wow has it really been 2 weeks?

So my last blog post was June 15th and thats actually kind of hard to believe. Don't worry guys I haven't fallen off the face of the earth! However, I have gotten progressively more busy every day, and its about to multiply. The first 5 weeks are almost up (CRAZY) and that means the staff are going to leave us in charge of everything for the second half of the summer. For those of you who don't know this isn't something they just like sprung on us, we knew when we signed up that the staff would leave halfway through its just actually about to happen. I was blessed enough that they chose me to co-lead the evangelism team for the second half of the summer with this awesome guy named Charlie Lelane. So my responsibilities and amount of meetings are about to go way up, but my job hours and other responsibilities are not going down so I'm preparing myself to count on God for every ounce of energy and asking him to give me just a little bit of time to blog every once in a while if thats what He wants :) Anyway most of you know I have a strong passion for evangelism, I think my eyes are most lit up when I'm doing that, or worship. Either way evangelism is something that I really feel alive while doing and something God has gifted me with a passion for so I'm very excited for the opportunity to lead the evangelistic aspect of our project. God has been teaching me so much about living the spirit-filled life, about prayer, about leadership, humility, servitude, and just about Him it's been such an awesome experience and while I can't believe its almost halfway over already I also can't believe that I still have another 5 and a half weeks of this, it's amazing. Shout out to Karl real quick, hes the staff guy who's been discipling me and listening whenever I need to talk and teaching me a lot of awesome things and praying for me and encouraging me despite having a wife and 3 children to be the spiritual leader of and I really really really appreciate it. God put him in my life for a reason and he can really relate to me very well and I'm so grateful. Hes leaving and he will be missed so thats my shout out to him, love you Karl! Tomorrow I get to go to a Giants vs Dodgers baseball game with my uncle which is going to be awesome. I'm not a huge baseball fan and would never watch a televised game but I've been to one or two live games before and its pretty fun stuff, but more than anything I'm excited to spend the day with Uncle Richard, I haven't really ever gotten to see much of him since he lives here in California and I live in North Carolina but hes a really cool guy so it should be fun. The evangelism team has a 3 option outreach planned which we are really excited for. One option will be to go to UCSC (University of Cali Santa Cruz) and do surveys/prayer walk if not many people are around, another option just for men will be to go early in the morning to where a lot of hispanic men line up outside a hardware store waiting for someone to come hire them for something like yard work or whatever else and bring them biscuits as well as spanish versions of the bible or Knowing God Personally booklets. The third option will be an outreach to the international students who are staying at a motel down the road. We are asking every student on project to sign up for at least one, challenging all the men on project to sign up for the day laborers one, and strongly encouraging people to sign up for more than one. It will be a great way to reach 3 of our target areas in Santa Cruz for the Gospel though and I'm really excited for it. That's all I can really think of right now but God is really moving here right now in my life and in Santa Cruz and I would love to thank all the people who are praying for me and all those who gave financially, the things you are reading about on this blog are the things that you are investing in and I hope it excites you as much as it does me!

long time no talk

so yeah since work started its been crazyyy. I had today off which was nice. But I've been working from like 10:30-5:30 pretty much every day except Sunday. We've done another outreach since the last one I told you about. I basically spent the entire thing on the front porch of a drug house talking to this guy, which was pretty cool. I'm starting to get to know my coworkers better and develop relationships, which is why we have jobs in the first place, so thats also a blessing. I'm learning a ton about how to live empowered by the Holy Spirit, and just let God be in the drivers seat of my life. The people here are awesome and I'm getting to know them better and better every day. I know I focus on the good parts of project here and never really say anything bad but it really is shaping out to be the best summer of my life so far. There are bad parts, but they just seem so miniscule compared to all the blessings. Just so it doesn't seem like an unrealistic picture of project I'll go ahead and say that there have been some conflicts, obviously there are always people that just kind of get under your skin. We have been over scheduled like crazy but its fine because its all good stuff and it forces us to grow in faith and rely on God for energy. Sometimes I feel like they put more on our plates than we have time for, which is why I never write this blog anymore. It feels like whenever we get free time we have something they've asked us to read or asked us to memorize, or we have laundry to do or its our turn on clean up duty after the meal. They leave us enough time to spend time with God which is great, and they even schedule 2 hours with God in on Tuesday nights but in terms of time to just breathe and relax its like non-existant. But in general I'm loving project and thats why I usually have nothing but good things to say about it. I love you guys, thanks for taking the time to read this. If you have prayer requests or need to talk please please please text or email or something, I will find the time. You guys are still my best friends and my brothers and sisters in Christ and I can't ever be to busy to pray for you or offer a word of encouragement. I'd love for any and all of you to send me messages on how your lives are going and I promise I'll read them, even if I can't respond. I miss you guys.

In Christ,

Matt

3 for 1

so hey guys, I know it's been a few days, it's been crazyyyy, so now I have 3 days to update you on, and it will have to be the spark notes version because I only have like 11 minutes. Maybe that gives you an idea of what my schedule has been like.

Sunday:

Church. Outreach. The end. Just kidding, but yeah that was basically it only they were both way too exciting to just leave it at that. Church was great because the service and worship was amazing and we get to help out with the children's ministry all summer! I am working with 3-4 year olds :). Then the outreach was probably my favorite thing on project so far, which might be why I'm on the evangelism team planning them but anyway, it was super successful, the staff said they had been part of similar outreaches before but that they didn't even compare. Tons of people heard the Gospel, we even had a guy sharing it in sign language with a group of deaf people. It was amazing, we did a tug of war on the beach and gave out water and watermelons and attracted hundreds of people wondering what was going on, and then went from person to person explaining who we were, what we were about, and why we were in Santa Cruz, and hopefully getting into spiritual conversations.

Monday: First real day of work (not orientation). I got taught in like 5-10 minutes how to run one of the games and then got left to work it for 8 hours. It was a lot of fun though when I got the hang out it and people were actually coming (morning hours were kind of empty). I got to get really enthusiastic about it (most boardwalk employees aren't) and high five the kids and make their days and just make it more fun than just playing a 10 second game and getting a dog if you win. Then we had our first Monday Night Live, which is our weekly meeting with worship and a speaker, Mike Mehaffie talked about How To Walk With God for a Lifetime, which if you know Mike, it was a perfect talk for him to give. It was amazing and super practical, and the worship was awesome too especially since they only had like a day to practice.

Tuesday:

Basically same deal as Monday, I worked 8 hours, but then instead of Monday Night Live we had our Time of Reflection which was basically just like 2 hours with the Lord, and it was really really awesome. Now we are about to do s'mores outside so bye!

A Day Late

Hey so since I didn't have time last night, I'm gonna write you about yesterday now and today tonight, if that makes any sense. Okay so yesterday was my first day as a game operator, but not really. I went to work all nice and dressed up in my uniform, after doing a quiet time and getting with the other game operators to throw a blanket of prayer over our days. When we got there, we realized it was just yet another orientation. 12-5 of learning game operator specific stuff even though two days ago was 5 hours of job orientation but it was a lot more broad. Anyway so that was long and draining and I'm sick of orientations but I did meet a few of my coworkers and that was pretty awesome. If we hadn't blanketed our day with prayer I might have not had the best attitude about it, but it turned out okay. We did dinner, uneventful. Then we did 2 hours of training, an hour of which was led by Holly Thomas. She talked about creating movements on our campus' and it was alright, I know it was really exciting for some people because she talked about entering into other peoples cultures and that was something God had already really hit me with last year, so I know some people in the room were getting hit with it last night just like I was and feeling called to do something when they go back. The other part though was with Noel on how to follow up with people after we've shared the Gospel and that was all really exciting, useful stuff a lot of which I hadn't heard before. The whole combination of orientation and training is so exhausting, training is exciting but I feel like I'm only halfway mentally present for it. I'll be so glad when all the orientations are over and I can just focus on the training, because right now it all seems so back to back to back and I can't focus for that long. Anyway then we went on a 2 mile run which was fun and obviously good for me, and then I went to bed. So that was my yesterday.

John 15:5 "I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing."

So this morning was job orientation. I found out that I will be a game operator. So I'll be doing the stuff like shooting baskets on that oval basketball goal that nobody can make it on and throwing balls at milk things and all that good stuff. I start tomorrow at noon. Anyway the orientation wasn't awful but not great anything. Then this afternoon we did our first training session. Mike Mehaffie gave a talk on how to share the Gospel using the KGP, and Misty Cook gave a talk on how to live the spirit filled life, and Josh Bolden gave a talk on preparing our testimonies. It was good stuff, but my personal favorite was Mike Mehaffies talk, he has soo much to offer and I'm really excited to be learning from him. Anyway from there we went to the coolest part of the night. We went to the Soquel Vineyard which is owned by a couple who is good friends with Mike. They let us all come up and see their beautiful vineyard and eat dinner there and do praise and worship there. Lots of pictures for the vineyard but it really brought a very really tangible expression of John 15 about Jesus being the true vine (hence the title of this blog post). It was pretty cool. Worshiping there was also awesome. Now chilling back at the Peter Pan

The Calm Before the Storm

So today was as the title implies, a calm before the storm. And after the storm. So I guess it was a calm between two storms. (Not bad storms though, just busy ones). The past couple days have been pretty intense like orientation, getting to know each other, getting adjusted days. Tomorrow morning is my job orientation to get started working full time. Today was a day of mostly free time in between all that craziness, which was nice, even though I spent most of my day running errands. We were assigned community teams this morning and had our first community team meetings. Community teams here are like servant teams back at home, theres the social team, the evangelism team, the prayer team, the special projects team, the housing/administration team, and the weekly meeting team. I'm not going to explain what each one is but I got evangelism team, which seems kind of self explanatory. We plan outreaches and help train the rest of the project in evangelism and just generally try to create a bold evangelistic culture within the project so it becomes a lifestyle for all of us. We had our first meeting which took about 2 hours and it was really pretty exciting. We went through 2 Corinthians 5:11-21 to break down why biblically Christians evangelize. We talked about how it was a privilege that God chose to use us to be his Ambassadors when He could easily have spread His message any way he wanted, and how even if the world sees us as crazy its because Christ's love compels us. Then we made our mission statement and planned the first outreach. Sunday we are doing a huge game of tug of war on the beach to attract attention and when people come up and ask us what is going on we're going to try to get into spiritual conversations with them. More on that in the blog entry Sunday night. Anyway then we had til 3 off and I did some laundry and made some lunch and did my dishes from lunch. At 3 we had our first action group meeting. Action group = bible study. It was really uneventful though we just went over some stuff we'd need to know for the summer, didn't take long. So we basically had another 2 hours of free time before dinner, which was already more free time than the first few days combined. Then we ate and had the rest of the night free, so lots of free time today. We watched the NBA finals which was interesting cuz everybody was from everywhere and had all different opinions on players and teams. Some guys were from kentucky and thought John Wall and Rajon Rondo were like the greatest things ever and were pulling for Boston just cuz they thought Rondo was like the best point guard in the NBA. Other people (like me) disagree and think that Rondo isn't that great hes just always open because the other celtics players are getting double teamed. (this is all just an example and if you don't understand a word I'm saying, bear with me for a second). Anyway so that was really interesting and after the Lakers won I made a target run with one of my roommates and got some shorts and a new razor. Now I'm back, and am probably going to go to bed after I finish writing this blog. I love you guys and I hope everything is going great back on the East Coast, please don't hesitate to text me with prayer requests or anything like that. Preferably not early there because of the time difference here it will be in the middle of the night but you guys know me you can call me at any time in the middle of the night if you really need me. I'd love to hear from more of you even if I may be too busy to respond.

Wacky Wednesday

Hey everyone, hope I haven't bored you all out of reading this yet. I keep repeating this and its not because I want attention or anything but I feel like this isn't really being read. I guess the cool thing about Facebook is that everyone is on there and it will show up in news feeds and everyone will comment on things and stuff so you know what your posting is being appreciated. Blogs not so much, I'm going to keep doing it anyway hopefully even when things get busy and I start my job here in less than a week mostly because it helps me gather my thoughts at the end of the day, but it would be cool if you guys would comment on this or something and make me feel like people are actually reading it. Anyway sorry about that little tangent, on to today. We started this morning by having soul to soul with our action groups (our bible studies). It was basically like an extended version of our testimonies we all shared like everything we'd struggled with and what God had done in our lives up to that point, it was pretty intense but it was a cool bonding experience, and now we can all help each other out with a lot of things. Now you are probably wondering why this post is called Wacky Wednesday if it was so intense, and that is because after the intense stuff the staff wanted to lighten things up a bit. We had a day where we wore around stupid hats all day got funny looks from the locals and did things like a scavenger hunt and football where the guys had to have their legs taped together and sand sculpting. It was a lot of fun and our group got second overall. Silly games like that I don't generally don't enjoy that much but as long as its not a consistent thing, today was really fun.

Hey everybody! Road trip is finally over, and let me tell you what: pulling into the Peter Pan Motel blasting music and having everyone who was there already cheering was one of the most awesome feelings ever. Having spent so long on the road and finally pulling up to the final destination was awesome. Also awesome was seeing months of God working and raising support for 60 people all come together in one place at one time. The people who all showed up at the Pan God has raised up a total of like hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it all came together at once it was mind blowing. Everybody was super warm and friendly and welcoming and you could just walk up and be like "Hey I'm Matt" and they say their name and then you stand and have like a 20 minute conversation, it was awesome. Nobody was awkward or anything like that and we all had the same thing motivating all of us being here. The whole first night was just really awesome, and God was moving. The first day however today was less exciting. It was definitely necessary in that we had a super long orientation, but it was long enough that I had a headache at the end of it. I think we spent 5 hours in orientation, but we did have breaks. That night though we went to dinner with our bible studies which was awesome getting to know them and then we heard our bible study leaders testimonies. So today was pretty tiring but I'm still in the phase of I can't believe I'm actually here because I've been looking forward to it for so long.