Dear Friends,
We hope and pray you are well and that the Lord is keeping you in perfect peace. As we write this, we are still moving through Vietnam and Indonesia, continuing our Gospel Expeditions across Southeast Asia — from cities once reduced to rubble to island villages scattered across an archipelago of more than seventeen thousand islands. The doors have been open, and we have journeyed to many new places. We are also deep in production on new episodes from Vietnam, from South America, and from several other journeys — and we believe they will stir your faith and ignite a fresh passion for the unreached. None of this — not a single mile, not a single open door, not a single frame of film — would be possible without you. Your prayers and your support are the lifeblood of Travel the Road, and we ask you to hold that line with us even more tightly in the months ahead, because the journey continues. We are preparing to move into South America, back into remote work in the jungles and the mountains, where the terrain is unforgiving, the logistics are difficult, and the gospel must reach. Every seed planted there has the potential to bear an eternal harvest, and you plant it with us. The best is truly yet to come.
Last month we wrote to you about Ashes — what God does with the ruins of a life after the fire has passed. This month we finish that thought, because the promise was never that God would simply sit with us in the wreckage. He lifts. He restores. He raises people to heights they could not have imagined from the floor where they were lying. This month’s theme is — Rise.
The God Who Lifts From the Ash Heap
Ashes were never meant to be the end of the story. What remains after the fire — the ruins of a life, a family, or a nation — is not wreckage in God’s hands. It is raw material. And Scripture is relentlessly clear about what God does with a man or a woman lying in it.
“He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap; He seats them with princes and has them inherit a throne of honor.” — 1 Samuel 2:8. Hannah prayed that after years of barrenness and public humiliation. It is not poetry. It is testimony. The God of the Bible is not a God who merely comforts people in the dust. He is a God who reaches into the dust and lifts. The world has one word for a man who has been through devastation: finished. Scripture has a different word: down. Down is not finished. Down is a position, not an identity. “For though the righteous fall seven times, they rise again, but the wicked stumble when calamity strikes.” — Proverbs 24:16. Read that carefully. The mark of the righteous is not that they never fall. The mark of the righteous is that they get up — seven times, and again after that. The difference between the righteous and the wicked in that verse is not the falling. It is the rising. And the prophet Micah, sitting in the wreckage of a nation under judgment, threw a defiance at his enemy that every believer should learn by heart: “Do not gloat over me, my enemy! Though I have fallen, I will rise. Though I sit in darkness, the Lord will be my light.” — Micah 7:8. Not I have risen. Not I feel like rising. I will rise — declared from the floor, in the dark, with nothing in hand but the character of God.
Joseph: The Pit Was the Road
Joseph was seventeen when his brothers threw him into a cistern and sold him for twenty pieces of silver. He was betrayed by his own blood, trafficked into a foreign country, falsely accused by a woman he had refused to sin with, and buried in an Egyptian prison — where he was forgotten by the very man he had helped, for two more years. Thirteen years passed between the pit and the palace. Thirteen years in which every visible circumstance said the dream was dead. And then, in a single day, God moved him from a dungeon to the second-highest seat in the most powerful nation on earth. Here is what must be seen: Joseph did not rise in spite of the pit. The pit was the road. The prison was where he met the cupbearer. The slavery was what placed him in Egypt. The betrayal was what put him in position to preserve the very family that had betrayed him. He understood it perfectly when he finally stood before his brothers: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” — Genesis 50:20. God is not limited to the good material in your life. He works with what was done to you. Ask Joseph.
David at Ziklag: When Everything You Have Is Ash
There is a moment in the life of David that we do not preach often enough, and it belongs to this theme more than almost any other passage in Scripture. David and his men returned to Ziklag and found their city burned with fire. Their wives, their sons, their daughters — taken captive. Everything they owned, gone. And Scripture records that they wept until they had no strength left to weep. Then it got worse: “David was greatly distressed because the men were talking of stoning him.” His own soldiers, in their grief, turned on him. He had lost his family, his home, and now the loyalty of the only men he had left. And in that verse — standing in an actual field of ashes, abandoned by everyone — comes one of the most important reminders to those who are standing in ashes: “But David encouraged himself in the Lord his God.” — 1 Samuel 30:6. There was no one left to encourage him. No prophet, no friend, no crowd. So he went to God and strengthened himself in the only thing that had not burned. Then he asked one question: “Shall I pursue this raiding party? Will I overtake them?” And the answer came: “Pursue them. You will certainly overtake them and succeed in the rescue.” — 1 Samuel 30:8. He recovered all. Nothing was missing. And within days of that ash heap, David was anointed king. Understand the sequence. The rise did not begin when the circumstances changed. It began when a broken man, sitting in the smoke, took hold of God for himself. That is where every rise begins. Not with a strategy. With a grip on God.
Peter: The Man Who Failed Out Loud
Some fall privately. Peter fell in front of everybody. He swore he would die before he denied Christ, and hours later he was cursing in a courtyard, denying he had ever known the Man — three times, before a servant girl. Then the rooster crowed, and the Lord turned and looked at him, and Peter went out and wept bitterly. That is not a stumble. That is public, humiliating, unmistakable failure at the single most important moment of his life.
Now look at what God did with him.
On a beach in Galilee, the risen Christ did not lecture him, did not review the failure, and did not lower His expectations. He asked one question three times — do you love Me? — and gave one commission three times: feed My sheep (John 21:15-17). Fifty days later, that same man stood before the crowds at Pentecost and preached with such power that three thousand souls were saved in a single day. The man who could not confess Christ to a servant girl became the man who could not be silenced by the Sanhedrin. This is the death blow to the lie of disqualification. God does not have a discard pile. He has a restoration process — and He is frequently more committed to your future than you are.
Rise, Sleeper — The Word Jesus Kept Saying
Read the Gospels with this theme in mind and something begins to stand out. Over and over, the command of Jesus to broken people is the same word: get up.
To the paralytic: “Get up, take your mat and go home.” — Mark 2:11. To the dead girl in her father’s house: “Talitha koum — little girl, I say to you, get up.” — Mark 5:41. To the widow’s only son on his funeral bier at Nain: “Young man, I say to you, get up.” — Luke 7:14. To Lazarus, four days in the tomb: “Lazarus, come out!” — John 11:43. He didn’t tell the broken person to make peace with the position they were in. He told them to rise. And when He gave the command, He supplied the power to obey it — the paralyzed legs held, the dead heart beat, the grave clothes came off. That same voice speaks to the church today: “Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” — Ephesians 5:14. And to a people sitting in the dark, wondering if their season is over: “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you.” — Isaiah 60:1.
The Lie That Keeps the Church on the Ground
Here is the hard word that must be spoken. A great portion of the modern church has learned to manage defeat rather than rise out of it. We have absorbed a therapeutic vocabulary that names every wound, explains every failure, and validates every limitation — but never issues the command that Jesus issued. We are comfortable saying broken. We are not comfortable saying get up. And so believers sit for years in a condition God never intended to be permanent, mistaking their scars for their identity and their history for their ceiling. The enemy does not need to destroy a Christian if he can convince them to stay down. A believer lying on the ground quoting their failure back to themselves is no threat to the kingdom of darkness. That is not humility. Humility bows to God. This bows to shame — and shame is not from God. “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” — Romans 8:1. If God is not condemning you, who exactly are you agreeing with? The same is true of whole nations of believers. Western Europe — once the launching pad of the greatest missionary movements in history — did not fall because the opposition was overwhelming. It fell, and then it stayed down. America is being tested on the same point right now. But the Word of Christ to a fallen church is not a eulogy. It is a summons: “Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first.” — Revelation 2:5. Fallen is not final. Fallen is an instruction to rise. And God is proving it in real time. In the very nations where the church has been driven underground and outlawed, believers are multiplying in secret. Where the church is knocked down hardest, it has a habit of getting back up strongest. We have watched it with our own eyes.
The Resurrection Is the Guarantee
None of this rests on human resilience, and none of it rests on optimism. It rests on an empty tomb. “He is not here; He has risen, just as He said.” — Matthew 28:6. Every promise of rising in Scripture is anchored in that one historical morning. Christ went into the ground — genuinely dead, genuinely buried, the case genuinely closed by every human standard — and He came out. And because He did, the same power is at work in everyone who belongs to Him: “If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit.” — Romans 8:11. That is not a metaphor for feeling better. That is the highest power in the universe, resurrection power, made available to a dead thing. It raised Christ. It raised Lazarus. It raised Peter off the floor of his failure and put him in front of a nation. And it is more than sufficient for whatever has fallen in your life. So hear this plainly, whoever you are and however far down you are reading this from: the fall is not the verdict. The ashes are not the address. The God who lifts the needy from the ash heap and seats them with princes has not revised His expectations downward because of what happened to you, what you lost, or what you did. Get up. The One who raised Christ from the dead is not finished with you — He is only getting started.
At Travel the Road, we have seen people rise from situations that every human calculation said were impossible — and we have watched God make a way where there was no way. We have sat with men and women who had lost everything, in villages and cities where hope had been gone for generations, and seen the gospel of Jesus Christ lift them out of the ash heap and set them on their feet. And we will tell you: we have felt the sting of being down ourselves. Objectives that collapsed after months of careful planning. Weather that shut down all movement for days at a time. Opposition and spiritual attack that met us the moment we stepped forward. In nearly thirty years on the road, we have had our fair share of setbacks. But we get up — and every time, God has made a way. He has never once let us down. Now, we ask you to stand with us on these journeys and the ones ahead. Pray for open doors, for protection, for wisdom, and for hearts prepared by the Spirit before we ever arrive. And please consider supporting this work financially — whether through a one-time gift or a new monthly commitment. Your giving is what puts us on the ground, what keeps us producing the episodes that stir a new generation toward missions, and what carries this message into places the gospel has yet to reach. We could not do any of it without you. Thank you for always being there for us. Peace be with you.
In Him,
Tim and Will