Let's do it to it.

Welcome to my summer updates blog!

As you probably know, I'm spending seven weeks in St. Louis this summer with a program called CityLights (http://www.citylights-stl.org/). I'm incredibly blessed to have this opportunity to go to St. Louis to partner with God’s people there to see into God’s heart for the city, for brokenness, and for PEOPLE. I’m excited to go meet the strangers who are going to become like family in a short amount of time.

As I’ve been preparing to leave, God’s been showing me all kinds of ways that he’s already been preparing me for this summer. We were asked to read two books in preparation -- A Credible Witness by Brenda Salter McNiel and A Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns. I highly recommend them both. Brenda talks about the power of the love of Christ that has reconciled us to Christ and to one another. The church should be embodying the power of that reconciliation, and by the grace of God, making ourselves credible witnesses to the gospel of Christ. Richard Stearns, the president of World Vision, talks about how our gospel often has a hole in it. This hole develops when we try to remove establishing justice and serving those in need from the mission of Christ.

God blew my mind with 2 Corinthians earlier this semester when I was reading it in my quiet times (daily time with God), a cool way that God helped me begin to unpack these verses. The verse that I’ve been rolling around in my head since I read it is 2 Corinthians 5:14-15:

14For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. 15And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.

What does it look like to be COMPELLED by Christ’s love to live for him? It’s a question a started asking a few months ago, and these books have begun to give me a peak into the depths of that answer as they look a lot at 2 Corinthians. I’m super looking forward to getting down to St. Louis to process these challenging, convicting books with brothers and sisters from so many different backgrounds.

My team is made up of 31 college students who go to school around the Midwest and New York mainly, but coming with homes as far away as Hong Kong. We will be living together in community for the summer in an old boarding school. We will be a part of the New City Fellowship faith community while we’re there, a multi-ethnic church that worships in 4-5 languages and has people coming from 25-30 different countries. (http://www.newcity.org/ucity/index.asp)

I still am unsure of what exactly I’ll be doing while I'm there, but I’ll let you know as soon as I get a chance. I’ll be able to check my email and update here about once a week I’ve heard. My address is:

Kristi Freitag

c/o City Lights, New City Fellowship

1483 82nd St

St Louis, MO 63132

I’ll end this post with kind of the summary of what my attitude is about the summer right now.

Anonymous quote in A Hole in Our Gospel:

“Sometimes I would like to ask God why He allows poverty, suffering, and injustice when He could do something about it.”

“Well why don’t you ask Him?”

“Because I’m afraid He would ask me the same question.”

This summer I’m going to let God ask me that question, and I’m apprehensively excited to listen to what He says. I would appreciate your prayers for me and my team as we discover more of God’s heart and allow ourselves to be transformed more into the likeness of Christ and have our hearts broken for the things that break His heart.

Ready.

Set.

Go.

Let’s do it to it.

A challenging, awesome, hot summer

If you wanted to get more of a picture of some of the things I'll be doing, here's an excerpt of an email that the program directors Gerry and Sharie Chappeau sent us:

“So an underlying emphasis of the summer is the discipling of our hearts for a lifetime OF RECEIVING GRACE---AND OF GIVING IT;--of living radically out of an intimate relationship with God that is prompted by his grace and our need.

We become deeply involved in the lives of people in the community, living in their homes for a week near the beginning (like the home of recent African refugees who speak
little English and have 7 kids in their apartment; or the apartment of a grandmother raising 4 of her grandchildren; or of a young Anglo couple who came from accomplished professional families, had top-notch educations, and have re-located to an 96% impoverished community to share life together, adopting half of their 6 children from the neighborhood).

We will spend the summer around people who seem to have nothing--and strangely, many of them at the same time seem to have everything that really matters.

We remember that Jesus said something about people who "lose" their lives actually find them--and we begin to believe it.

We will wrestle through issues like ethnic privilege (and gender privilege, and educational privilege, etc) AFTER we've spent a month together and have built some trust and honesty

--and after our study of the good news of the Gospel has given us tools to be open about our own sin

We will laugh together, cry together, play, work, worship, study, eat--lots and lots of eating, TOGETHER

We will have adventures together. Quite a lot of them.
We will learn to rely on God--and realize that WE are part of the answers to each other's prayers.

Times to sort out the voices and figure out which are God's.

Time to fall in love with a city...and people too numerous to count.

And time for a few strangers to become more important to you than you could ever have imagined.”