Learning to lead

Awesome sunset on Monday evening

LT has really gotten into full swing since I last posted, so this will probably be a pretty long post (but it's all really exciting!). We've had our first LT service, our day-long retreat and my project group had its first project day all in the last six days! I don't think we could have asked for a better or more fruitful start to #LT2012 than we have had in the last week.

Weather

Snow on CCYF

We all knew that Colorado would be fairly  cold, especially at the beginning of the summer, but no one expected this kind of weather! It has snowed twice since we have been here and I've had to wear a jacket during the day almost every single day. Hopefully it starts warming up soon so we can start playing baseball and tennis whenever we want!

LT Talks/Retreat

Andrew Schulz leading worship on Kickoff Night

Man, I can't tell you how awesome the talks have been so far this year. John Drage from Mizzou, Chris Ridgeway from Illinois and Brian Wiles from Bowling Green all hit great and thought-provoking points in the first 5 talks this summer and they have really challenged me and others to chase God fully this summer.

The kick-off talk by John Drage last Thursday really struck me because he talked about asking God what you want from Him in faith. A parable in Mark 10:46-52 says that if you do that, God will give you the desires of your heart. I've read that before but I can't say I've ever fully believed it. Since then, God has been super faithful in answering my prayers because I have truly decided to believe that God can answer prayers.

Talks at LT really strip away all the garbage and get to the point quickly, which is what I love. The theme of our Tuesday night talks is Jesus and the theme of our Thursday night talks is God's Leaders. I'm sure that through these talks and the stories from the Bible that are used in them, faith will be challenged and a deeper love of Christ will be formed. I would be willing to say that some people will become saved through the things they hear in these talks! Prayer for that will be fully appreciated!

Project Day - JDC!

Everyone telling our Project Group why they came to LT

My biggest job as an intern is leading a project group, a group of 20 people (in my case) that get together on a common day off to spend the day together searching for the Lord in a variety of ways. That includes worship, testimonies, small accountability groups and large group discussions, among other things. This group becomes a tight-knit community and is usually every LT participants favorite part of the summer.

My project day falls on a Monday this year, so we got lucky and got to be the first ones to have a project day!

Our day started with breakfast and a couple of "get-to-know-you" games. We wanted to form a good sense of community from the get-go, so we spent the entire morning asking silly questions to each other, playing Catch Phrase, etc. When we were making the plan for the day, I felt kind of silly and lame planning this much time for icebreakers, but in the end I'm glad we did it.

After lunch, God worked pretty quickly in our group to break down the walls and we seemed to be able to open up fairly easily when it came time to share testimonies and figure out what we wanted our vision for the group to be. All of our group is excited to be in Colorado and is solely focused on chasing the Lord, which isn't a given, even at Colorado LT, so that is very exciting for me. The atmosphere for growth is very high at LT, so I'm confident our group will help facilitate a lot of growth.

Establishing our vision was my favorite part of the day. This has been a big focus for the staff this year and I'm really happy our group has decided to run with it. We all discussed our values and what we all want to get from the summer, and through that, we decided that we wanted to accomplish three things in the next 10 weeks: establish a loving community, practice great encouragement within the group and be expert evangelizers.

Now that we have a vision, we will be able to keep each other accountable with it. Hopefully we can accomplish our goal!

We spent the rest of the day just hanging out, playing kickball and getting ice cream in downtown Estes Park. I can't wait for our second project day now!

Oh, and we came up with a pretty awesome name, but we are trying to keep it within the group for a while. All you need to know is JD! CCCCCCCCCCC!
 

Mizzou People

Steven and our new friend, Mabel, from Kent State!

I've been super excited to see how my friends from Mizzou are already growing closer to the Lord and giving up their whole summer to Him. It's nice to see everyone in the group do that, but when you watch people you have known for the last year or two dedicated themselves like that, you get a different and more satisfying feeling. Either way, it's awesome to watch God work and he is certainly already doing that in the first week of LT.

It has also been awesome to start to get to know the 4 staffers from Mizzou that are up here for LT: Kirstin and Andrew Schulz and Chris and Aimee Swift. They are awesome to work with and I've enjoyed just hanging out with them and leading together. If I do end up going back to Mizzou as a staff member, I know I'll have some friends and good leaders to work with!

Prayer Requests

- More personal growth in the Lord that can help translate into better leadership. I want to be a good leader, but I need to be reminded that the only way I can do that is by allowing God to have full control of my life and allowing him to do the work inside of me that he wants and needs to do.

- Pray that this program is used for awesome outreach. We've got a great opportunity to share the gospel with our co-workers and international students, but we've just got to do it! Pray for me specifically, as I need motivation and direction to do this because I only work at the YMCA 8 hours per week.

- Pray that our project group can continue to click well and that we are a great example of the love of God to everyone at the YMCA. Also pray for vulnerability within the group that leads to a better understanding of God's love, grace and faithfulness.

Thanks for reading this long post. More updates to come in the near future!

A completely different experience

YMCA kids in front of my favorite mountains in the Park

I've made it back to Estes Park and I'm already getting settled in to my new role here as a GCM intern. Working with the five other interns has been a great blessing so far, especially since I knew four of them fairly well because of interactions at last year's LT. Going through this process together with them will only make this experience that much better.

At the beginning of last year's LT, I had no idea why I was here and what God wanted to do with me during the summer, but this year is the complete opposite. God showed me that I should come back to Estes Park as an intern to find out if full-time college ministry is the career path that I should be focused on when August comes around.

I'd have to say after being here less than a week that God is making it pretty clear that I would thoroughly enjoy being on a church's staff, I have the passion to do a great job at it and I also have some skills that could be used to further His kingdom. Hopefully it will stay that clear the rest of the summer, but whatever God decides to do is fine with me!

Staff Training

Team-building exercises on the first day of staff training

The first two full days that I spent in Estes were mostly filled doing really useful staff training with the rest of the interns and GCM pastors/staff from the 7 campuses that are participating in LT this year. 

A good friend (Robbie) of John Drage (my pastor at Mizzou and the director of LT) came and did some team-building exercises with us that were really relevant to our team. We'll be working together a lot this summer, so it was good to get to know each other a little more and do some activities that helped us find out more about the strengths and weaknesses of each member of the team. Robbie also helped relate all of our struggles and triumphs to how we will be trying to affect people for the Lord that aren't involved in the LT program. It was inspiring, to say the least!

We also did a bunch of other administrative training like how to work as a project leader/coach, but it was just generally good to meet all the people that will be making this program run and actually get to work on what we have been looking forward to for the last 9 months.

Everyone arrives!

LTers have been trickling in for the better part of the last week, but yesterday was the big day where the majority of LTers showed up and got settled in. LT officially started for me when I saw my friends Steven, Elena and Allie show up ready and excited to get the summer going. I can't tell you how excited I am for all my friends from Mizzou to have the same awesome experience I had at my first LT last year!

Last night we got to meet our co-project leaders and the life group leaders and I have to say that pumped me up even more! I'm stoked that Kirstin Schulz, a staffer from Mizzou, will be coaching my project group. If I want to go on staff at Mizzou, it will be valuable to have a good working relationship with some of the current staffers there. It was also good to finally put a face to the names of the students who I'll be leading our small group with. They all seem awesome and I'm sure they all love the Lord a lot, so I'm sure we'll be #doingwork all summer long! We are going to meet the rest of the group at 5 p.m. today, so be praying for us in that!

Overall, God has been doing some awesome work in the first couple of days that the staff has been here. I feel way more prepared to lead a project group now and the excitement keeps building for the program to get started. I've also read an entire book and hiked a mountain already too, so it hasn't all been hard work for me yet! I plan on working as hard as I can this summer, but rest is definitely needed, especially in a beautiful place like this.

I'll probably write another update after our first project day, which will be on Monday, May 28. A LOT of prayers are appreciated for that day because project groups are where the biggest growth in LTers (and even staff) occurs. Thanks for your support and prayers! They are all appreciated more than you'll ever know.

Goals for #LT2012

I’m sitting in Kansas (boo!) getting ready to make the last leg of my 2-day trip back to Colorado for the summer and I was thinking that I should make another goals list like I did last summer and at the beginning of the school year. It’s fun looking back at those posts and seeing how God worked through me in the summer and in my Canvas Group this year, so I want to be able to do that after my internship at Colorado LT 2012 is over in August.

Here's my five goals:

1. The main goal that I have for the summer (and every Christian should have at all times!) is to improve my personal relationship with God. I want to concentrate this relationship during the summer on gaining a better understanding of His word. I just finished reading the Bible in a year, but I want to dive back into it even more to study the meaning and the connectedness of the Old and New Testament. With constant study of the Bible, it will be on the top of my mind more often and I will be able to use specific references when evangelizing to friends and strangers.
2. Another big goal I have for the summer that can’t really be properly measured (oh well) is to effectively lead my project group. As an intern, one of my duties is to co-lead a group of 15 LT participants in activities for one full off-day together. It’s our biggest opportunity for a tight community and me and my co-leader will be responsible for creating that good sense of community. I have to be diligent and persistent, especially at the beginning of the summer in creating the community and I’ve never done anything like this before so it will be a big challenge, but I’m sure God will show me the way!
3. As an intern, I’ll be working 40 hours a week for GCM instead of for the YMCA, so I will have a lot more opportunity to direct parts of the church program instead of being distracted with food service stuff (PTL). So another goal that I have is to be willing and able to do anything the staff needs me to do to make the program run better. That goes into my next goal, which is…
4. I want to figure out if going on staff with a college church is what God wants from me after the summer. This idea was presented to me during the course of LT last year and I have been motivated all year long to work in order to find out if I am a good fit for a college staff. My passion for this possible job hasn’t waned over the past year, but has gotten even more intense. So I’ve got to sell out 100% to my internship to see if I could do it full time. A lot of prayer is appreciated here.
5. And finally, a goal I won’t have any problem reaching: have fun! The mountains in Colorado are great and the community of believers is awesome. Nothing better than a summer with people chasing God and being awesome! I can’t wait to get there later today!

 If you want to get more updates on my summer, keep checking this blog because I'm gonna make a good effort to update it weekly! I can't wait to see what God does with my summer and everyone I come in contact with out in Colorado.