So for those of you reading who don't know, which is probably a lot of you, I actually have already been to Malaysia, and to even better my own statement, I lived in Malaysia.

Growing up I was privileged enough to live in Southeast Asia because of my Dad's job as a construction manager. Our family moved back to the States when I started school in the 7^th grade, but my 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th grade years were spent in Malaysia. Now I know I was young then, but I was old enough to remember the country fairly well, better than I remember any of the other countries I lived in growing up.

Coming back to Malaysia for me has been an interesting experience. After we landed in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia we had to take several subways and Metrorail's to get to our bus headed for Georgetown, Malaysia. The crazy part of that debacle wasn't jumping in and out of numerous trains while my stomach felt like it was going to explode, but instead feeling like I was right back in my childhood twelve years ago. I literally stood in places I stood as a twelve-year-old boy and looked at the same buildings I saw with twelve-year-old eyes. It felt a little bit like a dream, but I would have to quickly snap out of it, as I had to head count and make sure I didn't lose anyone on my team as we scrambled onto the platforms. Talk about being torn in two! Not to mention my heart racing because this is my LAST MONTH on the world race. Basically there's a lot going on up here in this little head of mine.

All the sights and sounds feel like home to me. This is the only place on the race I've felt really comfortable. Even the calls to prayer screaming from the three or four mosques near by give me a sense of comfort as I heard that sound everyday growing up here. I actually realized that I like to write music in minor keys and with a style very similar to the sound of the Muslim calls to prayer. The style has stuck with me even though the songs I write are for Christ. The people are just as I remembered too. To me it feels like I'm home, and yet I know I don't belong here anymore.

Our ministry here in Georgetown is working with a homeless soup kitchen called Kawan, which means "friend" in Malay. We open our doors around 10 AM and provide tea and breakfast along with an optional Bible study and worship for those who are interested, which I was able to lead worship for and give a message at yesterday. One of my favorite things about the race is that you have to be open and available to act. Yesterday morning I was just sweeping one of the rooms at Kawan and another worker there named Hannah asked me to help lead worship for the Bible study. I told her I'd love to and so I played a few songs as we started the study. She opened in prayer after that and while praying she asked the Lord to lead me as I gave the message this morning. WHAT!? This was the first I had heard about giving a message and I was about to have to give one in 10 seconds when she finished praying! I asked the Lord quickly to lead me, as I had no idea what to say. He of course took control and gave me the words. I spoke on love and other issues related to it, basically just telling them what Christ was teaching me. I spoke without pause for maybe 30 to 40 minutes. If we give our trust and put our faith in the Lord he will guide us without any worries. So no worries mates!

Kawan also provides showers, a lunch, and places to sleep later on in the day. The ministry is a lot of fun and we get to interact with a lot of people. We also get a lot of opportunities to talk to the other believers there and encourage and learn from each other. It's a great last ministry for me on the race. It's not too hard, but is still pushing me in boldness and love.

If you ever get the chance to come to Malaysia you have to visit Georgetown. This place is so much fun, and the food and people are amazing. Check out Kawan too, you won't regret it!

Thanks for reading! I pray God blesses you and shows you his love for you today. Seek his face. Love you guys!

Australia:

1.     It's the dustiest place I've ever been, and I thought Africa was bad.

2.     Darwin, Australia reminds me a lot of South Florida, so I kind of felt at home.

3.     The waterfalls are amazing! I hoped all race to run into these. Thank you Lord!

4.     The ocean at night under a full moon with a soft steady breeze and a half-mile beach is awe-inspiring.

5.     Sharing a single room with a kitchen and one bathroom with 10 guys and it still smelling good is a miracle and a fuuuun time!

6.     Fixing a rat and roach infested house for a new family of Aborigines to live in is disgusting and a blessing.

7.     Being a part of an Aboriginal church where the Spirit shows up powerfully and many people are healed is an experience impossible to forget.

8.     Baptizing a brother in a freshwater spring is sick with it!

9.     Going swimming at a free water park with Aboriginal kids where we cook 80 to 100 hotdogs, play worship songs, put on skits, give messages, and play GROUNDIES! is too much fun.

10. Trying to get internet at Macca's (McDonalds in Aussie speak) is painful and yet somehow delightfully fattening.

11. Yeah

12. Kayaking through Katherine Gorge spotting some wallabies and crocodiles, and getting roasted by the sun, balla!

Love, you can't live without it, I guarantee it.

"I[Love] have come that they may have life, and have it to the full." (John 10:10)

I've had a lot of questions growing up in my faith, a few of which include: what is this war supposedly going on? How am I supposed to fight in it? How do I move mountains or do anything miraculous for Jesus' glory? How do I love? I've found some answers...

I've talked a little bit about love in one of my other blogs, and I discussed how to grow in love, but I didn't really describe how to show that love through your life, and the reason was because I wasn't honestly sure how. I understood that "love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud..." (1 Corinthians 13), but I didn't understand why love was that way, what was the point, why care, and how to show it? Am I loving because I'm told to or because I want to? But even more than that, am I loving because I want to or because there's a reason I want to? Yes I'm suggesting there's an ulterior motive in loving people, but it's not for my gain.

After searching I feel the Lord has given me the answer to how to love, and it's by fighting. Even before I started the race, way back at training camp, people were prophesying over me that I was a warrior, which the Lord also made very clear to me in India, but I never truly understood what kind of warrior I was supposed to be. I mean what is a spiritual warrior anyway? Is it someone who prays intently in the spirit at all times and drives out demons and heals people? Yes, actually that is part of it. I understood what I was fighting, the forces of The Enemy, but I didn't know what I was fighting for, and no it's not love, it's the origin of love: the heart. A spiritual warrior fights for the hearts of men. Love is one of our weapons we use to fight for the hearts of people along with the Sword of the Spirit. Every time we do a kind gesture in love towards someone it's war on the enemy fighting for the heart of that person, and every time we do evil we find ourselves fighting for the wrong side. Yes, you can actually think of it like that. Now we mess up and fall short, but there is something you need to know if you have a relationship/love affair with the King of kings, your heart is good. "He made no distinction between us and them, for he [Jesus] purified their hearts by faith." (Acts 15:19). When we mess up we often jump to "I'm a terrible person, how could a good person do that?" That's a lie the enemy is yelling in our ears. Just remember your heart truly is good because the Lord has replaced your old heart with a new one in which he resides. "I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith." (Ephesians 3:16-17). Who you are isn't bad, just that one action. Turn against the devil and cast him out, don't listen to his lies a second longer.

Society puts a great deal of emphasis on the heart, but the picture's been skewed, misarranged like a jumbled puzzle with pieces missing. Most people including me don't fully understand the importance of their heart and what it can even do. Did you know your heart does more than feel? "But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart." (Luke 2:19) Mary was thinking with her heart about the shepherds spreading word of what the angels said to them concerning her child. I know that sounds confusing, but the point is this: she was thinking with her heart! We've been dooped! There are many other examples too, but the point is I've been fed a lie my whole life that only feelings and emotions come from my heart. Movies, music, literature and others all put so much emphasis on the importance of following your heart and feeling boldly, but there is so much more that the heart can do. The heart is a home. It's where the Lord resides in us if we know him. We can think, communicate, and feel with our hearts. We talk to the Lord with our hearts. The Lord doesn't look at people's actions; he looks at the heart. "Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart." (1 Samuel 16:7). The Lord cares about our bodies and he wants us to be healthy, but he will put us through pain and suffering in order to get our hearts healthy and centered with him, just read the whole book of Job. The Enemy knows the importance of the heart and he's working overtime to imprison our hearts, yes even believer's hearts. Just because you believe in Christ doesn't make it all easy sailing, we have to fight for our hearts, luckily we have a man who has all power and authority in heaven and on earth also fighting for our hearts. The best weapon the devil has right now in my opinion against our hearts is the lie that our hearts are only for emotions and feelings. If that is all your heart is good for you are ensnared. Your heart isn't free and you can't do all the Lord requires of you. Ask him to first show you the importance of your heart and what it can do, and then ask him to free you. Ask the Lord to show you the lies you've believed about your heart and then demand freedom from the devil and cast him out in Jesus name.

I know now the rest of my life is focused on one task, fight for the hearts of people. Did you know you are your heart?  "As water reflects the face, so a man's heart reflects the man." (Proverbs 27:19). When people see your actions and hear your words they don't see what you were thinking about saying or doing, but what your heart wanted. We are a reflection of our hearts. If you're not seeking Christ, then your heart is most likely seeking the world. We are not our minds, they just help us process and take in information; we are our hearts. God cares more for you heart than even you do and he's willing to die for it. He didn't send his Son to die for our bodies, but for our hearts. God puts it this way: "Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life." (Proverbs 4:23). Before you do anything else on this earth in any way, the Lord tells us to guard our hearts. Do you see how important our hearts are to him. Before we eat, before we find shelter, before we buy groceries, etc. we guard our hearts. How do you guard your heart? Same way you guard anything of value, keep it protected in a safe place. That safe place is in the Lord's hands. We keep our hearts directed toward him and he will keep us safe, not physically always, but spiritually.

We love by fighting. Love is an act of war. We fight the Enemy. We fight for hearts. We guard our hearts in the Lord. Amen.

Growing up in a Christian home I've been told all my life about Christ and all the deeds he did and how he can change your life. If I just trusted in Him with my salvation, then everything would be peachy at least in the life to come. Not that my parents actually taught this, but my whole life I never really thought about this life and Christ, I only thought about heaven and the Lord. He was my way out after this life…AFTER not now. If life is only really about the hereafter, then Lord take me now. I mean what's the point of living. Some would say it's to bring others to the Lord so they can be with Him in heaven. So my only purpose on this earth is to tell others about Christ and heaven? BORING! That's not living, that's dying slowly.

Thank God that is not the truth. “The thief comes to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” -John 10:10  Life to the full people. You've heard this before I know, but do you get it? Do you really get it? I had heard it a million times before, but I'm only now discovering the truth. Life to the full isn't just talking about Christ. Yes we our commissioned to preach the Good News of Christ, but Christ said something else first, “'My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.'” �"John 15:12-13 Jesus doesn't stress preaching about him as the most important thing to do, he stresses love. Take the shackles off. You don't have to try to do this or that, to make yourself busy about the “Lord's” business. Are you really sure what you're doing is even the Lord's business? What did Jesus himself say to do? Love. That's it. Everything you could ever accomplish comes after this. If you haven't done the “action” in love, you've wasted your energy. Many people busy themselves trying to serve the Lord because they think he wants them to. All he wants is for us to love. So for some that means going to the jungles of the Congo and for others it means to just talk to your neighbor who beats his wife and love him instead of judging him. Forget trying to heal someone through prayer if you don't love them, God won't show up. So what does it mean to love someone?

I find it really hard to describe true love. It's so abstract and feels different a lot of the time, but I'll describe it like this: to feel like the other person feels and to feel for that person the way the Lord does. It's putting yourself in the Lord's shoes so to speak and feeling for that person the way the Lord feels. Jesus doesn't care what anyone has done in the past; he's bigger than that. He says love me and I'll make you clean, whiter than snow. We need to see people as souls and spirits the Lord passionately loves and literally would die to have them with him. Would you die for a stranger so that they could see and feel tangibly Christ's love? That's what we're called to live for rash, intense, crazy, violent love. We need to pray for the Lord's heart for the world. To be broken hearted by a complete stranger's story and brought to our knees in prayer for the Lord to intercede for them to bring healing and wholeness. Interested?

Life as a believer seems a little more exciting when you know the truth. The question I've had is how do you get to this place? I want so badly to feel this kind of love for the world and to act out of pure love instead of selfishness, to honestly die to myself daily. How do you get there though? You can't just flip a switch and suddenly your heart becomes putty and you burn with passion for the hurting. Trust me I've prayed for it. But, I have noticed my heart soften over the last 9 months and I didn't understand how until a few days ago. How it slipped past me for so long I have no idea, but I've found the answer. The answer is time. If you want to have the Lord's heart you have to do the time. You have to spend time with love to be love. I've asked myself many times why I'm not healing the sick and raising the dead yet. I mean I've devoted 9 solid months to the Lord and I'm just now starting to see small healings and feel a little of his heart, but if I had to be honest with you I haven't spent the kind of quality time with the Lord that he wants, and that's why I've been so slow in my development. The more time you spend just sitting and talking to the Lord and waiting, the closer you become and the more you will receive from him. The Lord can't risk giving us authority until he knows we can be trusted, and the only way to be trusted is for him to know we are filled with his love. So the answer is to spend personal alone time with the Lord talking to and listening to him, everything else will follow. So preach the Good News everywhere you go, but know why you are doing it. You are doing it because you passionately love the people you are telling and you want their lives to be filled with joy in the Lord without pain now and their eternal future secure in the fullness of Christ. This is why we tell people about Christ, because of his overpowering love, the kind of love that makes you sick to your stomach unless you share it. To walk in love you must first abide in love.

Christ's love and that's it.

We give all we've got and find at the end of the day it wasn't enough or just barely enough to scrape by. So we start to get a little restless, a little uneasy, something's up. Something just isn't right and we can't seem to put our finger on it. We're doing what we've been told, we're even trying to do it for the Lord, but our mind seems to slip. And as we fall we start to think about what those other guys are doing over there. They seem to be getting it. They seem to be prospering and things are going great. What's their secret? Why can we get a little of that? WHAAM! We hit the ground and jealousy bleeds out. But this isn't a minor cut, you can't just wipe this one and slap a bandaid on it. What we've got here is a serious flesh wound. We're going to need a doctor for this, but we can't seem to remember the way to the hospital. So we sit here in our jealousy as it pours out of us, and we cry and moan for ourselves. Oh, why did this happen to us? How did we even get here? How do we get out of this pool of pain? When those around us try to help us up we turn away in shame and stare endlessly into our own pool of jealousy widening around us. It's all we can really see anymore. We don't even seem to really remember what the ground looked like before we fell. Someone passes by to help us up, but like the others we turn him away, except this guy doesn't give up asking. He's wearing something different then the others, but we don't recognize it at first and he keeps asking to help us up. This is really annoying. We wish he would go away. He's standing in our pool now, he's close enough to see more clearly. He's a doctor. Come on man, can't you see what we're dealing with here? This pool is like an ocean! He reaches out his hand, and a flash enters our mind of a time before we fell, it's those other people who were prospering. Maybe this doctor knows those guys. Finally, we've made up our minds. We're sick and tired of sitting in this filth, we want out. We grab the Doc's hand and he pulls us out onto the clean ground, where our wound seems to have healed up. We feel our strength return as the Doc grips our arm firmly. As we walk away from our pool our joy returns to us and we feel anticipation for what's coming further down the road. The Doc lets go, takes a step away, turns and says “Follow me.” How can we not follow our hero? And as we follow him down a new road we suddenly find ourselves in the midst of the those other guys. Remember, those ones we always wanted to be? The Doc stops and says “Stay here with me.” So we do.

Cute story right. We'll this was my experience this month. Jealousy will eat you from the inside out and murder any option you had of doing anything worthwhile. Jealousy has been one of my biggest enemies on this race and one of the enemy's best tactics. It all stems from selfishness and comparison. What do I want? Why are they getting more than me? WHO CARES!? The Lord didn't call me to live a life of luxury and happiness. He has called me to love others the way he loves, which means being selfless and putting others first, to be happy for those the Lord is blessing and find joy in our suffering so His will is accomplished.

Walk with me on this. We are not our own. We were bought with a price. We will no longer live this life for ourselves in anyway. We will walk with the Lord and let Him lead us into His promised land, which on earth may mean serious strain, but everlasting joy and rest in heaven. Take it from a guy who has been there and messed up big time. Imagine all those around me who could have known or felt the Lord through me, but were denied that experience because of my own self-absorption. And don't tell me I'm being hard on myself because this is heaven or hell we're talking about, and that isn't something to mess around with. But let me tell you the best part. Whether you know the Lord or not, He's always there, and He's reaching his hand out into your pool, no matter what it is. I grabbed His hand this month and he set me free. I found peace. And when I found his peace I literally felt like my eyes were opened and I could see clearly again. I felt like I had been looking at all the people around me through some kind of haze, and when it lifted they came back into focus. Finally I could be useful to the Lord and those around me. I wanted all of you to know this so if you find yourself stuck, you're not alone. I went through it and I'm sure I will again. Just turn to Christ and ask for peace and joy to be returned to you. He's more the able and willing to give it, as long as you give up yourself to Him. Christ doesn't want our efforts, he wants our hearts. Stop trying and try surrendering. I promise you will find something unexpected. I love you and I hope this hit you where it hurts, in that place you've been running from, so now you can give it up. Lord, give me peace.

You know what's really frustrating…indecision. I feel like I have more of that in my life than ever before. I can't seem to make up my mind about anything, and I mean anything. I have a million questions floating around in my head and I have no idea what the answers are, and for some reason or another I don't hear an answer from the Lord. I believe most of this is just because He wants me to learn patience, but at month 8 on the world race I'm running down. I'll just be honest. I'm tired. Emotionally I'm tired, spiritually I'm excited and tired, and physically I am most definitely tired. A lot of people said South Africa was a month of rest and rejuvenation, but I don't really think it was for me. It was a testing ground though.

I believe the Lord wanted to see if I could still seek him in a setting which was so similar to the States it wasn't funny, and I found I could, even more so than I can in a tent in Thailand. I feel ready for America, and yet I still have 3 more months to go on the race after this one. It's not that I want out at all or that I'm done, it's just that I'm ready. But I know the Lord still has a lot to teach me on this trip to further equip me for when I get home. I've found that the only thing that keeps me going isn't the love and support I get from my team members or family, but the love I receive straight from the Lord spoken through the Holy Spirit. I literally would fall apart I believe if it wasn't for Him. Sometimes though my mind is so full I don't think to ask Him for anything, but thankfully the Father is always thinking about me and will use others to reach me if He can't Himself.

Yesterday I was given a word from a friend of how the Father spoke to them about me. The person said that during a personal time of prayer the Lord stopped mid conversation and turned to look at me and then said to the person “I really love Dave, like I really love him.” Just when I was feeling beaten down and tired the Lord comes along and fills me back up again just by saying He loves me. I guess I'm a cheap date, but I don't know what else you could want than to be told the Father really loves you personally. I've been so distracted recently by the busyness around me that I haven't spent much personal time with the Lord, and I miss Him. Do you ever feel like that? Like you just really miss your best friend? The best part is He's always waiting for you to come back. He's just a word away.

So what's this all about? Nothing. There's no point to this blog besides to tell you what's really going on in this noggin. I'll type out a blog about our South Africa ministry and our Thailand ministry soon, but I thought it would be more important to tell you my personal journey. I guess I do more of that in my blogs anyway. Sorry for not being more detailed about the ministries I've been working with, but I see blogs as like a public journal, and I don't write about ministry in my journal. So that's my bad. Please continue to pray for me. Pray for strength and rejuvenation. Pray for more heavenly fire. I want to end on a positive note, so let's make it an A �" AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. Just kidding. I am having tons of fun here in Thailand. This place is beautiful and so are the people. This month Team Waka is paired up with Team Transformers 2:12 and we're laughing our heads off all the time, so no worries. Thanks for keeping up with this crazy journey. God bless.