Wow!

Haha in the words of my roommate "God...You are really something else." This weekend's outreach was very moving for me. We decided that for Saturday's outreach we wanted to stretch ourselves and take steps of faith for the people on our hearts back home. A lot of us have become very comfortable with going out to the boardwalk and sharing with strangers, but sometimes the hardest people to share with are the people we love the most. We decided to face this fear and call these people for an outreach. The goal was to set up phone dates with people back home for saturday night, with the intention of sharing the gospel with them. This outreach for me was very close to my heart because the person I wanted to share with the most, came to Ocean City this weekend. My Mom has been on my heart for so long and I had never taken that step of faith to reach out to her. We set up the gym into 4 areas. We had prayer in the sanctuary, silence and solitude in the choir room, fellowship off of the gym and the "calling space" in the gym. It was amazing to walk in the gym and see dozens of people reaching out to the ones they love back home. My Mom and I sat in the sanctuary together for awhile and then I decided to take her up to the gym balcony so that I could talk with her. I started off our conversation by telling her my testimony, ALL of my testimony. She knew bits and pieces, but she has never heard the whole story. I felt that she could not fully know how the Lord has changed my life unless she heard all of it. After telling her my testimony, I opened up to her about my heart behind this outreach. For me, this outreach was for her. I told her that it scared me soo much not knowing what she believed in and how much she means to me. I followed this with a line of questioning. I wanted to know exactly where she was coming from and what she did believe in. After getting a better understanding of her beliefs I was able to share with her the message that has changed my life. I got to thoroughly go through the gospel with her and she followed it so well. She was asking wonderful questions and she had that moment. That moment where in a person's eyes you can see they understand. That moment when a person realizes that its all about Jesus Christ and what He did on the cross. My mom acknowledged that she had never let Christ into her life and that she had never opened that door to her heart, but she wanted to. She wanted Him to come into her life and that's when the Lord made her His. The Lord rose my Mom from death to life on Saturday night and she became a child of God. She prayed to receive Christ and I couldn't help but to rejoice and cry. We sat in the balcony and cried for joy together. Praise the Lord! I don't really know how to describe the amount of joy the Lord has blessed me with from last weekend. All I can do is smile and say "Wow....

Mom I know you are reading this. I am so blessed by having been able to witness the Lord change your Life. You are a child of God and He will never let you go. You have been raised up from darkness into light and out of death into eternal life. You have entered into a relationship of overwhelming love, grace and forgiveness and I am so happy for you. I love you Mom and cannot wait to see how the Lord is going to work in you and through you as we live life together.

Relying on the Lord

The staff is now OFFICIALLY gone, they all have moved out and the project is now entirely run by students. The leadership team gave us the option of not doing an outreach this weekend because of the short notice BUT we decided that we wanted to start this new stage of the summer off right with a challenging outreach. We decided that one of the biggest thing we want people to take away from this summer is to be bold and stepping out in their faith and so last night we took away what has become comfortable to us. We met down in the Ambassador's Inn like in normal pre-outreach style, but instead of passing out surveys and Knowing God Personally booklets, we took them away. We had people empty their pockets and purses and the mood of the room changed pretty quickly. People were pretty nervous about the situation before them because they were really going to be on their own. However, this was the point of the outreach. We wanted people to realize that even when we don't have these great tools in our pockets we are NOT alone. The Lord has equipped us with the Holy Spirit, which is greater than any tool we could create. The Lord has fully equipped us to carry this message because he has written it on our hearts. We wanted people to be relying completely on the Lord for ways of initiating, relating to people and the words to speak. The tools we've been given are wonderful ways of sharing our faith, but we do not want them to become a crutch. There will be countless opportunities that the Lord will present us with, where we will not have these tools to use and so we will have to confident in the Lord's power to work through us. Overall the mood of the project was nervous as we left the Inn, but coming back was a completely different story. Everyone was sharing with each other and excited about the way the Lord had used them. It was great to debrief with the project and just hear how much people had been stretched and how much the Lord taught them. It was a great way to kick off our first weekend on our own as students and it was SUPER encouraging to me on the outreach team to hear how much people had grown through the night. Im excited that the Lord worked in such a big way and I cannot wait to see the Lord ignite a passion for evangelism throughout the project as the summer continues. 

Side note- I got to share my testimony with the entire project before the outreach and it was such a stretching experience. I had never shared before such a large group before and it was amazing to see how the Lord touched so many people's hearts through what He has done in mine. I would challenge all of you to prayerfully remember how the Lord has changed your lives. Every single story that starts in sin and ends in glorification is one worth hearing and one worth sharing.

Stepping Into Leadership

I suppose the climax of this week entitled "Agape" would be the moment last night when the Project Director, Bob Fuhs, said "We are no longer the staff of this project" and proceeded to leave the church with the rest of the staff. The staff got a standing ovation, but the real celebration and excitement began once the doors were closed. The Lord has placed the movement into the hands of the students and we couldn't be more excited. For those of you that have never been on a summer project, the staff leaves half way through the summer and the students fill the roles that the staff once had. Each student is responsible for some task that the staff had and the project really could not function with out each and every student. The staff has asked me to be the Outreach Director, with a girl named Hannah, for the rest of the summer. I am EXTREMELY excited about this position because the Lord has really placed evangelism on my heart this summer and I cannot think of any other job that I would rather do. As the Co-Director of Outreach and part of the Outreach team we are responsible for planning and running all outreaches and evangelistic events. We've already had a few meetings and have been able to plan tomorrow's outreach. I love the team that I get to be a part of, all of the members' passion for the Gospel and their hearts for the lost are so encouraging. We have come up with a vision statement of "Trusting the Lord to ignite a passion for the Gospel here, to create a lifestyle of evangelism everywhere." Our vision for this project is that sharing your faith would not be an activity that you do, but a lifestyle that you live. We want people to fall in love with the gospel and to have a passion for sharing that with other people. It is crazy for me to think about how much growth the Lord has shown me over the past year. Last summer if you would have asked me if I would want to spend 11 weeks next summer sharing the gospel I would have said two things. One: What's the gospel? and Two: You're out of your mind! There was no way that I would have given 11 weeks of my summer to go share the gospel, but now I cannot think of anything greater that I could dedicate my life to, let alone my summer. I praise the Lord for this opportunity to serve Him as part of the Outreach Team and I cannot wait to see how the Lord is going to work, through the gospel, in the hearts of the people on project and in the lives of the people we reach out to. 

God Bless America

God Bless America. Its a song that we've all heard, but since last night I've really been thinking about it. We have been SOO blessed. In America we have 3 meals a day, we've got houses, we've got cars, we've got clothes and shoes, we get paid 7+ an hour, we get etc... but what I've really been thinking about is how God has blessed all of us as Americans to be born in a country where we can worship Him freely. I was thinking last night as I watched the 4th of July fireworks about how all these people were celebrating our independence from England, but I couldn't stop thinking about the freedom that gives us towards our relationship with God. We can openly go to church as much as we want, we can have worship concerts, we can have Bibles and read them whenever and where ever we want! It hit home even harder tonight as we had another outreach. Here we are 110 students all out in a highly populated area, serving the Lord and openly sharing the Gospel with people. This is not the case a lot of places in the world. Our brothers and sisters meet in secret and in hushed voices and in code share with eachother. Always fearing a raid and the persecution that follows that. I praise the Lord for these blessings that we receive through the freedom our country has. With the blessings America has with money and resources. This again points me towards missions. We've been blessed beyond imagine, let's in return take these blessings and take them to the world.

Every Tribe, Tongue and Nation

This week has been really motivating for me. This week's theme is "World Vision" and it has been a week dedicated to learning about what the Lord is doing throughout the world. One of the aspects of the week that has really spoken to me is simply the statistics. According to Billy Graham, 33% of the world considers themselves Christian, which leaves 67% of the world devoting themselves to false Gods or no God at all. With 5.6 BILLION people in the world, 67% is  a lot! Of that 5.6 billion only 7% is experiencing a relationship with Christ and of that 5.6 billion only .10% is experiencing a spirit filled life and is trained in evangelism and discipleship. .10%! How much greater is the call to be involved in the great commission knowing just how great a need there is! The phrase PRAY, GIVE, GO and MOBILIZE has been thrown around this week and I think it is something that all followers of Christ need to be involved in. PRAY would be continually humble yourself before the Lord in prayer for the world and missionaries. GIVE would be to give financially towards missions and to make all that goes into missions possible. GO would be to physically go overseas and to be a part of sharing the gospel with nationals. And MOBILIZE would be like the Cru. staff that is training and teaching the next generation of missionaries. We may not know exactly what God is calling us to be a part of BUT what i've learned is that we ALL are called. Each one of these aspects is equally important and it is a calling worth giving your life to. The Lord has definitely given me a deeper love for world missions this week and I am excited to see where the Lord will be using me in relation to that. 

The picture up top was taken at our Thursday night "World Vision" meeting. We were asked to wear any sort of international "flare" that we might have, and so our action group decided to represent some old testament internationals by sporting the togas. The swords were our welcoming gifts given by our action group leader, Ian. Besides dressing internationally, we've also been doing some other cultural customs such as leaving our shoes outside and eating without utensils, its been kinda fun, but at the same time its made me realize just how different people are. One thing that i've really been thinking about this week is just how hard it really must be to go communicate with people who have grown up in places that might as well be different worlds than America. However, through this thinking the Lord reminded me how powerful the message of the Gospel is. The Gospel is something that EVERY single person on this earth needs to hear no matter who you are or where you live, so with that in mind, as the christian rapper Lecrae would say, "SEND ME! I'LL GO!"

All For One

I'm sure you've all heard the classic saying "All for One and One for All!".... "All for One" was the theme of last week and I would like to start by apologizing for the delay on the update. As a means of promoting more fellowship and building more community the staff shut off the student's internet access all week, which made it problematic to get an update out. So  sorry for the delay, here goes! So to be completely honest I struggled a lot this week on project. Along with taking our internet, the staff basically took away all direct communication with us. The way that they would inform us about events and details they would give a "clue" to one student and it was our job to pass this information by word of mouth to the rest of the project. Some of the things we had to do as a community this week were take an entire project picture without talking, only one person of each gender could set an alarm one morning so we had to wake each other up at different times, and a lot of things relating to the end of the week staff vs. students softball game. I was pretty frustrated with the secrecy this week because in my mind it felt very much like we were at some sort of summer camp. It didn't feel like we were being treated like adults and it didn't feel like real life. It was hard for me to have the desire to participate whole heartedly and my attitude reflected this. The entire week was building towards the softball game climax. We all wore the same uniforms, all 110 of us paraded to the field and we chanted and cheered the entire way there. It was fun and in all honesty I had a great time, but about half way through the game I became discouraged again. In my mind I could not justify playing a softball game instead of doing an outreach (which we had done every other saturday). Again I became frustrated and my attitude toward the night changed drastically. In my journal I wrote "is this really all the body of Christ is for? to have fun with each other?" It wasn't until Sunday that I realized what had really happened throughout the week. Some guys asked me if I'd like to come along on a walk with them and so I went. I ended up talking to them about my frustrations and a guy named Matt really spoke truth into me. He explained that the main reason he came to Ocean City was for the fellowship. He came here to be built up by the body and to be a part of a community of believers. All for One week was exactly what he was looking for. I was so convicted! How selfish I had been all week. In my mind all I could think about was what I would rather be doing, and what I thought was best. Thats not how the body works. I was living this week all for one and that one was me. What I learned this week is that I am a part of the body of Christ and the question shouldn't be what can I get out of this, but instead what can I give to this. How can I be one for all? How can I serve my brothers and sisters? How can I encourage others and spur them on towards Christ? My mindset was so off this entire week. 

It is interesting though, I looked at this week as the worst one since I've been on project BUT I had the best night of project during this week. We had a Men's "conference" on Wednesday, and it was phenomenal. I use the quotations because it was more like Men's boot camp. The staff had us meet them out in the Ocean City state park and immediately we were forced to work together as a group. The entire night was based around community as men, and learning what it means to be a man of Christ. I think that I got so much out of this time was because every single one of us working together and encouraging each other to persevere through the challenges. Not only physically, but spiritually we were stretched as well. I have never been to a men's time that wasn't focused on sexual purity, but this one was different. That issue was addressed, but the night was dedicated to our hearts. It was about how as men we can be being real with eachother. It was about how we can grow together and how we can be waging war on sin as a body. I don't know, when I think about community, this is what I want. I want to be a part of a community that loves on each other and genuinely cares about how the person next to them is doing. I got so much more out of this week than I had expected. I praise God for pursuing me even when I am not whole heartedly pursuing what He lays before me. I also praise Him for teaching me even when I didn't want to learn.