Jayson & Carrie Whelpley

[This post was originally written on February 23rd, but we were asked to not announce the DC thing until it was official so we saved it until now.]

The past two weeks have been doosies! I’m going to go in reverse chronological order though.

This past Thursday my uncle Ken passed away from a heart-attack. He was my mom’s brother and my dad’s best friend (my parents are divorced), so it hit the whole family pretty hard. We spent the weekend at the funeral home through 3 packed viewings. I would estimate that nearly 500 people came through to pay their respects. Please be praying for my aunt and cousins as well as my grandfather who has lost his wife and then his youngest child in the course of 7 months.

Ken had seen victory in a fight against non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma that struck nearly a decade ago. He’s battled through the pain of chemo therapy, bone marrow transplant, and the side effects of the anti-rejection drugs. He died of a heart attack in his bed after a night of doing what he loved to do best – snowmobiling.

Two weeks ago, I took a couple of Edinboro students down to the Life Options Conference just outside of Washington D.C. They were there to work through the “What’s next?” questions of being a Junior or Senior in college. They heard speakers from different ministries as well as from the business world encouraging them to think through their future and see it as a ministry from God no matter if they go into vocational ministry like Carrie and I or into the marketplace. Some of the 200 or so students came away confirmed in their calling to pursue a job in their line of study, while some have begun to feel called into full-time vocational ministry – even if just for a year or two.

While there I roomed with a good friend of mine, Jake Tarr (Carrie was visiting her family that weekend). He was recently asked to lead a team of staff and interns to reach the campuses in the D.C. area that have been consistently hard to reach. Take a look at this video:

While I was at the conference Dave Moles, the Regional Catalytic Director, asked if he could sit down with me to talk. I had been wanting to talk to him to clear up some things with us pursuing purchasing a house in the Edinboro/Erie area in the next few months; Dave had something else in mind.

He asked Carrie and I to consider joining the D.C. STINT (Short Term Internship) team for the next year. He told me about everything that we would be doing and how this is something that is a priority of not just our region, but also Campus Crusade on the National level – important enough that CCC National is planning on paying for the team’s housing for a year.

After praying these past two weeks about it, talking to our teammates and others – we have decided to join the D.C. STINT team next year!

Please pray for us as the details get worked out and we prepare our first major move. This will be our first time living in a major city and the students we will be working with will be a very different breed.