reflections while sitting in a coffee shop...

so i am sitting in a coffe shop in beaver falls pennsilvania right now. and it is so nice to sit and just do nothing at a crazy week.

i updated on tuesday so you can read about the beggining of the week there. the week ended ok. there were just some people that were difficult all week. but thats ok. we made it through! that is the important part!

i wanted to share something important that i learned this past week: having a servant heart at all times, not when it is convenient for you. yes, i have given up the last three sumers to go to crazy places away from home and serve for the summer, yes, this past year at school i spent usually 10-15 hours a week in north minneapolis serving the teens. but it was all mostly convenient for me. i enjoyed it. and serving should be enjoyable, but maybe not at all times. this past week was a week of questions. it seemed like i was asked questions or to do something for someone 24/7 this past week. and it was really was annoying at sometimes. sometimes i was in the middle of something, or rocking at with youth at the concert we have each week, or in the middle of devotions, and i was getting really upset. but i stepped back for a minute and pondered. God doesnt call us to serve only when WE want to or when it is convenient for US, but at ALL TIMES. when he wants us to. sometimes it may be hard and you may have to force that smile and say yes when you are really thinking no, but we are called to serve with a servant heart and attitude at all times. and that is something that is hard to learn and fully do. but it is truth. and i got a nice reminder of that this past week.

another thing that has been happening over the past few weeks is people telling me that i am going to be a preacher. i give talks every night at club. and i enjoy it so much. making the bible relevant for youth to understand! but over the last few weeks, once everyone one adult leader each week has told me that they feel like i am going to be a preacher, and i am not sure how i feel about this. i have never really felt like that or thought that is what God has for me. I guess i will see as my life goes further on i will find out. personally i feel like i have screwed up way to much in my life to even consider being a preacher, but i know that is just satan telling me that. God uses us all no matter how much we have strayed away from the path. God's grace is made perfect in our weakness, which is a beautiful thing. all i know is that i love teenagers and i want to spend my life just helping them get through the tough times and making God's love and word relevant for them!

so yeah. that is where i am at in this very moment. i am getting really excited to come home. i fly home two weeks from tuesday and i cant believe it! i am super pumped to go back to northwestern and go back to school, but at the same time i only have two weeks left with kim eric and mark, which is nuts. this summer has been an adventure with them, we have fought and had hard times, but it has only made us closer. we truly are like a family. we all get along great and have had amazing moments together, i am so glad that i have been able to meet and live with these three people for the summer and i am not quite ready to leave them.

so i will end this with a few funny moments from the past week!

-kim bought orange pants last week in pittsburg to match me! so on fridays mark and eric where the same outfit (khaki shorts and brown long sleve t's) and me and kim where the same outfit (orange pants with green t's) it is just hilarious and i LOVE it!

-last night we hung out with the firemen till about 1 am. it was so much fun. we just sit outside the fire house with our fav 3: pounder, terry, and grey. they are awesome. the street right out side the church is the street that the hookers walk. so it is basically like reality tv sitting outside the fire house. we saw some ladies get picked up and dropped off several minutes later. we saw guys drive by multiple times looking for ladies. we saw cops drive by and tell them to leave. and we saw some drug deals go down. it is pretty entertaining and is way better than tv.

so that is the update. i hope you all are doing well. and i will be home before you know it!!

i hope you have a beautiful day!

yikes!

hey everyone!

i am sorry that i wasnt able to make a blog post this past weekend. it ended up being super busy and there was simply zero time for it. we went to pittsburg last weekend and it was so amazing. we went to the district and went to pillima (?) brothers. the sandwhich shop where they put the fries and coleslaw on your sandwhich! it was pretty good. then we just hung out. and shopped and enjoyed a day in the city. we went down the incline where you get in a rail car and the view was beautiful!

some highlights from last week...(its hard to remember all of them)

i got to give mark and eric mowhawks. the group met the money raised for YE and so mark and eric got mowhawks. it was really fun. i am really getting good at cutting hair and that has been super fun.

other highlights were just getting to spend a lot of time at kids club and interacting with the kids. it was so good to just continue those relationships.

although kids club is never easy. on monday we had a "gang fight" it wasnt really a gang fighting but it was about 5 teenage boys going at it right at the end of kids club. me mark and eric were caught in the middle of it. it was crazy to try and break up. we were all holding people back and at that point i was ready to pack my bags and leave...but if only i knew what was gonna happen this week..

this week has been really hard. there is no other way to put it. yesterday many things happened to atribute to the worst youthworks day i have ever seen.

yesterday someone tried to start multiple fires in our sactuary with our bibles. thankfully we found it before it got out of control, but there was still some damage done, but no one was hurt. we came accross the fire after eric had saw some smoke and smelt it. when we went the back way into the sanctuary we found a few bibles ripped up and smoldering in a pile. then when we went into the sanctuary we found 3 more places with ashes of church envelopes. the sanctuary was filled with haze and smoke. also thankfully the fire dept is right accross the street and they and the police were here with-in minutes. so even though we dont know who did it, we are glad everyone ended up being ok. and now we are taking extra safety procautions to make sure it doesnt happen again.

also yesterday we had a youth that just was not getting along with an adult leader and that was tough. we are trying to work that situation out but it is really tough. we have a wide range of youth here including many that dont want to be here. and it is hard to make someone have fun when they are so angry that they are here.

then just all the small things this week that could go wrong, are. kim had a bad feeling about this week this past weekend and it is proving to be true. i dont know how it will end out but as a team we are spending alot of time in prayer and just hoping that God really moves here this week.

i really would just to like to ask for prayer here for us in steubenville. we have so many challenges in the next few days to deal with and i pray that we can just overcome them. and surpase them. that this week can just be turned around. we have 2 weeks left after this and i just hope that this week doesnt burn us out. because we need to give these final two weeks as much as we gave the first 6.

so there is a quick update. that is about all i have time for right now i will be writting again this weekend. to fill you in. here are a few quick pictures from last week.

with exactly one month left...

So today is July 11th...and on Aug 11th at about 7 am or so i will be on a flight back to minneapolis! its so crazy to think that i just have 4 short weeks left. and i have been here for 7 weeks already!

so to start this off i am just sitting here listening to jack johnson relaxing...this week has been a little crazy and different, especially this weekend. it wasnt planned but as of yesterday at about 4 my whole team left. they all went their seperate ways to spend time with their family members this weekend. and so i am here is this church by myself...which can be scary, especially last night...but i made it through!!! so i am pretty proud of myself for that!

well i am just gonna do highlights from the past week:

a. i got to shave heads! we sell YE shirts here on thursday night, and it is my job to sell them, and lots of them. so mark said if we sold 700 dollars worth that he would shave his beard. well one of the participants said that if we sold 1000 dollars he would shave his head, and then another one of the participants, with hair past his shoulders said that he would shave his head if we sold out of a certain shirt. well we did all three! so i went out and got clippers and we had a hair shaving celebration! it was super fun and hilarious! thanks to my dad i have had alot of practice with shaving heads...so i didnt cut anyone's ear off!!

b. we had some awesome people here this week. to of my favs were the taylors...these to guys named taylor were just so cool. and just simply fun to hang out with. we had some mean four square time!

c. foot washing. everything thursday night we do a foot washing during club. it is super emotional and just powerful. we wash the adult leader feet and then they wash their student's feet. well this week was just amazing. after the foot washing i had two youth from long island that wanted to wash my feet. and they prayed for me. and it was just so touching. they just told me about how much i had impacted them this week and how the stories i shared about my life during club just really helped them connect and really begin to find God again. well after that. three others came up and wanted to wash my feet. and prayed for me. then the taylors came over and prayed for me and said that i also helped them connect with God again because they had gone off track and then this amazing girl savanah as well came over and prayed for me. it was just so awesome. all of these youth just were so filled with God and it was such a sight to see. it also just really was a re-assurance for me, that what i am saying during my talks is getting through and God is just really speaking through me!

d. playing mau with the adult leaders. on wed night we had an after hours party with the adult leaders. we started out by playing spoons, and then played this card game called mau. the first rule of mau was that you arent allowed to talk about the rules. so it was a definately a learn as you go game. but it was so much fun. we ended up staying up till 2:30 am..but it was so worth it. then thurs night was also a 3:00 am night..but it was because it was just such a powerful night that people just wanted to talk about life and what God had for them. so it was just great.

e. i learned about P.U.S.H (pray until something happens) last sunday at church pastor Jason gave a sermon on prayer and talked about PUSH, but didnt say too much about it, but then we went to power of tower on wed night and pastor everette really talked about PUSH and how you just have to be in prayer 24/7 and something will happen because God always answers prayers. well then that night i bought a devo book because i wanted something that i could take time each day to really connect. and the next morning i opened the devo book to the date (July 9th) and it was a devo on PUSH..it was soooo crazy. and so God. this week i had really been struggling because i have just been dealing with random things that have been pulling me down, and sometimes i just give up and stop praying about things, but God just reminded me to PUSH Pray Until Something Happens, because he WILL answer!!

so that was the week in a nutshell. i am gonna post some pics in a bit. so you can see what has been going on. a prayer request for me would just be that our team keeps growing together and also that we can give these last few weeks as good if not better then we gave our first!

i love and miss you all and i hope that you are having beautiful days!

wow. what a week.

so this week was completely different then last week. we had three groups once again from PA, CT, and MN (minneapolis YAY). the beggining of the week was super hard because i missed all the participants from the first week. they were so great. not that this group wasnt great, they were just completely different.



the ages were younger and also just they way the acted was younger as well. so i wasn't really sure how i felt about the week. but as the week went on some amazing things happened:



1. JANE-right away on monday i noticed how she just really didnt seem into this. she was always by herself not talking to others and she spent the whole day when she was supposed to be working at kids club talking to a local teenager guy. this definately was just a red flag to me and i wanted to get to know her more. so monday at the marina i sat down with her and talked. she told me how she didnt fit in with her church group and how she never felt like she could truly be herself in life. she also opened up about how she was struggling with boys and wanted to let go of all of it. so i knew that God had to do great things for her this week. through out the week i was frustrated, i had a few more conversations with her but she always just looked so sad and never said that she had a great time, just ok. so i really didnt know how to take all of this. i even had to be the "mean one" when she snuck out with the local teenage boy. so i had kinda given up hope. well thursday during the footwashing this all changed. i had just finished washing feet with mark and had sat down when all of a sudden jane came over and just like collapsed on me in tears. i just held her for a few minutes and told her everything was going to be ok. she told me that this was the best week of her life, she truly felt like she could be herself now and that she had the courage to be herself as well. this was amazing. here i thought that she was hating me for being so concerned but really it was just what she had needed. i am excited to go home to minneapolis and be able to hang out with jane, and even take her to church with me sometimes. she is really an amazing child of God and i cant wait to see where she is going to take what she learned here this week!

2: there was a group here from minneapolis. i love it when people from back home come. it is just a breathe of fresh air slash i make friends that i can actually hang out with again!

3: it was rainy all week which was a bummer but we still made everything work!

4: my cell phone broke and i had to get a 30 dollar ghetto one. so i have to do t9 again, which is wayyyy hard to relearn. but it is good. it was also kind of a lesson, i really rely on my cell way to much and the fancy technology of it. i really do think God was just saying that i need to rely souly on him. and not on my communcation to people back home. even though i love everyone back home so much, i need to remember that all i need is God and He will take care of everything else!

5: God is really teaching me to let go. I really do enjoy having people tell me good job or wow this is amazing what you do. and have it be about me, but it isnt about me, it is about Him. and i need to remember that. when particpants come here, I want to be the one to change their life, but that isnt the way it works, yeah they listen to the talks i give and look at my example, but God working in their lives in what truly changes them, i do nothing. and as hard as that is to except and realize it is the truth, God really showed that to me this week and it was a really good thing to learn. although i have always known this it is finally starting to make sense. we are just here planting seeds, God sees the end results in their hearts and really does the work. It is NOT about is, it IS about God!

so that is my week in a nut shell. this weekend has been hard. i really am getting home sick which is something that has never happened before. i miss my friends and family so much that it is really difficult. it is hard to talk to friends back home on the weekends cause that is when they are all busy. and it is just hard living with four strangers all summer, and they are all great and awesome but we are nothing a like and i just miss having people here that know me super well.

but the thing is that God has called me here to be in steubenville, and he has a plan and a will for me. life isnt easy. it is not supposed to be. if being a christian and doing what God wanted was easy, everyone would do it. God calls us to do things that are humanly impossible, but with God all things are possible (Phil 4:13) so he is gonna help me make it through!

i love and miss you all and i hope you all have a beautiful day!