Jesse and I attended an event last summer that was for people involved or interested in Social Entrepreneurship. I’ll never forget one of the speakers who got up front and said something like, “the only way to succeed in a social enterprise is to fail often and fail early.”

I remember it so clearly because I was genuinely frightened by the idea of going into something with the expectations of multiple failures. Engineers aren’t really designed for that. We do all our work to codes that have been “proven” and we have safety factors to make double-sure things will NOT fail. You can’t build a bridge with the mentality of “fail often and fail early”.

Since that event last summer, it seems like we have been told to “Fail often and fail early” a lot of times. We’ve also just had a lot of things fail.

However, I’m also learning to see the wisdom in “Fail often and fail early”. It’s basically the fastest way to learn.

We are at our month-long training now, and the first two weeks focus on language acquisition. It’s actually really fun, but just today, our instructor said, “when you learn a language, you have to make a million mistakes first…so get started!” After laughing, I realized how that statement seems to have been true about so much lately and how I better just embrace it!

So, as of today, I’m committing to embrace the wrestling, the effort, the falling down and getting back up, the starting over, and the failure…because it is the fastest way to get to success.

Here are some photos of our last few weeks! We traveled over 1,000 miles, driven more than 19 hours, and stayed in 7 different places over the last 2.5 weeks.

Prayer Requests:

– Praise:  We are under contract with a buyer for our house!

– Request:  This is actually the third buyer we have had a contract with, so pray that this buyer will work out.

– Praise:  Great time with family over the last several weeks.

– Request:  Safe travel as we drive to and from our training center to meetings, etc in Denver.

– Praise:  One month in the same place! So nice to unpack and get settled for a bit.

– Request:  We’ll receive Jesse’s Professional Engineer exam score in late-June. Please pray that passed his exam.

– Request:  For Lumi and for Lumi’s founder Thomas. Lumi is in a critical phase right now as the capital raise is starting. Thomas is with WV also and is in need of more financial supporters. Pray for wisdom for Lumi and for supporters for Thomas.

– Request:  Pray that we reach 100% of our monthly support before we leave MTI training at the end of May!

2 Corinthians 12:9:  “But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

Thank you SO much for reading up on our journey, and supporting the work we will be joining in Uganda!

Please let us know how we can be praying for you!