Week Three -- Teaching or Being Taught?

Our first week of five weeks of teaching is done! It was awesome. Laura and I are co-teaching the oldest group – 11 kids who are around 11 years old, mostly boys. This year the summer curriculum is based on early African-American history (1600-1900). All of our lessons are supposed to revolve around that theme – teaching geography, a bit of math, history, reading, and writing.

This first week we’ve been talking about the start of the slave trade. We looked at what Africa was like and why slavery began. We discussed the Middle Passage and tried to help make it a bit real to the students. The lessons have been based on the book Amos Fortune Free Man.

Our days (Monday through Thursday) are typically structured like this, and will be for the rest of the summer:

We get up for 7:15 breakfast and to pack a lunch. We do a brief corporate prayer time for the day before heading off for a half and hour of personal devotions and then we head off to prep classes a bit. I’ve been playing drums on the worship team every morning for chapel time for the kids, so we have rehearsal until the kids come in from recess at 10. We do morning worship with them, which is great. Then we have them in class for 2 hours. We read to them for 15 minutes or so out of Amos Fortune Free Man. Then we do some math drills. We teach the main lesson for the day, using different activities and we make sure they get some kind of writing practice in for the day. Then we have a time of devotionals with them. Lunch, then recess, then afternoon classes. They have gym class (or dance if they prefer) and art class (woodshop for the older kids). I teach art every other day, with my free afternoons open for prep. Then we bring a load of kids home after school.

Playing with the worship team has been an awesome learning experience. I have a quite limited repertoire of beats, but I’ve been learning a lot of new ones from the worship leader and other people on the team. I’ve been appreciating their input, and it’s been a great time of bonding with people. It’s also been a blessing to be able to serve on the team with Eric. He’s playing bass. I’m excited to start playing spirituals next week with the kids because a lot of those have swing beats, which I miss playing and haven’t had much chance to play since high school.

A couple of highlights from the week with the kids have been a brief conversation with a girl named Jonai in my class and our Tuesday devotionals. I had a conversation with Jonai on Wednesday morning. She asked me to talk with her briefly in the hallway, and she asked me how her math drills were going. I looked at them and told her she was doing very well! She wasn’t doing them as quickly as many of her classmates, but she was doing them quite accurately. She excitedly replied, “Really?!” and went back into the classroom jumping with excitement. She asked if I could write a letter to her parents telling them that she had been doing well, because they have been working with her on her math because she failed math in sixth grade. It was an awesome example of how a lot of these kids just need a confidence boost, someone to tell them they can instead of always hearing they can’t.

Tuesday devotional time was really awesome as well. It was only our second day together but somehow (the grace of God) the kids still opened up with a lot of big questions they had. Who wrote the Bible? Where did it come from? Why don’t we read it in Greek and Hebrew so we can be sure there were no translation errors? How can God expect us to be perfect, yet know that we won’t be? We asked them to write any lingering questions anonymously and put them in a basket before they left class. In the basket we found questions that we really need to talk about and pray through how to answer these gigantic questions… Is God really good, because sometimes it doesn’t feel that way? How can we say God is all-powerful and good when he doesn’t do anything about the starving people around the world? They are thinkers. And I love it. It’s been a challenge after Tuesday to learn how to lead effective devotionals with them, since they have them at the end of their morning and they are sick of sitting and being in class. But our weakness is God’s strength.

Friday is our team day, and so this week we spent the morning doing our retreat of silence (2 hour quiet time with God) at the Basilica in St. Louis, which is absolutely GORGEOUS! I love it there. Then we went to the St. Louis circus, which was sweet. I love the trapeze artists. We spent the latter part of the afternoon browsing the art museum, and they had three paintings by Monet who is one of my faves. Then we just spent a chill evening hanging out as a team.

I spent my free day doing a variety of things. Eric and I got to go to Forest Park to hang out in the morning for a bit of time to catch up with one another. Then I spent the middle of the afternoon working on a few random things and watching Pirates of the Caribbean. Saturday night, a group of us went to an event at the South City site of New City Fellowship. The event was to celebrate world refugee weekend. St. Louis is the third largest refugee city in the United States, especially the South City area. The church invited members of the congregation and community to share their stories of what they’ve experienced. We heard from two different groups in Burma (the Karen and one by Myanmar), Bhutan, Liberia, and the DR Congo. Due to quiet voices and faulty technology, it was hard to audibly hear, but it was also hard to comprehend through accents and broken English. The basic themes came through however – extreme situations of legitimate fear and persecution, civil wars and governmental failures, but everyone, despite the things they’d seen, the family and friends they’ve lost (some in front of their very eyes), they still worship God in a way I haven’t been able to yet. Completely thankful, completely dependent, completely aware of his goodness and sovereignty. Pure worship of the king who brought them out of trials and into this new place. They also shared a worship song from each of their cultures, which was really neat. I got to see and hear people from places I’ve never honestly thought about before, hear many languages I’ve never heard before, and love them as brothers and sisters in Christ. The comprehension barrier was frustrating, but the evening was still a great learning experience.

We’ve also started our discipleship class for the rest of the summer. Twice a week, a present and a former pastor of New City Fellowship alternate and come and talk with us on the idea of Sonship, living as if we realize that we are Sons of God, not orphans walking around helpless and abandoned by our father. We’ve talked so far on the fact that we are not righteous on our own, but it’s Christ’s righteousness as our own. There is nothing we can do to make us more or less righteous than we are right now, because Christ’s righteousness is perfect, and it’s already ours as adopted sons of the Father. Because of that, we are completely dependent on him. It’s not our strength; it’s not our efforts at righteousness, but solely the grace of God that allows good to come from sinful people like us. There is no room for boasting in ourselves, because God acts in our weakness where all we can do is point to the work of Christ in our lives.

The theme from the beginning part of the week was reconciliation and unity. It came up in my head many times, as well as in speakers or studies or devotions. God really made me start looking at areas in my life that needed reconciliation on the most basic levels. Because of the leading and conviction of His Spirit, I called one of my friends and got to talk with her for a half an hour, the first real conversation we’ve had in six months. I haven’t felt that kind of peace and joy in a long time. The blood of Christ and the power of his reconciliation are beginning to manifest themselves in this very dear relationship of mine. (2 Corinthians 5)

The latter part of the week, I really started thinking a lot about “not my will, but Yours be done.” At the Basilica, I was paging through their hymnal and came across the hymn that they use to meditate through what they call the Stations of the Cross – the journey Christ took from his sentencing to his last breath. Every verse of the hymn ended with “not my will, but Yours be done,” and that theme has been rolling through my mind ever since. I’m still trying to wrap my heart around it more and more. I mean, that is basically the essence of following Christ. But being able to see so many examples of what that looks like for people is challenging, especially trying to really humble myself to this posture. God’s been revealing more areas of pride in my heart and my inability to act in humility. The sermon this morning was on Philippians 2, Christ’s humility. Learning to approach others with that kind of extreme humility, but more importantly learning to approach God in that humbly submitted “not my will, but Yours be done attitude.”

Prayers:

Continued relationships with the kids in our class and grace in co-teaching and all of the dynamics that come with that

Brokenness – that God would continue to reveal my brokenness to me. That he would break me to the point where he can really enter in and use me. Where I'm not striving of my own strength, or holding on to my pride, but I’m humbled before the throne by the brokenness within me, so that God’s grace and strength may shine brightly from this broken vessel.

Balance – I’ve really been getting more engaged in community, which is awesome, and there are always things to do, but I need to make sure I’m still taking adequate time with God to process everything that we’re thinking about and listen more to him.

Thanks again for all of your support!

Peace from St. Louis!

Life on Etzel Avenue -- Lessons from the Neighborhood

We spent the week living with host families from New City Fellowship who are living intentionally on Etzel Avenue. My host family was an African American family of 6ish. Mr. Chuck and Ms. Leia Jackson were awesome hosts for three of my fellow interns and me. They have two daughters, Neia and Sydney, ages six and eight. Cherish, one of Mr. Chuck’s older daughters (13), was staying with us for most of the week, as well as his sixteen-year-old son, Marcus who is in St. Louis for the summer. Mr. Chuck works for Harambee, a ministry of carpentry, employment, and discipleship for youth in the community. He’s lived in the neighborhood for a few years. His wife, Leia, works for one of the church’s ministries as well. We had a great time eating with them, having a girls’ night out with Ms. Leia for Fro-Yo, and some girl talk with Cherish about guys, and hung out and did nails with Neia and Sydney. Mr. Chuck is such a father figure, and he really took us under his wing, even the first night he met us. He spoke a lot of truth into our lives and really encouraged us in a lot of ways.

One of the highlights of the week for me was living with Kim, Maggie, and Dionna for the week. I didn’t know any of them very well going in, but we had late night talk times and got to share our testimonies. These girls all seem a lot different than me on the outside, but we’ve actually all struggled with similar things. Kim and Dionna are African American, from Houston and Iowa respectively, and Maggie looks pretty similar to me, from St. Louis. We had a great time bonding, and I really learned a lot from the diversity of our group. Kim even taught me some new slang so I could understand what she was saying.

The week was definitely an awesome growing experience for me in that I knew that I was the least comfortable with African American people, having had very little interaction with them, and basically no real relationships or friendships. And God knew that of course so he blessed me by surrounding me with many African American people, even brothers and sisters in Christ, who I could learn a lot from, especially Kim, Dionna, and my host family, as well as a lot of the kids I interacted with and their families. And other people on the street. And in the grocery store. Etcetera. And oh how I love and appreciate them now that I've gotten to know them. What a blessing! And I love all of the gospel songs we sing, both at church, and randomly with our team.

On Friday night, Mr. Chuck invited one of his friends to come over and chat with the four of us that were staying with them. Travis lived many years of his life on and near Etzel Avenue. He moved there when he was two, and life was pretty good. First I should explain what Etzel was like 20 years ago. Almost every single house was either a crack/drug house, collapsed and abandoned, or some other kind of trouble. There were strong gang rivalries by neighborhoods in the area, and you couldn’t leave a four block area without fearing for your life. Even in the elementary schools, people would ask you where you lived and you would be profiled and associated based on that. There were usually 30-40 dudes hanging out and hustling drugs on the corner. There were gunshots frequently, and Gerry said that the police didn’t even want to respond to Etzel and sometimes wouldn’t.

Travis’ mom became a crack addict, and life got hard for him and his family. They lived in an apartment building with his mom’s whole extended family in different apartments. His mom’s boyfriend was a crack dealer, which gave Travis a look into the industry. In his neighborhood, there was really no choice for kids. You either joined them, or never left your house. Travis started dealing at age 11, and eventually started stealing crack from his mom’s boyfriend. He got involved in the local gang as well. As he put it, he was discipled growing up, but not in the way we normally use the word now. He was discipled in the street – how to kill, how to sell and use drugs. One of his close friends in the gang with them killed his cousin who was Travis’ best friend one day over a petty argument. From there he started asking a lot of questions to God about why this happened. It really walked his world. A few days later, a church came down the street and was hanging out evangelizing and he was already questioning and looking and so he met the pastor. He mentioned that one of his hobbies was rapping, so the pastor took him to meet some Christian rappers (a completely foreign concept to Travis). From there, those rappers brought him to meet Flame, a famous Christian rapper from St. Louis. When Flame dropped a rhyme for Travis, the fire in his eyes convinced Travis that God had to be real, because he could tell how convinced Flame was. Travis soon got arrested for homicide, which he didn’t commit. God really worked in that situation to bring a lot of crazy circumstances together. He had gone to court and gotten a court date for 30 days later. He talked with God, and he said, “If you get me out of this, I won’t tell you what I’m not going to do, but what I will do. I’ll go to chuch.” He woke up the next morning to the jailers telling him to grab his stuff. He did, thinking he was moving cells, but they released him. He didn’t really know why, but he got out. He started going to church weekly, having given over his life to God, and God began the sanctification process. He stopped doing crack, stopped dealing, stopped going to the clubs. After about two years, God told him to get back into rapping, and so now he’s a Christian rapper, traveling around the world, performing under the name Thi’sl.

He also shared how he’s seen Etzel transformed. He really appreciates the people from New City who moved into the neighborhood and didn’t leave, even after people were shot on the sidewalks out side their house. When he comes back to visit, he’s always shocked at the people walking the sidewalks and hanging out and jogging, walking their dogs. When he lived on Etzel probably only 10 years ago, you would NEVER be out doing things like that. One thing he said that has stuck with me is, “The size of your impact depends on how much you surrender to God.” I want to learn to surrender more. I’m asking for God to show me the things I’m still holding on to which are preventing me from making the full impact that He’s asking me to make. Mr. Chuck also talked with us about the importance of building relationships with people and relating to them on their terms. That’s something I’ve been thinking about this week as well.

We got to lead Backyard Bible Club Monday through Wednesday on Etzel Avenue. It was a great experience, challenging in many ways, but great fun as well. It was cool to see these kids getting into the songs and then memorizing the verse for the night. We had them partake in skits to act out the Bible story for the night and keep them engaged. We did Moses, then Gideon, and then the stories of the prodigal son and the Good Samaritan. There were only a few students from the neighborhood that weren’t children of the church families, but what a blessing they were! To see how hungry they were for attention, and even a few misconceptions about God and Jesus came up in our interactive discussions with them. We were walking the street one day, looking for kids to hang out with and we met 3 beautiful girls who were playing in the backyard of the apartment building that I was staying in. These girls were some of the greatest teachers of my week.

I saw them Monday through Wednesday, and they came to Bible club Tuesday and Wednesday. They fell asleep before Bible club on Monday, so we prayed they would be awake and their parents would be ok with them coming for Tuesday, and they were able to and were very excited! They really didn’t want much to do with skits or Bible lessons, but they loved attention and people to play with them. Oh those beautiful girls, made in the image of God and growing up in a less than ideal home situation. Of the four children, they have three different fathers, the latest of which lives with them and their mom. They had a lot of misconceptions about God and Jesus and who he is.

And while I was angry at the situation of these beautiful girls, one of the things that God most surprised me with this week was the ability to see God’s beauty in their mother and to lover her, despite the lack of stability and security in their home and the fact that she has a bottle of whiskey always at her side.

I’ve been learning to stop assuming. To stop judging. To stop assessing blame.

Or at least I’ve been trying. Or rather it’s been God’s work in me. In and of myself I am wicked, broken, selfish. By the grace of God, He’s *beginning* to give me his eyes, his heart. Pray He’d download more.

Also pray that:

Relationships with the 11 students in our class would continue to go deeper so that God can use us to impact them beyond just learning some math drills and geography.

I would be able to co-lead well with my co-teacher.

That the slightly slower schedule we have coming up would allow me to press into processing with Jesus more.

Thanks again for reading! An update on my first week of teaching coming soon. :)

Brokenness -- Lessons from Week One

Brokenness.

Welcome to the world.

This week exposed us on many levels to the brokenness of the world – past and present, in St. Louis, our country, and around the world. In the process, I’ve been reminded that I’m one of the many messed-up pieces of the picture.

Maybe the world’s not that bad. It’s better than it used to be, right? We don’t have slavery anymore, everyone can go to school if they want to, there’s equal opportunity laws and affirmative action. (Not that I think any of these things are bad! Great things!)

One of the main actresses in the play from Saturday night shared her story during the play. Gang-raped at age 15, doctors said she would never be able to conceive children, so in her depression she fell hard in to alcohol and drug use. She married and was blessed with a miracle child, a beautiful daughter. She loved that girl, until one night, a drunk driver barreling down the road struck them head on instantly killing her beautiful eleven year old daughter, also putting her on the edge of death. She has fought hard to begin walking again.

Broken.

St. Louis schools are in horrible condition. The teachers kept passing this kid (lets call him James) all the way up until third grade, even though he didn’t know how to read. By that time he felt so stupid that he couldn’t read that he dropped out of school. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do it.

Broken.

In our fixed game of Monopoly, whichever piece you chose determined how much money you started with, how much money you got for passing Go, and what kind of rules you played by. The people who had picked the privileged piece got to go whenever they want, they didn’t have to pay when they landed on the properties of the poorer people. They didn't have to go to jail when they drew that card.

But that was just a game.

Even in the game, as my friends who were playing the different characters, we could see sin come out. How a little money, a little power, turns into a lot of greed. How a little injustice turns makes you angry… or soon enough apathetic and complacent.

That’s me.

Selfish, ignorant, and worst of all complacent and apathetic. I knew coming in that my heart wasn’t nearly as broken as God’s was for the hurt of injustice and the cry of the oppressed. And I’m just praying that as these things continue to become real this summer, that my heart will be molded by my maker into the way He originally designed it, before it was twisted by sin.

At the play Saturday night, the main character fell from the corporate world to land flat with her butt in a Metro seat. One of the friends she developed over the next months eventually confronted her with how she had been living her life in isolation, not letting anyone in, not letting anyone help, letting pride and fear get in the way. I started crying at this point because I realized that is a huge part of my brokenness too. I’ve been in a funk this week, and I couldn’t figure out why until the play last night. Most of you know me as crazy, outgoing, sometimes bold, loud-laughing, people-loving Kristi. Well that’s not what I’ve been showing people this week. St. Louis threw me out of my comfort zone, naturally. That’s what I was expecting and hoping, but I was not expecting these effects. Where I don’t talk… I would rather sit in my room or outside by myself than talk with anyone, where I have to force myself to laugh when other people are laughing, where I don’t feel needed in the group… out of my zone. At school, that is my territory. I know what I’m good at, I know what to do. Here, I instantly put up walls and didn’t want to trust my team. Not good. That’s my pride and brokenness in me.

But it also reminds me of something that Brenda said in A Credible Witness. She said that it’s so important to make people feel like they are needed. We can’t just invite them into our lives or into our fellowships where we don’t need them there. It wasn’t that people made me feel unwelcome, or that they did anything specific. In my head, I just felt unnecessary. Praise the Lord He spoke to me through a couple teammates who didn’t even realized how much it meant to say that my laugh was awesome or whatever. Anyway, that’s a big part of what’s at the center of me. Pride. Impatience.

I am broken.

And yet how blessed I am. As we worked in the sun and the dirt, beginning to get dehydrated as we cleared weeds in the Etzel neighborhood, one of my teammates shared her thoughts that as she was thinking about how hot and tired she was, she was reminded that we were blessed to be able to hop in our air-conditioned cars to go to our air-conditioned rooms and hop in the shower, rehydrate with ice water or lemonade and sit down and relax with friend for the evening, while many of the people living in these apartments couldn’t do that.

The world is broken. I am broken.

But that’s not the end of the story.

There is hope, there is life. Jesus is alive and at work in me and in my team and in this city and in this world. He’s taking people who have been scarred so deeply by this world, and reaching in to the places only he can touch to heal them from the inside out. He’s reaching into my heart in tons of different ways, to heal hurts, change my sinfulness. That actress from the play who fell into drugs and alcohol? The prayers of her mother and by the grace of God and the work of His Spirit, she came out of that, to a renewed outlook on life. Even after the loss of her daughter, she chooses to praise and thank God. She chooses to glorify him in her life.

Jesus is equipping and sending his people into neighborhoods like Etzel to live and love alongside the broken. He’s asking His people to adopt children who come with the baggage that the world has laid on their shoulders, and to show them the easy yoke of Christ (Matthew 11:28-30). God’s heart is for the oppressed. Seriously. That’s one of the things nearest and dearest to his heart. Our God is justice. He is mercy.

What am I going to do about it? I’m following Christ… or so I say? Christ walked into the bad parts of town that everyone else avoided. He touched the people that most people took a couple extra steps around. Will I follow Him there? My first step is to Etzel this week. Lets see where he takes me from there.

Week One Summary

This week focused on team building and developing a toolbox for the upcoming weeks of interacting cross-culturally. A quick rundown of the week:

Tuesday:

We did team introductions of the 31 students and 4 staff workers. Then we went to spend the evening in one of the worst streest in St. Louis, Etzel. A large group of people from the church, New City Fellowship, lives intentionally in the community. But Jesus is at work redeeming this city and this street. We’re going to live in this community next week with host families who are doing life intentionally in the city. We got to meet a few of them at the cookout.

Wednesday:

We spent the morning with some logistical stuff, but then we got to go out into the Etzel neighborhood to do some service for the neighborhood. We served in the area of an apartment complex where many refugees are placed when they arrive in St. Louis. In this couple of blocks, there is a group of Burundis, Somalis, Iraqis, etc. We cleaned up broken concrete and big rocks from around the playgrounds, cleared the fence from weeds to make the place look more up kept and restore a bit of pride, and planted some tomatoes among a few other activities. I was working clearing weeds and garbage from around the fence. Many people honked and encouraged us as we were working. Wednesday night we went to the Missouri Botanical Gardens for a fun scavenger hunt and a night of jazz at the Whitaker (free) Music Festival.

Thursday:

We had training in cross-cultural interactions, talking about different cultural lenses and our entry-posture in cross-cultural situations. We played a couple of games to demonstrate some of the realities of the world, like a fixed game of Monopoly. Wednesday night we went off to Forrest Lake Park for a free live show of Hamlet on a stage in the park. It was fantastic! We also got to sit down with one other member of our team for an hour or so to talk about our stories and get to know each other on a deeper level, which is just what I had been craving.

Friday:

Friday was our media festival. We watched some full lengths movies as well as some clips to make some of the historic injustices a little more real. We watched a clip of Amistad about the slave trade to see how Africans were captured by rival tribes and traded to the slave traders for guns or other items. It also showed the conditions and some of the things that went on during the trip over. Gerry asked us at the end, “What did you just see?” One of my teammates said, “Human beings being treated as less than animals.” Then we watched Eyes on the Prize, the condensed version. It is originally a documentary on 14 VHS following the Civil Rights movement in the 50s and 60s. This was the story condensed into 2 hours. They had tons of original footage from that time, as well as interviews with many of the lesser known heroes. Our team played a game of mushball (softball with a 6 inch diameter ball) in the afternoon to get at least a little sun and activity in for the day, as well as build community trust as everyone of all skill levels (including me) joined in the game. We watched Selma, Lord, Selma before dinner, the story of a little girl getting involved in the Civil Rights movement in Selma, and then ???? after dinner about an African-American preacher who tried to get his church to stand up to injustices that they saw or experienced instead of just taking it. He was the forerunner to Martin Luther King, Jr., in Montgomery, Alabama. MJK took over his pastorship after he left that church in Montgomery.

Saturday:

We went off to spend a few hours in silence with God processing the week in the morning. We went back to that Etzel neighborhood to a flower garden that one of the elderly ladies has in the empty lot across the street from her house. We also spent about an hour going deeper with a small group of people from our team with our backgrounds – ethnic, family, church, etc. We then went out and about in the city a little more. We went shopping for hospitality gifts for our host families this week at a shop called The Plowshare which imports local artistry from around the world and sells it here to support those local crafts and trades that would otherwise potentially die out. Then we went to the farmer’s market in St. Louis. We got there at the end of the day so we were really able to barter. We also took a lot of the food that the vendors were throwing away at the end of the day. Through bartering and dumpster diving, we took home hundreds of pounds of fruits and vegetables for about $35 dollars. Some of it was bad the morning, but we’ve been eating some of it, and many of the church members took some home after church Sunday morning. We went out for dinner last night before heading to see an original play called Eye On the Sparrow. It was written by a local playwright who is a part of the theatre organization called Gitama, a group wanting to bring groups of people that normally wouldn’t even talk, much less be together, through the arts like music, dance, and drama. This play was AMAZING! It touched everyone in our group I believe. It told the story of a corporate America lawyer who is laid off, and takes the bus home. It tells the story of her transformation, as she begins to live life alongside the people in her neighborhood, mostly people ethnically different from her. She has to take the bus everywhere, so she gets to know the people, and she goes from successfully living the dream to poor, even to the point of having her house foreclosed on. The title comes from one of the last scenes, where she has been offered her job back, but she doesn’t want to take it. She’s realized that these people around her are like sparrows, going around doing their thing, supporting one another, but most people don’t take any notice of them. But now through her trials, she’s become one of the sparrows, part of the community. There was some GREAT music, awesome humor, a lot of optimism still saturated with realism, as well as truth.

Sunday:

We went to church this morning at New City Fellowship, and sang the opening song in at least 6 different languages (English, Yoruba, Chinese, French, another Nigerian language, and other language that I didn’t catch the name of). We were singing about 50% of the time in a language other than English, which is so fun. The pastor today spoke on remembering God’s goodness and faithfulness. That’s one of the hardest things is to not forget everything that God has done and everything He is, so he talked about setting up a reminder or memorial like the Lord commanded Joshua to do in Joshua 4. Then we were supposed to head out to the Etzel neighborhood where we are living this week, and that’s what most people did, but my family cancelled this morning, so Gerry and Sharie were contacting a couple of back-up families, so we’ll probably be moving in with someone tonight. It’s a blessing from God, actually, to be momentarily displaced. That means that this small group of us gets the afternoon off. I got a chance to sit down and finish this, as well as just relax. We’ve had almost no time to do that yet this week. I did some dishes and checked my email. Most people haven’t had a chance to do that, so I’m thankful for this change of plans. I would have been excited to go with a family right away after church, but you roll with the punches and go with the flow. Hooray for God growing my patience, slowly but surely.

Upcoming:

We’ll be living 16 hours a day in the Etzel neighborhood, getting to know the people and the neighborhood from the inside out, better equipping us to serve them over the following 5 weeks, as we teach their children or serve in their clinics or whatever. Gerry challenged us to ask lots of questions, to find people that have lived on the block for 30+ years and ask them how it’s changed. I’m excited and nervous to step out and ask questions, having my perceptions and assumptions challenged and shattered.

Prayer:

It’s going to be another busy week of training and prep during the day, followed by going back to Etzel to interact with the neighbors and play with the kids and serve the families and the neighborhood. Pray for our hearts and attitudes to be like that of Jesus Christ. Pray that we would step out of our comfort zones and enter in a posture of learning and servitude. We get to lead a backyard Bible class Monday through Wednesday nights, so pray for God to show up there, that He would be glorified, and we would see children learning about the God of hope who loves them dearly.

That’s the play-by-play of week one. As you can see, it’s been a crazy busy week. See the blog “Brokenness” for my take-away lessons from the week.