Sickness

I saw the conference doctor and he declared that I do indeed have strep. Blah. The good thing is that now I have some antibiotics and should be feeling better soon. I was able to teach the club this evening which was a blessing since Tamara's voice is reduced to absolutely nothing. Mine is about at a whisper, but hey, I can still talk a little bit!

Thanks for praying! I really appreciate it! Hopefully I'll have a better report tomorrow....

Please pray

I regret to say that both Tamara's and my health have taken a turn for the worse. Tamara came down with bronchitis last night and so she is totally out of commission today. I'm experiencing significant pain in my throat again, and I've almost lost my voice entirely. All of this is so Not Good when we are responsible for teaching all of these adorable little Arabic children. :-) It's really frustrating when one of us is sick and then the other person exerts herself to such a degree that she ends up getting sick. It's just one thing after another. Thankfully, another CEF worker (Carolyn) is helping us with the clubs - but even she isn't doing the best health-wise.

This is such a drag. There is a doctor here at the church conference that I might have to track down. I don't want my throat to turn into anything too serious (like strep, or something).

Please pray.

Life of late

Thank you so much for praying for healing of my sore throat! I felt really bad on Wednesday, so I opted not to go to club. Staying at our host home and resting up seemed to be the best plan. Tamara stepped up to the plate in an amazing way and ended up teaching both of the clubs by herself (another lady went with her to the clubs but Tamara did all of the teaching). I was grateful for her willingness to do that. Thankfully, I felt MUCH better yesterday, and except for a slight "frog in my throat" I seem to be on the mend. YAY!

We had our last clubs in the two housing developments yesterday. The first club went very well, with all of the kids being extremely attentive during all aspects of the club. One of the girls, Julen, has attended club each day this week and it is amazing how thoroughly she can answer questions during our Review Game. You would suspect that she had taught the Bible lesson! Tamara taught her how to use the Gospel Flipper Flapper (a tool that uses the same colors as the Wordless Book) so that she could share the gospel with her friends. Julen seems to have a lot of head knowledge about salvation, and Tamara and I are praying that this head knowledge is also heart knowledge.

Two funny comments were made by kids at the first club. Tamara was sharing John 3:16 and one of the little girls (Kayla) raised her hand and said, "Hey! I know what you're talking about! 'For God so loved the world that He gave His only forgotten Son....'" It was a good opportunity to correct her misunderstanding, and I definitely chuckled inwardly. We also had a new little boy named Darrell who was extremely inquisitive (and also adorable). During counseling, he asked me what God looked like. I explained that the Bible says that God is surrounded in light and no one has actually seen Him. "But," I continued, "The Bible also says that Jesus is the image of the invisible God, so when people looked at Jesus they were 'seeing' God. What do you think God looks like?"

He thought for a minute and then smiled and said, "I think God would be Haitian!" :-)

We finished our first club just as a thunderstorm decided to pass over. It only rained for a little bit, for which we were very grateful. At our second club, the children were exceptionally rowdy. They insisted on talking during the teaching and exhibiting absolutely no control over behavior. It was quite challenging and several times we had to stop the club and say that we were going to leave if things didn't improve. The redeeming factor about that club was that a 13-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl came to the club and, surprisingly, stayed for the entire hour. They kept making indications that it wasn't "cool" for them to be there, but they stayed nevertheless! During the Bible lesson, several of the kids began asking deep questions about the Trinity, virgin birth, and the role of Mary. It was so neat to be able to share with them what the Bible says about each of these topics and to clear up confusion. I wish we could have had more time to spend on just answering questions. There is such a need for long-term discipleship. It's hard to be with these kids for a short period of time and then move on to another location.

It's also hard to interact with these children and realize in just a short time how intelligent they are, and then look around at their living environment and wonder what kind of people they will grow up to be? Will they be able to get out of the vicious cycle of dysfunctional homes, a fearful atmosphere and a seemingly hopeless existence? I hope and pray that they will.

Tamara and I are off to the Arabic Church conference this afternoon. It will be an intense weekend of teaching but I'm really looking foward to it. I hope I don't lose my voice! :-) Please pray for safety while travelling (it's 45-minute drive to the conference) and for endurance as we teach these kids.

I know this may sound like a slightly silly prayer request, but Tamara and I are hoping to go to the massive 4th of July celebration in Boston next week and it would be best if we could go with somebody who knows what they are doing (it's such a bother to be young and single sometimes!). Please pray that those details can be worked out!

Okay, this is quite long enough for today. Toodle pip!

Wednesday

Tamara and I drove back from the CYIA training on Monday morning, made some stops of historical interest in Concord (it was incredible to actually see the battleground of "the shot heard 'round the world") and then prepared to do our first 5-day clubs on Monday evening. It was a long day, but we survived! We had about 8 kids at our first club and 10-15 at the second club. Since the kids have a tendency to come and go throughout the club, it is hard to get an accurate count. The kids were well-behaved and eager to hear the Bible lesson. Several kids came back for counseling, and after some discussion, I determined that they had all received Jesus at some point in their lives. It was great to be able to give them assurance and encourage them in ways to grow in their relationship with Christ.

Praise God for His constant protection and care for us as we have travelled and taught clubs. I'm grateful for continued unity between Tamara and me and that we are able to be completely honest with each other.

Please pray for continued good health. Once again, I have come down with a dreadful sore throat and I just feel physically "yuck" all over. We have to teach VBS-style clubs at the Arabic Church Conference on Friday evening, all day Saturday and Sunday, and then Monday morning. I am really excited about teaching this weekend, and I want to be completely up-to-snuff health wise. Time to go get some echinacea and zinc lozenges!

We made it!

Tamara and I arrived in Boston at 10:30am (eastern) this morning. Thank you so much for praying for our safe and smooth travel. We are staying with a host family in a Boston suburb and we have our own little basement apartment. It's cute and cosy! We have wireless internet which will definitely come in handy for writing regular updates.

Tomorrow, Tamara and I are going out to the Christian Youth in Action (CYIA) of MA training to touch base with the CEF state director and help out with some of the training events. Please pray for safe travel and a productive time. Please also pray that we will get adequate rest tonight and this weekend (we both got -3 hours of sleep last night since we had to leave for the airport at 3:45am). We need to be ready and raring to begin teaching clubs on Monday!

I'm going to tootle off to bed. Good night from Boston!

Two days and counting....

Oofy poofy! The last few days have been jam-packed with activities. I think we're all starting to go on Summer Missions overload, however, since the most random things are making us burst into uncontrollable laughter. Last night, Psalm H. and I were practicing our Bible lessons together and the combination of the busyness of the day and the late hour (nothing sane happens after 10:30pm) caused us to crack up at the most inopportune moments. Who knew that describing Mary and Martha's grief over Lazarus' death could bring such...morbid mirth? The insanity continued this evening when we had to prepare a 5-Day Club schedule in 45 minutes and practice teaching through an interpreter. Since the "interpreter" was merely repeating what we were saying in English, this made for much giggling. Laughter is a good thing. right?

Anyways, yesterday I was part of a team of five that taught a Party Club in an inner-city St. Louis church. We had five children attend so we had a great 1 to 1 ratio of teachers with students, and we had a lot of fun. I taught the memory verse and led the review game. There is something about teaching children that is so much fun! I believe that all of the children who attended the club were saved, so it was good that the club lesson was focused more on Christian growth principles. I believe that one of my teammates took some pictures of our Party Club, so I'll have to share those sometime.

Please be praying for us as we prepare to leave for our destinations. It's weird to think that the majority of my trip hasn't even begun yet! I have lots of packing to do, as well as general preparation for the clubs which will begin on Monday. It's so exciting! Pray for continued good health and that we will continue to rely on God in potentially challenging circumstances.

Here is an amazing praise and prayer report: I learned that during our Open Air in St. Louis, one of my classmates was able to lead EIGHT young mothers to Christ while her teammate shared the Wordless Book with their children - all at a birthday party in a park! Talk about the amazing work of God! Please be praying that these young moms will be able to receive the follow-up that they will need to be able to grow in their relationship with Christ.

Thanks for reading and praying...I'll be back!

Open Air

Wowsers. What I anticipated to be the most nerve-wracking evenings of my life turned out to be one of the most wonderful evenings I have ever experienced.

This evening, all of the SM students and staff piled into vans and headed to inner-city St. Louis to do open-air evangelism to children. I was with a team of 12 other students and as we took the hour drive into St. Louis, I was working myself up into a nervous tizzy. It's not like I felt unprepared or unable to handle whatever situations may arise, but just the fact that everything was so unknown was driving me batty.

Our team went to a housing development in downtown St. Louis (I saw the Arch for the first time!) and as we drove through the development to get a feel for its layout, we saw tons and tons of kids. The place was swarming with them! We decided to divide up into smaller teams of four and then spread out through the development. My team got dropped off by a playground, and before our van had even driven away, a little boy rode up on his bike. "Hey, I know you," he said. "You were here last year and you told us stories about Jesus." We eagerly responded that we had come back to tell more about Jesus. He said, "Well, then, I'm going to be your first listener." As one of the girls on my team began to share the Wordless book with him, four or five other children joined to listen. Another girl from my team began to share with the new kids, while I went with the one and only guy on our team over to the playground.

We asked the kids if they would like to hear a story and before I could even finish my sentence, we had about ten kids gathered around us. I plopped down on the wood chips and began to share the Wordless Book. One amazing thing was that the majority of the children who were listening were pre-teen girls. They were full of hard questions about God, Heaven, Hell, and what does a person have to do to be saved. It was obvious that these girls were not getting the answers to these questions from any other source, and once they discovered that we could answer their questions, they fired them at us right and left. I absolutely LOVED answering their questions, and watching the relief in one girl's face when I explained confession and forgiveness of sins. I am rejoicing in the fact that FIVE children that heard the Wordless Book in that group received Jesus as their Savior. It was the most exhilarating experience! Praise the Lord!

I was able to speak one-on-one with another little girl, and it was clear that she already understood the message of salvation and had received Christ. I was able to give her assurance of her salvation, which was also really neat. We joined our two other teammates and realized that they had led FOUR children to Christ, including the first little boy who had talked to us. :-)

We were only able to do open-air for about an hour and a half, so we didn't have time to go over the Wordless Book in detail with another large group of kids. We did give them tracts with information on the Mailbox Club, as well as Wonder Devotional books. It was so amazing to look back down the street and see parents reading the Wonder Devotional books to their children. Imagine the impact that might have on entire families!

I could have done open-air in that development for HOURS. There were so many children, and they were all so hungry for attention and to hear the message of salvation. Now I am even more excited about going to Boston and working in those housing developments. YAY!!

Praise the Lord for protecting us and for giving us such a fruitful, fufilling evening. It's all to His Glory! Praise the Lord for each of these children who came to know Him as their personal Savior!

Pray for Jordan, Alexus, Aaliyan, Kevasha, Dasia and Deante - these were the kids in the first group who received Christ. Pray that they will send for their Mailbox Club lessons, and that they will continue to grow in Him despite their circumstances.

I need to scoot to bed, but I was so excited that I just had to share! More tomorrow (a free day - hooray!)

Today and Tomorrow

Whew! The week is almost over. Today we worked on combining what we learned in our advanced Bible lesson class with what we learned in our worldview class to create applications in our Bible lessons that will really, well, apply to the children with which we'll be working. Since Tamara could easily inform me of the special challenges faced by inner-city children in Boston, we had a good time talking through and writing the different applications. As I was working on this, I realized how little I know about working with inner-city children. Sure, many of my fellow students will be having extreme culture shock as they travel to different countries - but working in the inner city will be plenty of culture shock for me! Thankfully, I'm not as thoroughly freaked out as I was last week (praise the Lord!), and I'm eager to see how God will both grow me and use me in this new environment. (I'm also looking forward to the classes next week which will further equip me for urban ministry.)

Highlights of the day include eating a massive salad, weeping and gnashing my teeth over Lazarus' death (I was Martha), evangelizing a cedar tree, discovering how much it would cost to feed 15,000 people with a meal from Mc Donalds (I'm trying to bring the feeding of the 5,000 - or ~15,000 if you count women and children - down to terms to which children can relate, hehe!), and listening to an excellent message on personal relationships from the president at our praise and worship time tonight. I also got to talk to my mom for more than 20 minutes this afternoon, which helped me tremendously, AND Sarah gave me an impromptu hug which totally made my evening.

Please pray for all of us as we have our Bible lesson practicums tomorrow. We are also leaving tomorrow afternoon for Open Air ministry to children in St. Louis. Please pray for safety, a good response from the children and that I'll get put in a team with either a tall guy, or a tough girl (I'm only partially joking there ;-)). This is the first time that I have ever done open air and I'm both terribly excited and extremely terrified (the latter statement is a bit of an exaggeration, but I thought it would be fun to see if I could think of two words that "flipped" the first letters in the words of my first statement...just ignore me). Hopefully, I'll have all sorts of stories showing how God worked through us!

Classes and exercising

I can't say enough about how wonderful the classes are here at training. As previously mentioned, I'm in the "Advanced Track" of training, and I am absolutely loving my classes on worldview and leadership skills. Today, in the leadership skills class, we focused on communication - particularly in the area of encouragement. We studied six different kinds of encouragement that Paul uses in the book of Philippians. I was encouraged just learning how I could be an encouragement! I can't wait to try out some of the "encouragement techniques" that were identified today. The neat thing about encouraging people (for me, anyway) is that I get so encouraged in the process!

Next morning:

Tamara, Mandi and I went for a walk in the woods yesterday. I don't know if I'm going to do that again, thanks to the poison ivy, poison oak, and TICKS that seemed to be taking the path by storm. Thankfully, I don't seem to have contracted anything of the poison variety and I only found one tick affixed to my personage. Phew. It was very pleasant to go on a nice long walk, however. Today our exercise plan is to test out the swimming pool. I wonder what hidden dangers lurk there? (Probably nothing besides being blinded by our pasty white legs....)

Praise: I'm praising God for excellent classes and increased unity among the classmates/team members! I'm so grateful to have Tamara as my teammate.

Prayer: Pray that will we be able to maintain our focus on the whole reason why we are in training: to be able to share the wonderful, amazing Good News of Jesus with those who need to hear it the most - children!

Have a splendiferous day!

Sunday

I'm praising God for a delightful Sunday during which I spent nearly the entire day in the Word or in prayer, or in singing praise and worship songs with my fellow students. It was so nice to have 2 1/2 hours of uninterrupted time alone with the Lord this afternoon during our Retreat of Silence. He spoke to me in such an amazing way about His love and the difference it will make in my life if I choose to live like that attribute is true (which, of course, it is). :-)

Quick prayer request: Many of the students have not received passports yet - that is a really stressful situation to be in. Having had a similar experience before going to Ireland last summer (as in getting the passport the DAY BEFORE I left), I can sympathize. Please pray that they will all receive the passports in time. One young man said that his mother was on hold with the passport office from 5am to 2pm and still wasn't able to talk to anybody. Yipes!

A praise: I'm feeling LOADS better thanks to your prayers and several rounds of Emergen-C. YAY!!

First Day of Training

Today is my first day of Summer Missions training. Since I have already taken Teaching Children Effectively Level 1, I am in the "Advanced Training Track" which involves classes on worldview, leadership skills, advanced Bible lesson techniques, etc. We're getting started with a "bang" as there is already a Wordless Book practicum scheduled for this afternoon!

We had about three hours of ice breaker games and orientation last night. There are about 50 students here - 43 girls and 7 guys (I think). I am staying with Tamara in one of the apartments and I am SO glad that we have our own bathroom since the girls' dorm is packed.

Praises: All of the students arrived safely and everyone seems eager to begin training. I think that this will be a great bunch of people to spend the next two weeks with!

Tamara and I have such similar personalities that I think we will be a fabulous team. I had a wonderful discussion with her last night about Boston and the ministry there, and I was so excited that I had a hard time falling asleep last night. :-)

Prayer: Either I am dealing with allergies (not surprising in this location), or I am coming down with a cold. Please pray that my sore throat will subside quickly and that whatever this is will not hinder me from participating in classes and other activities.

Tamara is also dealing with the after-effects of having mono this past spring. I know that she would appreciate prayers for increased energy and strength as we begin the next few weeks of intense training with full-time ministry to follow.

Have a marvelous Saturday!