Let This Be The Day

The title is just really random because I was listening to a song titled that when I started to write this. The words say "Let this be the day, people turn to you Lord. Let this be the day, lives are wholly restored. Open every eye to see, open every ear to hear. All the goodness of your kingdom has come near. Come bring your peace to all the nations. Come bring your love to every heart. Send us in power to make your kingdom known, Holy God we're crying out!" The guy who wrote it came and led worship at the church I'm going to here and I bought his CD and I love his music a lot. Anyway on to what has been happening in the past week. 2 of those 5 outreaches I was talking about have now happened. A large group went and prayer walked the campus of University of California at Santa Cruz and I heard it was really powerful. Unfortunately all the servant team leaders had meetings so I couldn't make it. The other one was this morning, and it was by far my favorite outreach that we've done on project. It required me getting up at 6:30am and everyone else getting up around 7 but every guy who drug themselves out of bed loved it and said it was totally worth getting up for. It was a guys only outreach because we were going to a hardware store where middle aged hispanic men gather early in the morning waiting to get hired for a day task like mulching. We had one girl Kelly Toner who came because she knew spanish almost fluently, she was such a huge help! She was so worried that she wasn't gonna be as good at spanish as everyone expected or she wasn't going to be useful or something I don't really know but she stepped out in faith and God so used her, it was such a blessing she was there. Anyway so it was her and 12 of the 24 guys on project who signed up and woke up and came with us, we had spanish bibles and spanish "More than a Carpenter" books and spanish "Knowing God Personally" booklets, and even though there was a language barrier like I said we stepped out in faith and God really moved. We couldn't really verbally present the Gospel to these people at all but through like basic spanish and them knowing basic english we were able to just love on these people, try to get to know them a little bit, we brought them all biscuits. They all looked so dreary and like they hated being there when we showed up but when we left there was a definite buzz and an energy and they were all smiling. Because we loved them the way Christ loved us, they were interested in reading what we gave them. Before we left people were already opening up and reading the book of John, flipping through the Knowing God Personally booklet, and even giving extra bibles to their friends as they walked up. The whole scene was just so awesome and encouraging, God overcame a language barrier and His spirit totally moved this morning! Seeing it was very humbling too because knowing I could barely even communicate with these people was just a reminder of how God doesn't need me, and its not how well I can present the Gospel but how God moves that changes lives and today it wasn't God using my talents it was God working despite what I lacked and that was very humbling and awesome and inspiring. But, those two outreaches are only like 3 hours out of the past week so I should touch on the rest of it. One of our family members here on project got sent home, it was a real tough decision that our leadership had to make but this person had broken the alcohol policy as well as some other stuff and after a ton of tears and prayers and seeking the Lord and talking with the staff who had already left at this point, our directors decided they had to send him home, so that was sad for all of us, and especially his roommates. I didn't know him all that well but it was a significant enough event to our whole project that I felt it was worth documenting on here. We're planning a huge Christmas in July party/outreach for July 24th and we found out that the evangelism team still has a lot of budget to use so its going to be pretty awesome, we're all getting really excited for it and its 2 weeks off. Shout out to my awesome brother Mike for getting a job! It was so cool to hear from everyone back home about how much he came back from camp on fire for God and now hes starting his job which I know hes been trying to get for a while so I just wanted to say on here I'm so proud of you man and I love you and can't wait to see God continue to work in your life and grow you up more and more. We also had our guys room ask one of the girls rooms on a creative date which was a lot of fun. We took them out to dinner then took them to the Salvation Army and let them pick out ridiculous clothes for us to wear around the rest of the date. Then we went roller skating and then out for ice cream. It was all lots of fun. Sorry this is really scatter brained I'm trying to think of all the really significant stuff from the last week. Oh! last Monday right after I wrote my post, after the staff left and the four student directors took over they immediately opened in prayer and then called all the students on the whole project up in a line for them to wash our feet which was amazing! We could all feel God just taking up that whole room with his presence, and I remember thinking to myself "only God could inspire students to do something like this" Anyway thats been a few highlights from my week, I love you guys!