Hollywood Debut: Featuring the Trade Mobile

Part of that is true at least

The end of the year is coming fast and that means...ummm...I totally forgot what I was fixing to say. Anyway, since things have been slow lately, I've been brewing some ideas up in my head as to what I can write about.

Over the next few weeks, or really just whenever I get bored, I'm going to highlight a few cool projects and people I have come across since starting this project. Also, my brother-in-law has been painstakingly working on Trade Me Out of Debt's "Hollywood debut".

Dani and I spent a whole entire 2 hours hiking far and wide to find the perfect place to film this action packed video. We climbed mountains and scaled the treacherous cliffs of the great Chandler Park. I even had to fight off a bear that was running towards Dani as he was scouting out our final shooting location.

After all that, we decided to settle on shooting it in the great downtown city of Tulsa, Oklahoma. We had a little budget of ooooh...no money and we were working on a very tight schedule (our baby mommas needed us home for supper).

We found the perfect location to film, a local community college parking lot and a square block that was under construction. We drove the Trade Mobile onto our first shooting location and were welcomed with many smiles and stares.

We set up all our equipment and blocked off the required spaces we needed in order to obtain the perfect shot.

Crowds of people started coming out from across the street to see what exactly we were doing. It seemed as though we were getting a lot of attention. I was starting to feel like a real life movie star, and then it happened....our crowd dispersed and drove away in their fancy cars.

Come to find out, they had just gotten out of their post high school classes and were going to go do whatever post high school students do. To make it even worse, their smiles and glares were just their way of making fun of us.

On a happy note, we only had to shoot once, but that might have had something to do with the old man in the car with yellow lights on top of his car.

All joking aside now, we did shoot a little chick flick that should be quite a hit.

That is all I have to say, have a Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas!

I hope everyone out there has a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Lots of new challenges to face this coming year, but it's so great to know that all things are possible through Christ.

"I can do everything through him who gives me strength" (Philippians 4:13)

Have a blessed new year and take it a day at a time, don't focus too much on the future or look too much to the past. Remember that we are only promised today so make every moment count.

1 Year Down, 2 to Go

The first year of this project sure did fly by 

Things have been a little hectic lately with school and some other personal issues I've been dealing with. Lately, I've had a lot of time to think about my current trade and have been wondering why it's not trading.

Apart from this project, God has me in a time of fully trusting him and being okay with not having full control of what the future holds. As I've said in the past, this project isn't solely about getting out of debt through trading up stuff, it is about figuring out who I am in Christ, building relationships in Christ, and sharing how God has changed my life.

Trust has really been a main theme lately. Our lives are in his timing, not ours.

So, about this project...What is its fate? Who knows? When do you decide to hang up your boots and call it good?

All I know, is that I didn't paint my van with huge "Trade Me Out of Debt" and "Trade Mobile" letters for nothing. I will be honest, there are days that I ask myself, "What the heck am I doing driving around a multi-colored van that gets horrible gas millage and has the website painted all over it?"

Sometimes I don't know. Maybe it's to humble me, or to just understand that what we have does not define who we are on the inside?

One of these days I will have to share with everyone my story of having everything you could ever want, all the way to losing it all within a short amount of time.

What we have, own, rent, or whatever, does not define who we are in Christ. What we drive or wear, does not define who we are in Christ. How well our grammar is, or how good our spelling is, or wether we can read or write, does not define who we are in Christ.

God see's us as his perfect creation, even if we see ourselves as worthless. Trust me, I've been there and seen the lowest of lows. God loves each and everyone of us the way we are. We don't have to be at a certain place in our lives to accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior. He takes us as we are.

Anyway, I don't know where I was going with all this. Sometimes I just type out whatever is on my heart.

So,  Trade Me Out of Debt or not, van or no van, house or no house, debt or no debt, job or not, wether you have everything or nothing, God loves you the way you are, no matter the circumstances.