Here we go

I'm sure that you have been where I am now. In a chair. One that is on a plane or in a car or on a boat or a motorcycle or even a train that is pointed in a direction that you don't know if you are ready to go. Your heart caught in the tension of the excitement and sheer terror of what you have done. Wondering how you got here. Knowing there is no way out. As if your mind is suddenly awakened from a sleep that your body did not recognize. Like when you finally jump off the side of the cliff overlooking the glassy water and fate gives you a few seconds to turn over your choices in your head. This time the temperature of the water is the last thing on your mind. Plane flights are cliff dives turned into hours. And jumps like this require months of suspense. All this to say: I'm not quite sure how we got here. But I am so excited. I think for me it somehow has to be blamed on a million moments culminating into one. I was sitting in a chair just like I am now. One that was on a boat. And maybe it was the combination of brain freeze from eating frozen yogurt too fast as an island was turning from a mountain into a hill into a dot on an ocean and a racing wall of water from the sky was erasing all my canvas and turning every color gray. There was nothing special about the moment. The yogurt was cheap. My skin was still cold and wet from me thinking it would be a good idea to go outside on a boat on an ocean in a storm. The painful piercing of the rain and the ferocity of the wind that felt like it could at any whim lift me from the deck was unlike anything I had ever felt. But sitting in that chair I somehow knew that the days of speaking of what I would someday do had ended. I felt a leap inside my heart. A leap off of a cliff.

So here we are. We--Kati Hultman, Katie Beth, and I (Travis Frugé)-- have all decided to take this leap together. We are starting children's homes in India called Ashraya Mission. Ashraya is the transliteration of the Hindi word for Refuge. In three months we will be in India looking at properties in Calcutta and New Delhi. We plan to have our first children in the program in less than a year.
Most importantly, we hope that our work will be effective in rescuing and restoring these victims and in representing the life Jesus lived. How are we going to do all this? (and that's just Phase 1). I imagine we will have to work very hard. I imagine this is more huge than I can imagine. But I also know that no one ever changed the world by thinking about how hard it would be. So. I hope you're in. Suffice it to say that we need help. Technically, all the help we can get. So if you're a film-maker. We need that. If you're a nurse. We need that. If you're a teacher. Definitely. It really doesn't matter what you do. We need your ideas and your skills and your support and your prayers. We can't do this on our own. And I don't think that we were meant to.