Adios

I am out. Headed home to the place where my heart....South Asia. I will be leading a team of college students with my good friend Kyle and Mical. Here is a prayer guide of how you can be praying for our team. Sorry to those I didn't get to connect with before I left.

Week One:
May 25- Pray for last minute preparations and rest before we get on the plane.
May 26- Pray for travel safety and for ALL of our luggage to arrive in-country with us.
May 27- We arrive to our city at 6 AM. We have a LONG day to stay awake and to engage. Pray for unity and close bond with our field workers and for our cultural adjustment.
May 28- Pray that we would be LEARNERS as we go through orientation and learn our country, city, and people. Pray for a great love for the people we will be serving. Pray for an adjustment to the intense heat.
May 29- We are a Bible Storying team and will be spending a lot of time learning the art of storytelling. Pray for a love for storytelling and a love for sharing stories with the people we meet.
May 30- We will be worshipping today with local believers. Pray for God to give us a love for the global church and a better understanding of Revelation 7.
May 31- Today will be our first day of teaching ESL storying. Our team will be split for the first time in our trip. Half of the team will go to one location and the other half will go to another location. Please pray for the unity of our team. Pray for immediate connections with our students. Pray for boldness to have spiritual conversations.
June 1- Pray for endurance, strength, and adjustment to the INTENSE HEAT and long days. Pray for brokenness.
June 2- Pray for unity as a team as we are spending most of the day separate from half of our group. Pray for good debriefing and team time in the mornings and evenings. Pray for our spiritual growth and to be refined.

Week Two:
June 3- Pray that God would break the hearts of the people and make their hearts ready for the gospel. Ask that HE would also break our hearts for lostness among the nations.
June 4- Pray for good health and perseverance. Today is our last day of teaching in this location. Pray for good closure and good conversations with our new friends as we say good-bye to the students.
June 5- We will be site-seeing in a city about three hours away. Please pray for smooth logistics, great unity between our team, hydration, and lots of laughter.
June 6- Pray for physical rest today after a long-day of site-seeing. Pray also for spiritual rest as we worship with believers.
June 7- We are in our second and final week of teaching. Pray for new relationships, strength, endurance, and unity. Pray for good health for the team. Pray for salvation for those we meet this week.
June 8- Pray for boldness to share the gospel and for the hearts of our students to be prepared for the gospel.
June 9- Ezekiel 11:19-20 “I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. Then they will follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. They will be my people, and I will be their God.” Pray for perseverance, that we would keep our eyes fixed on the goal, and that we would finish strong as a team.

Week Three:
June 10- Pray for REST for our team and for us to connect and share with those we have not yet been able to. For divine opportunities to share and boldness to do it!
June 11- Today is our last day of teaching. Pray again for good closure and good-byes and we leave the location we have been serving this week.
June 12- Pray for our team as we debrief our experiences in the next couple of days. Pray that God would teach us what we need to learn as we learn from our experiences.
June 13- Pray for good goodbye’s with our new national friends and our field workers.
June 14- Romans 15:20-21 “And thus make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation but as it is written, ‘those who have never been told of him will see and those who have never heard will understand.”
June 15- Pray for safety as we travel back. Also pray… “And he said to them, ‘the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” Luke 10:23.

TOP: (left to right) Kyle, Brenton, Chris, Sarah, and Erik
BOTTOM: (left to right) Alicia, Mical, Nicole, and Natalie

May 25-26: Traveling
May 27-30: Orienting
May 31 – June 4: Teaching our first week of ESL Storying
June 5–6: Site-seeing and Resting
June 7-11: Teaching our second week of ESL Storying
June 12-14: Debriefing, Shopping, Resting, and saying Good-bye
June 15: My team leaves and I stay in India a few days longer.

You can read LIVE UPDATES at www.calbaptist.edu/ISP

Click on South Asia Storying Team

An Ode To Pink

My roommate Becka teaches poetry to her sophomore this time each year. Each sophomore writes their own poetry (odes, sonnets, figurative language, onomatopoeia, etc...) and makes a book. Becka chooses to do write poetry alongside her sophomores every year. Last year, I wrote an Ode to my Spurs and this year the roomies and I collectively wrote an ode to our sweatpants. Here it is in all it's glory....

PS. Amanda, I think this will make your English heart, pink heart, and VS heart happy.

Ode to PINK TM

All roomies hail to Victoria
And all her many, saucy secrets.
You make us sing gloria,
5 pairs later, and still no regrets.

Cut like a boyfriend,
Sweatpants so soft you’ve captured our love,
We salute your cotton blend,
You give us sweet TLC like from above.

All the girly colors of the rainbow,
Pink, purple, gray, and black,
You give off that sexy glow,
Cause you always cuddle back.

Like good news, we tell of your wonder
On facebook and twitter, both far and wide,
No other sweatpants could tear us asunder,
We’ll wear you this summer wherever we ride.

We’ve learned we must stagger our swagger,
Cause we wanna wear you all the time,
Hotter and better than Keysha’s Mick Jagger,
The Trifecta together, you ARE that sublime.

Corporate Prayer

Yes, you are getting two posts in one evening. Tonight I was blessed to be a part of the body of Christ working together. There is nothing more powerful to me than corporate prayer. In fact, it is the one thing in my life that is completely absent, which is slightly ridiculous because of the amazing community that I am surrounded with. However, tonight some dear friends asked for prayer for their family and for those that could to come to their house and pray. I JUMPED at the opportunity to go and was honestly just spiritually blessed to get to pray in with other believers. Man how I wish this happened on a weekly basis. I am thankful to the Cordi for asking their communit for prayer. There are some days when all I wish was that someone would offer to pray for me. Maybe I need to be more intentional to ask for it. But today, I was thankful that someone had the guts to ask for the community of God to pray together for a specific need. I am honestly an idiot in my own life for not asking of the same.

SOS

Right now, I am so stressed I can feel the rocks in my shoulders and back. I have 8 days to hold it together before I leave. And yes, I did specifically choose the words "hold it together". It's going to be a rough 8 days. I will be so thankful just to get on the plane and GO. But I am also not going to get any type of physical or spiritual rest before I go. So please pray for me.
#bitter/stressed rant

To the ends of the earth....

Acts 1:8 "...but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth."

This picture has my mind spinning. My seniors graduated last Friday and these represented in this picture are 1/3 of the California Baptist University population that served on a missions trip during their college experience. The beauty of this picture is the physical representation of the gospel of Jesus Christ lived out among the nations. Many won't stop at graduation and will continue to be the LIGHT to a dark world.

May God continue to send workers from CBU...the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. God give us hearts of obedience to go the corners of the world proclaiming the GOOD NEWS!

***students get to where the Great Comission white stoles at graduation if they participate in an International Service Project while at CBU.