Spiritual dryness

It was a rainy week in Estes, too, which could be affecting everyone's mood!

So it seems like we're getting to that point in LT where everyone is tired, getting tired of being around the same people all the time and basically everyone just feels like they want to go home. Guess what? I'm feeling the same way. Just cause I'm an intern and just because I didn't go through that at all last year doesn't mean I'm immune from these feelings all the time!

This is part of the reason I didn't blog last week. I couldn't find the energy or the motivation to do so and I feel like I'm just kind of treading water right now. It's no fun.

Through this dry spot, I have felt God calling me to keep pushing on and persevering so I can see beautiful fruit at the end of the summer, but I honestly have no energy or desire to do that. It sucks because I know time at LT is precious and I need to take advantage of it, but every part of me is having a hard time desiring to be close to God. That sounds terrible, but a relationship is not always perfect, even with our Lord. Please pray that I can get over this spiritual low and that I can allow God to fill me up again as soon as possible.

The trial has allowed me to take the last couple of days to try and think and process why I am feeling this way, but I can't really pin it down at all to any specific things. This is something I have really struggled with too: feeling bad or uneasy and not knowing why.

Still, through processing all of this, I think what God is trying to teach me is that everything in ministry will not always be fun and games. That should be an obvious fact of life for me, but experiencing it so strongly here at LT while doing ministry work is giving me a good image of what to expect for a full-time staff member.

That's exactly what I wanted from this internship. I wanted to gain a full and clear picture of what full-time ministry could look like for me, both good and bad.

I don't want to be dishonest with anyone and tell everyone that it's all going great out here, but I don't want anyone to think that it has been a terrible last couple of weeks for me either. I've had some great project days, I got to hang out with my girlfriend, Irene, and there has been some awesome spiritual growth out here to watch! LT is still a great thing and I wouldn't rather be anywhere else for this whole summer.

I hope to post a more encouraging update next week!!

Stepping out in faith

Yesterday was supposed to be one of the more nerve wracking days of the summer for me. Our the project group spent the day focused on evangelism, so we spent an hour and a half in Boulder on Pearl Street sharing our faith and the Gospel with all who would listen.

I'd never done anything like that before because of some unexplained, deep-seeded fear inside me. Because of that fear, I probably should have been really nervous for the day and sharing my faith boldly to a stranger for the first time. God wasn't gonna allow me to be nervous though.

Through the quiet time we had in the morning before we left for Boulder, God gave me a whole lot of peace about the upcoming day. My co-leader, Michelle, put together an awesome guide of verses and things to pray about for evangelism and it really helped me put my focus on God and realize that the things I did during the day really didn't matter in the end. It wasn't my work that would help lead anyone to Christ, but instead I had to let the Spirit work through me and let it plant the seeds

When we got to Boulder, I was teamed up with a girl from Mizzou named Doona. We were walking around, looking for someone to talk to and I recognized a guy that I saw on an earlier trip to Boulder. When I was there earlier, I saw the guy and thought, "he'd be a good guy to talk to for evangelism." So when I saw him yesterday, I knew that God was telling me to go over to him and do just that

We walked up to him and asked him if we could play chess with him (he had a sign welcoming all challengers) in order to break the ice. After a bit of small talk, we got into a deeper discussion with him about spiritual things. He was raised by a staunch Catholic dad and chose not to be a Christian because the spiritual leaders around him couldn't answer all his questions about the faith and he "didn't believe in a bearded guy in the sky." Both were legitimate doubts, but it was clear that he had at least thought about the faith.

Still, this guy was obviously opposed to Christianity in general, but Doona and I still tried to share our faith in a way that would be appealing to him. Overall, I feel like we did a good job just making him feel loved, which he needed because he doesn't have any really good friends as a homeless guy in Boulder.

I could tell he appreciated us giving him some of our time, so maybe some seeds were planted there. We spent the whole hour and a half talking to him about his life, his past and his beliefs. How awesome is that? After the conversation I was full of joy because I felt God was there the entire time and he challenged me a lot to ask some tough questions. Sensing the things he wanted to ask me was really cool and responding to that push by the Spirit was great to.

I'd encourage everyone reading this to share your faith with a stranger as soon as possible, if you consider yourself a Christian. I think evangelizing is the best thing you can do to help strengthen your faith because you have to overcome fear and uncertainty.

Fear is a thing I dealt with a lot for the days leading up to yesterday, but God works through everyone who is bold enough to step out and just do it and he surely did that with our group. Everyone in our project group had a cool story about evangelizing and what God did to push them to another level. It was just an awesome picture of how God can empower people to do things they never thought they could do.

The power of a true community

Things just keep happening at LT! This week has been a great week, especially in the context of our project group (JDC!).

Most people that attend Colorado LT would say that the best part of the summer is their project group. After one and a half summers, I'd have to agree with that statement 100%.

This week, our group kind of took a break from long project days filled with spiritual discussions and instead just focused on building the camaraderie of the group with fun activities. I can say for sure that this was a great and much needed day off.

What? These are our normal clothes....

Our project clicked in certain ways pretty early on, but I feel like Monday's relaxing/fun project day kind of broke down the walls for a lot of the quieter members in our group and helped everyone just get to know everyone else's personality a lot better. (obviously. see the photos!)

JDC has been a huge blessing to me personally this summer and has been a great place and community for people to come with struggles, spiritual questions or anything else. It's great to see how openness and honesty is so prevalent in our group (especially life groups) after only four project days this year.

The true sign of a healthy community of God's people is how open the members of the group are. It takes a lot of great and committed people to be open and make a small group like this work, but that is exactly what we have this summer! Praise the Lord.

So basically what I am getting at is that we are making a more connected community of Christ-followers, which we know is extremely valuable. But, why is it valuable?

Britanny, Sam and Bennie looking good!

First of all, in this day and age, the most effective way to get people interested in Christianity and regularly attending church is the provide a group of friends that make them feel loved and accepted. In doing this, the power of God's love is shown and people are able to appreciate that love in a more real and physical way.

That was why I got hooked on my church at Missouri. That's how you get people interested in a relationship with God. That's why I want to do this as a career for the near future. Nothing gets me more excited than someone experiencing the love of God in a way they never thought was possible.

With the power of the community of our project group, I've seen people experience that love for the first time. I can't wait to grow closer together as a group and keep showing that love to those around us.

Another reason it is valuable is pushing growing Christians to a better and more committed relationship with the Lord. When you are constantly surrounded by a group of Christians that all have that same goal, motivation is easy to come by and accountability is everywhere. I like to say that you have no where to run from growth at LT (kind of true, even though it sounds scary) because of the insane amount of accountability that is built into the program.

Overall, the community of God is just a beautiful thing that everyone needs to experience!

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!