Welcome to the 527 Project. My name is Jordan Lean and I like to run. And when I say run, I mean run far. What started as a challenge to myself to run a marathon has quickly escalated to running ultra marathons (any distance greater than 42.2 km). After achieving these goals, this year I am setting a more ambitious one. In September of 2025 I will be running the Haliburton Forest 100 Miler (160km).

Running is a challenge; running far is hard. Human beings were designed and created to do and overcome hard things. Challenges that force us to persevere and overcome redefine how we look at ourselves and the world around us. As the saying goes “average effort yields average results”. My perspective on this, while preparing to do something I see as difficult, is that God created and called everyone for more than average. As I prepare for this race, I am choosing to find the struggle, suffer with it, overcome it, and once finished, rejoice in it and seek the next opportunity for growth.

This is where Jobin and Francine Sam come into the picture. The Sams are living out this principle to the fullest. They left behind a life of comfort in Canada for the struggles and trials of serving God wholeheartedly in western Africa as medical missionaries. Along with their two children, Jackson and Emma, the Sams are committed to seeing God’s physical and spiritual work being done in the margins of society. They are serving as medical missionaries in an area of the world where foreigners and Christians are not always welcomed. Due to the current political environment of the country they are in, their exact location is being kept private for safety reasons. Between a desert and a mountain range they are living full time in a local village with people fleeing political and religious persecution. Here they are serving those with leprosy and tuberculosis, assisting in all forms of urgent surgeries, delivering babies and providing postpartum and pediatric care. They do this in a temporary hospital built with mud walls and a steel sheet roof on the edge of the wilderness. While they do this, they are sharing the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ, providing a way for people to have both physical and spiritual healing. They are unsupported and isolated in ways we cannot imagine in our daily lives. This is their choice and they are choosing the hard thing.

The purpose of the 527 Project is to join with Jobin and Francine in choosing the difficult. As they pursue the purpose of life in their voluntary upward self-sacrifice, I want to embrace that same mindset of seeking challenge and embracing the struggle. This race, although insignificant in comparison, is in support of the Sams and their choice to follow God’s call in their lives and leave average behind. Please join with me by showing Jobin and Francine that they have a community with them, for every beautifully hard step of the way.

“How beautiful upon the mountains

Are the feet of him who brings good news,

Who proclaims peace,

Who brings glad tidings of good things,

Who proclaims salvation,

Who says to Zion,

“Your God reigns!”

-Isaiah 52:7