Love, love, love.

MTC DETAILS

From June 15th through the 20th (Sunday through Friday) myself and about 45 participants (leaders included) from FirePower (our senior high youth group) will be living and working in Minneapolis (Minnesota). This week is designed to build relationships with our partner ministries in the city and also to give the students opportunities to grow in this act of worship through experience and through teachings. The group is split into three teams, each team assigned to one of three ministries for the week. The ministries are; Parakletos, The Fallout, and Union Gospel Mission. During the day the students will be working with and learning from their experience with the ministries. During the evenings we will have some teachings designed to educate the students with a biblical perspective on issues such as; Human Rights, Oppression, Social Justice, and Poverty. The purpose of this week is to serve God, bless our partner ministries, and create opportunities for our students to grow in compassion. Please pray for us!

$0.02

I have been learning about love. loving others, to be specific. A pretty important thing, being one of the greatest commandments with the other being to love God with the entirety of your being. So how have I been learning these things? Well I am glad you asked. You will be happy to hear that my life has become even more inconvenienced than it had been. I have been intentionally learning about human ecology, social justice and human rights - which just so happen to be directly tied to my belief in God and my belief that God cares about people and wants his people to be loved and restored. Knowledge is responsibility. Now I am stuck with this inconvenient knowledge and need to figure out how I am to respond to it, and the worst part is that I keep going back for more. That's right. I will have even more burdensome responsibility as I continue being informed. frick. Not only that, but I will be sharing this information with students who will then need to process the information and potentially have their lives messed up by having compassion take root in their hearts. frick. I mean seriously, peoples lives will be so disrupted by this venomous information, but the truth of it is.. it is a beautiful complication. I am learning more in order to act and to inform others. Change can happen but it needs to be something more than just wearing a trendy rubber bracelet around our wrist. It will happen when the hand attached to that wrist is willing to sacrifice for the love of God and for the sake of others. This is compassion. This is not convenient. This is loving others intentionally. You cannot do this on your own. This is not focused on personal gain. This is love. love. love. Love is all you need.

One-armed John and the trip to Ohio.

I recently went on a mini road trip from Minnesota to Ohio. Laura from my DTS was getting married, so Miranda (also from my DTS) and I headed over to Ohio for the weekend! Road Trip! Ohio is a solid 12 hour drive from Minnesota, so we left at around 10pm on a Thursday night. the plan was to drive through the night arrive in Cleveland (where the wedding was) in the morning, stay with my Buddy Owen ( from college), get some rest and head to the rehearsal dinner Friday evening. Makes sense, right? I thought so to. Well sometimes you need to be flexible. The trip started out great, as most road trips do. Some wonderful conversation, good music, tasty treats. A good start. Well, I was not as well rested as I should have been for that late night drive and neither was Miranda. In spite of that, I ended up driving for around 10 hours without any real problems. We burned through Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and we were just 8 miles away from Ohio... when it happened. Yes... it. It happened. The legendary "it" that all road trips should happen. the "it" that changes a trip into an adventure.. a weekend into a memory... "it". As the sun was beginning to rise and we were ridiculously close to our destination state.. Safety Jeep (my vehicle) died... It began with the battery struggling to produce enough juice to keep my headlights bright, eventually my speedometer would stop functioning, this would lead to Safety Jeep stopped completely, on the side of the road, so close to Ohio and so far away. It was 7:30 am. We were stranded in the quaint town of Angola, Indiana. Thank God for AAA. A tow truck was sent to rescue us. Deek, the friendly tow truck driver picked us up. He not only hauled Safety, Miranda, and me to the service shop, he also was a comedian. At least he thought so. He would crack jokes and make commentary. He would laugh at his jokes, Miranda would smile uncomfortably, I would also laugh.. not at his jokes, but at the situation. We learned about Deeks childhood, the conspiracy theory of the firework shop owner, how to brighten a toll booth workers day, and everything else you would expect to learn from a guy named Deek in a situation like that. So it was a humorous start. We pulled into the shop and a handful of guys began immediately working on my car. I was encouraged by this, I though.. at this rate we should be out of here in no time.. How wrong I was. I don't know where everyone else went, but after a couple hours had passed and I had memorized the details of every picture and newspaper clipping on the waiting room wall, I decided to check on Safety Jeep myself. At this point there was a lone mechanic working on my car. His name was John. He had one arm. well, to be fair.. he had two arms- but only one of them was functional the other was more like decoration, so in reality.. he had one arm. Now, don't get me wrong. I think it is great that somebody would overcome the odds and do what John does. However, John was having a hard time. i don't think this was really the Cinderella story of a guy rising above the challenges placed before him and achieving a great feat of humankind. I think it was a one armed mechanic named John, with the mouth of a sailor and the determination of a brick, working on Safety Jeep for a long, long time. I actually had the privilege of working on Safety with John for a little bit, which is not always the case when you are paying to have the work done. It was educational. Well, after a new alternator, battery, belt, blackened lungs from secondhand smoke, broken minds from lack of sleep, new friends in Angola, and about 4 hours... we were on the road again. We made it to Ohio without any other problems! We met up with Owen an hour before the rehearsal dinner, had a great time. Went to the dinner, saw some friends I hadn't seen in a couple years, had a great time. Went rock climbing Saturday morning and then got some ice cream before going to the wedding, had a great time! Celebrated at the reception with wonderful food and amazing people while dancing the night away. It was an amazing weekend! We left on Sunday morning and made it back to Minnesota without any problems at all. It was a fun adventure of a weekend, and if you are ever in Angola, Indiana, make sure to stop by Gold Star Towing and tell our friends hi! And that, as they say, is that.