angola (R) to Christ!
  • Matthew and Scuba (R) trained a couple of believers they found at FIU.

In the course of planning for and sending these students, the network effect became more clear to me. Both of the leaders who hosted our students are a part of the No Place Left community, so I already knew we were all on the same page. Not only was there no slow-down or vision-disconnect, our 3 guys were able to jump right in, and get to work. Alternatively, the hosts were able to turn our students loose to do what we all already do and they were also able to do some coaching and development with them that helped tremendously.

Ultimately, it is the vision that makes this possible. We associate with one another not because we like each other (we actually do love one another deeply), or because we are paid to, but because we have the same belief system with the No Place Left vision at the center of it and an agreed-upon clear path in place. It is amazing that we can parachute into one another’s networks and get right to work as co-laborers and learn from one another on the job.