The June 2012 team!

Hello everybody! This is Amy from the 2009-2010 winter trip. I am so excited to share with you what God has in store for 12Stone in Liberia this upcoming June!

In August of 2011 a new team from 12Stone was selected to go to Liberia in December of 2011, which I was completely blessed and thrilled to be chosen for! As we began preparing God made it very evident that the trip should be pushed back to June of 2012. So we have been preparing and growing together as a team for over 9 months now, God has been changing and revealing many things to us throughout that time. We've also become a very close knit family and already learned so much from each-other and from our meetings.

This trip is going to have a different focus than any other trip that we have taken to Liberia. It will be focused around building-up and training leaders in the Liberian Community as well as building the individuals for our team as leaders at the same time. God has made this need very evident through what we have learned/observed on previous trips, prayer and also aligns with what Liberian President Sirleaf believes Liberia currently needs. Throughout the time of preparing for the trip it has been a complete team effort, we have spent time envisioning as a team what we want this trip to look like and prayerfully making decisions together. It's defiantly not a trip that was planned out by someone and the team members do what has already been planned. We have all taken different roles and responsibilities while preparing for the trip, which has been a huge growing and learning experience for us all. There have been many different visions for this trip and throughout the past 10 months and we have experienced how God has been chiseling the perfect plan for us as we have had many changes of what this trip is going to look like. 

At the end of March we had a wonderful opportunity to go through leadership training on the 5 levels of Leadership, based off of the book by John Maxwell. The training was held by Dan Shogren of Logical Choice Technologies and also a member of our Church as well. Throughout the training we learned about what the five levels of leadership are, the importance of each level, how to move up in level with different people, and being able to identify what level of leadership you are on with somebody. We also spent time getting to know more about ourselves as leaders and about each-other. We did some fun hands-on learning as well. 

In this activity we all individually made a paper plane and then competed to see whose plane went the furthest. Tony won and as the winner he was selected to then teach the rest of the team how he made his airplane in a short period of time and only speaking. We then all made our new planes with his instruction and watched as they went further than the planes we all made on our own. This was a great example of how sharing one team members skills and knowledge of one thing can help the entire team. Which was a wonderful example for our team which we have really been able to see how God has given us each individually different gifting and talents that we have been able to grow tremendously together from each other by learning what those gifts  and talents are and utilizing them while preparing for our trip.

Here is the official 12Stone Liberia team for June 2012! This photo also includes three of our amazing prayer partners, who have also been a huge part of our team in helping us to prepare for the trip. Not including Rodney who will be joining us over in Liberia. Also Dan (in the white shirt) was not originally on our team while this photo was taken but it didn't take him very long after he trained us in the Five Levels for God to lead him to join our team! We are overjoyed to have someone with such experience in Leadership training to join our team!

Like I said earlier we have become a very close knit family so we like to have a little fun. As you can see the Wonlay, Dave and Danielle have no idea that the rest of us are having a fun time pointing at Dave. :)

Once again I am so excited to be sharing with you what God has been doing through our team and what he is continuing to to. Please continue to check out our blog as we update about what's going on, we're so excited to be able to share our experiences and blessings with you all! We are officially leaving in one week, on June 2nd!

God Bless,

Amy