#ltsm15

[lifeversations-blog]

Endings

Click here for a slideshow of my summer, if you have 18 minutes to spare.

Waking up from eight hours of sleep in a queen-sized bed in a huge room without another person ten inches above me was a weird experience, and if I’m honest, I don’t prefer it. Thirteen hours after leaving Tahoe Wednesday morning, I was home. It’s a bittersweet feeling, because I’m excited to go back to school and get back into the swing of things. Between marching band, my ResLife job, my cashiering job, my classes, and my involvement with Cru, I’m stoked to see what God has in store for this year. But the goodbyes on the last night of Project were by far the hardest goodbyes I’ve ever said. There were people there who became my family who I’m never going to see again. Fortunately most people are going to be at Cru Conference in Portland this winter break, and that makes the goodbye easier, but I’m still going to miss them as individuals until then, and I will always miss the incredible community that everyone created together.

The above picture is my life group at $5 Prom, where we all went thrift shopping and then danced.

Our last night together, we all boarded the MS Dixie II for a cruise and formal dinner around Lake Tahoe. The view was beautiful, and it was so much fun to get to spend our last bit of time together in such a relaxing environment where we could sit and talk, or stand and enjoy the beauty of God’s creation and have the wind whip our hair into each other’s faces (pictured below). Then that night when we got back, everyone gathered where the picnic tables once were (when we cleaned the camp we had to move all the picnic tables behind the shed and lock them up until next summer) and said goodbye. People left the next morning anywhere between 3am-9:30am, so you weren’t guaranteed to be awake to see everyone off, so all goodbyes happened that night. I tried to hug every single person, and squeeze in a few last laughs with my closest friends. There were a couple times when we all gathered in a circle and prayed, and a lot of small group prayers. But I think the thing I appreciated most about that night was the words that sentimentality brought forth from people’s mouths. My primary love language is, completely and undoubtedly, words of affirmation. When someone bluntly and directly tells me something they appreciate about me, my insides melt and my brain short-circuits (even if I don’t show it). And so many people that night were so encouraging in that way, that by the end my heart was full to overflowing. Although that was the hardest night of the entire mission, it certainly will always also be my favorite to remember.

The Kmart cashiers (pictured below with our coworker Alonso) had the opportunity this summer to witness to a couple of our coworkers, and we had the experience to present the Gospel to one guy in particular at Denny’s after midnight, and then hear him pray to commit his life to Jesus. That was a miraculous experience and getting to be a part of helping him understand what the whole Jesus thing is all about was so cool, and the biggest blessing of the entire summer.

Reflecting back over the last two months, I can identify a few main things that God taught me. We studied the book of Luke and the Holy Spirit allowed Luke’s words to come totally alive to me, so I got something out of each passage I read and discussed with my life group, but my main takeaways from the summer came through the wisdom and teaching of the leaders and guest speakers.

Having been raised by Christian parents, I grew up going to church, so I tend to think I know a lot about God and the Bible and Christianity in general. But more and more, I’m realizing that this is not the case. With our life groups, we went through a book called The Gospel-Centered Life. It explores extremely fundamental concepts of Christianity in a way that is entirely applicable to every situation. It’s easy to think that the Gospel is simple, and that I have it figured out, but this book forced me to come to terms with how little I truly understand and live it out. Because the Gospel is everything, and living a life truly centered around it looks so different from living a life centered around yourself and your head knowledge of God. Your life and your mind can revolve around Jesus independent of whether your heart revolves around him.

One way this was illustrated to me was on a teaching night during one of the first weeks of the summer, we were taught about what we called the Gospel Flow. Basically, a lot of people (see Luke 18:18-30) believe that it’s very important how they live, and that to be a good Christian and please God, they need to live a good life. But the Bible teaches that the Gospel starts with who God is (His character and promises), which is the reason for what He has done (because of His love for us and his desire to know us, He provided Jesus and blesses us constantly), which directly affects who we are (forgiven and justified so that when God looks at us, He sees only Jesus’ righteousness, not our sin), which finally affects how we live (filled with the Holy Spirit, bearing His fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control). We don’t have to work hard to do good things. We can’t do good things in our own power, anyway. All we can do is sit back and surrender to God, allowing Him to be our first love and priority, and desiring His will above our own, and as we do that we will see the Holy Spirit transforming our minds and actions and making our character more like the character of Jesus. In Galatians 5:22-26, Paul basically says, “Here are the bad things and here are the good things. Keep in step with the Spirit.” It’s not about avoiding the bad things and trying to do the good things because we know we should. Rather, the list is there as a tool to measure spiritual growth. The more you fall in love with Jesus, the less you’ll have a desire to sin and the more you’ll see the Holy Spirit producing its natural fruit.

Another seemingly foundational principle I learned was about prayer. I’ve ended prayers my whole life with “in Jesus’ name, amen” but it wasn’t until this summer that I gave a single thought to what that means. God’s name embodies His character, reputation, and will. To pray something in Jesus’ name means to pray it according to Jesus’ character, which was founded on God’s will. If you ask God for something contrary to His will, you are not asking it in His name, regardless of whether you attach that phrase to the end of your prayer. That was what God taught me about prayer this summer: to pray in Jesus’ name. I had to come to terms with the fact that I’m free to ask God to do things for me. I truly believe that God has the power to do anything I ask. He can make my day go by faster, make my headache feel better, or heal my sick friend. But I’m not promised that any of those things are part of His will. It may be that what He wants, and what is ultimately best for me is that my day is hard, my head hurts, and my friend has to pay thousands of dollars in medical bills. I can let God know that it is my will that He does those things for me, but also surrender my will to His and rejoice no matter what happens. If God doesn’t do those things for me, then He must have something better in mind. What I CAN pray for in complete confidence is things God has promised in His word. I can pray, like Jesus did, for God’s name to be hallowed, His kingdom to come, and His will to be done. I can pray for my daily bread and trust Him to give me everything I need. I can pray to be filled with the Holy Spirit. I can pray for strength and joy and the growth of my character in hard situations. I can pray that whatever someone is going through, that God would assure them and those around them that everything will work out for God’s glory and their ultimate good in the end.

My final main takeaway from the summer was the only one I was actually expecting going into it: I received incredible training and equipping on how to share my faith. I’ve always known what I believed about spiritual things, but it really wasn’t until this summer that I felt comfortable communicating my beliefs in a way I was confident someone who doesn’t believe the same things I do would understand. I also learned how to ask exploring questions in order to get a general sense of what another person believes. Most of all, I learned how to love another human soul enough to want them to experience the same satisfaction in life that I’ve found in Jesus, and how to respectfully, humbly, and lovingly disagree with someone about something that I find so important and integral to my existence.

I wouldn’t trade my summer in Lake Tahoe for all the riches in the world, but I look forward to the adventures this coming year has in store for me.

Tahoe, it’s been real.

[lifeversations-blog]

Girls Night

The boys put on a really nice dinner for all of the girls to honor us and just for fun on Sunday night after outreach. They passed out invitations at dinner on Friday with the mail, and we all opened them at the same time. It said to dress formally and be ready at 7, and then they announced that we weren’t allowed to come back to camp after outreach until 6. Most girls went dress shopping or debriefed their outreach time. We came back and all the guys were in blue button ups and slacks and bowties. They crowded us into the family room until we were all accounted for, and then brought us outside to watch a synchronized swimming act behind a blue tarp, and then escorted us one by one to our seats at the picnic tables, which were covered in table cloths and had bouquets and candles. There was also a stage area with mics and drums and speakers and a backdrop with string lights. Every table had their own personal server who would take their orders before every course (drinks, salad, chicken alfredo and garlic bread, and a desert of chocolate cake and ice cream, all of which had been home cooked by the boys.) Throughout the evening, there was entertainment, including a lot of singing/guitar playing, and one act each of drumming, cheesily romantic poetry, interpretive dance to imrov violin, a roast, reading original prose, and stand-up comedy. It was like one big date between all of the guys and all of the girls, and it was extremely well-planned and thought out, and super sweet. Afterwards there was swing dancing on the basketball court. Below is pictured me with my life group.

Turnover

Halfway through project, the Cru staff leave and appoint directors, outreach coordinators, community event organizers, and life group leaders from among the students in their places. We then had a turnover ceremony with dinner, worship, prayer, a brief talk, and then the old staff washed the feet of the new leaders, who then in turn washed all of our feet. Then we had time to cry and say goodbye to the staff, and we all gathered in a big clump at the front of the sanctuary and one staff guy appointed a new director to close the prayer, then started praying. The 84 of prayed over the remainder of the project for maybe twenty minutes, and when we said “amen” and looked up we realized that the staff had gone. Luckily most of them came back at some point and said their final goodbyes since many of them didn’t leave Tahoe til a few days later (like Cami came back and ate dinner with us the night before she left). But it was still so sneaky and also jarring that they just vanished like that. One moment they were there and the next they were gone. However, it is better that they leave, just as Jesus said when he was with the disciples for a short time and then left them. But Jesus didn’t just leave the disciples there in the dark to flounder and fail with no idea what they were doing. He left them His Holy Spirit to guide and counsel them, and that’s exactly why the staff leaving is good and better than if they stayed. We have the Holy Spirit to guide our ministry for the rest of project. The only downside is that staff spent an incredible amount of time just praying for us and for our purpose. Some of them would even walk the camp at night and pray over our cabins. Every year when they leave, the students start seeing immense amounts of spiritual warfare in their lives, and this year is no different. My greatest prayer request for the prayer warriors supporting me this summer is for the spiritual attack we are seeing. Satan absolutely hates what we are doing here in Lake Tahoe, and he’s doing everything he can to stop us, turn us against each other, distract us, or scare us. But that should be encouraging: if he is this upset, we must be doing something right. Pray that it continues, and that each of us continues to surrender our hearts, emotions, and devotion to God’s will and not our own.

We had a barbecue down at Pope Beach for the Fourth. We ate together, took a lot of pictures in the water (Kmart God Squad (minus Lane) pictured above), watched Marshall and Andrew breathe fire (Marshall pictured below), went to Camp Rich for ice cream, sang around a propane fire, watched the fireworks across the water at Nevada Beach, and then some of us stayed to watch a few brave souls consume ghost peppers, the second-hottest pepper on earth.

The next day we had another barbecue at camp, that we all invited our coworkers to. I believe there were six people from Kmart who came, and four of them even stayed for the worship time we had outside afterward which was super cool.

Miscellaneous Fun

Every year, the Cru students volunteer for the world’s biggest paddleboarding race. The shift I signed up for was in the morning before church, and we got free T-Shirts, Red Bulls, hats, and we got our hats signed by the guy who won first place in the 14-mile race from El Dorado Beach to Emerald Bay and back (pictured above). We also got tickets for lunch, and our volunteer nametags got us a free hour of paddleboarding, which we took advantage of the next week. I’d never been paddleboarding before, but it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, and you can paddle for 20 minutes straight out into the middle of the lake and still be able to stand up, so falling off was no big deal (although at its deepest, Lake Tahoe is 1645 feet deep, making it the second-deepest lake in the United States after Crater Lake’s 1945 feet.)

There’s also a celebrity golf tournament going on, so Justin Timberlake and Michael Jordan are in the same city as me, and Imagine Dragons performed here a few nights ago as well. (Of course, tickets were $300 so we didn’t get to go, but it was still cool just knowing that they’re here.)

Myself and four other people went up the mountain at Heavenly last week on our day off. The view of the lake is incredible from up there! Sabrina and I took a selfie with part of the lake in the background (pictured above). We got free gondola tickets because Courtney works on top of the mountain and so she gets free tickets, and we got half off tickets for the shorter zipline from her too (there are no discounts on the $60 zipline). Then, we went back down the gondola back to Heavenly Village, where we got 25% off our lunch at Base Camp Pizza because of Anna’s employee discount.

We’re now playing a game of undetermined length in which we’re all given one person’s name on a piece of paper to be our target, and we have to kill them by slicing our finger across their neck while there are no witnesses. When you kill your target, you take over their target, and the game continues until only one person is alive. It might take the rest of the summer, and having to constantly watch your back makes walking to your cabin at night extremely stressful. Luckily, cabins, cars, prayer, and devos are safe zones. Unluckily, work is not safe and, working with 16 other Cru kids, it’s likely that one of my coworkers will have me as a target. However, even though we’re all scared of each other, this game does do its purpose to promote community, because now it’s not safe to go anywhere alone.

As always, thanks to my support team for praying! We’ve had over 411 spiritual conversations so far, and 13 people have decided to devote their lives to Christ, and those numbers will only continue to grow. Pray for the hearts of the people we talk to during our Sunday outreaches, as well as the people we work with or even just run into on the street or in the laundromat.

[lifeversations-blog]

Lake Life

As most of my friends and family know, I am spending two months of my summer in Lake Tahoe, California on a summer mission with Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ), an organization on college campuses around the world. I’ve been involved with the University of Idaho’s Cru my entire first year there (and plan to be in years to come), and it has been nothing short of an incredible experience for me. I was challenged by the girl who was discipling me to apply for the Tahoe summer mission (which has happened every year for 45 years), and I quickly realized that every excuse I tried to make was selfish and weakly reasoned. So here I am, writing this from my cabin in South Lake Tahoe. I’d like to start off by thanking everyone who supported me financially to reach the $3200, and also everyone who continues to support me through their prayers.

Our mission here is simple: grow in our own understanding of our identity in Christ, and learn how to share what we believe. The main tool we use to understand and explain the Gospel is the Knowing God Personally booklet, which can be read here in pdf. A summary of the four points it describes are that God created humans to be in relationship with Him like it was in the Garden of Eden, and longs to know us each personally and intimately. However, humans have an inherent brokenness called sin, which separates us from God’s perfection. No matter how hard we try, we can never overcome our own sin, so just doing good things or being a good person will never allow us to reach God’s standard. Even “good people” deserve death in the form of eternal separation from God. So God came to earth in the human form of Jesus, who lived the perfect and sinless life that we never could, only to be brutally executed. But this is all just knowledge: what’s important is our response. We can experience a relationship with God through believing that Jesus’ death and resurrection cover over our sin and make us blameless in God’s sight, and choosing to put Jesus on the “throne” of your life, yielding your own desires to His will.

If we really believe that the Creator of the universe loved humans so much that He lived a terrible human life and died a terrible human death just so He could have a relationship with us and redeem our brokenness and give us abundant and fruitful life, how do we respond to that? If we really believe that heaven and hell exist, and that, at death, every human soul is sent to one eternal destiny, how much would we have to hate a person to not at least let them know? So that’s exactly what we do, and we do it in two ways. The first and more terrifying one is by approaching random people at the beach and just inquiring and exploring what they believe about Jesus and finding any obstacles, questions, or doubts they have that keep them from believing what the Bible says Him. We then ask if they’d like to hear what we believe. Sometimes the answer is no, and that’s okay. But sometimes the answer is yes, and that’s great! The second way we talk to people is through work. Every student gets a full-time job and, over the course of two months, we do a more personal version of the same thing with our coworkers. I work as a cashier at Kmart. It’s not glamorous, and most of what I do is apologize to customers for things that aren’t my fault; I’m sure anyone who’s ever worked in customer service would relate. There are about 15 of us from Cru (out of the 84 students on this summer mission total) who work at Kmart, and we just got through training, so as I meet more of my other coworkers and get to know the ones I’ve already met a little better, I’ll keep you updated on how you can pray for each of them individually.

My 15-hour drive with Bethany from Richland, Washington to South Lake Tahoe, California came to a safe and peaceful end at around 3pm on June 11. After registration and being assigned a cabin, church, bike, and life group, I got to meet my two roommates—Whitney from Eastern Washington University, and Krystle from a study abroad year at Indiana University (after this summer she’s going back to London to finish uni)—who are both very sweet girls and I get along really well with. I’m sick right now and this morning Whitney brought me breakfast, and came home from work with a box of tissues for me, and Krystle works in the kitchen at camp and has offered to make me soup.

Next I got to meet my life group, which is a small group of girls that meets for devos every morning at 6:30 or 7 depending on how early people have to work, and for our main meeting each Monday night where we go through a book called Gospel-Centered Life and talk about what we learned from the Luke study book from the Life Change series we’re reading during our morning devos. My leader Cami (pictured above standing on my and Kathryn’s legs) is a 26-year-old math teacher from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. All the leaders here except her are either student staff who are still students but have been on a summer mission with Cru as a student before and were seen as qualified by the staff to come back as a leader, or a staff member with Cru. Cami, however, has created her own position of volunteer staff: she was a student leader in Cru when she was in college, and she decided that God wanted her to apply to spend her summer as a leader on a summer mission. And I am so glad that she did! She’s a wonderful and skilled life group leader and serves as a role model for me in her passion for God and people and in her confidence in initiating Gospel conversations with strangers.

She’s taken me sharing twice so far: once on our weekly Sunday outreach (so far we’ve gone to Heavenly Village and Pope Beach), and once during our weekly one-on-one discipleship time. Each of those times, as well as the times I’ve gone sharing with other students (we always go in pairs), our conversations with people have been absolutely great. Whether or not they have any interest in knowing God personally, letting people know that God is interested in knowing them and has provided one way to do that is always a win scenario. Our job as Christians is not to convert people; rather, our job is to accept the invitation God has offered us to enter into someone else’s spiritual journey (because every person is on a spiritual journey), speak what we believe to be the truth gently and without judgment, and let the person make up their own mind about what they believe and how they want to respond to what we believe.

We don’t have much downtime between our full-time jobs and camp activities, but when we do, there are a couple main places we hang out. The beaches here are beautiful. Pope Beach is a short drive or bike ride from Tallac Village, the camp where we’re staying, and people always go there to watch the sunset. I’ve also been to El Dorado Beach, Nevada Beach, and the marina at Camp Richardson, and I hope to go hiking at Emerald Bay soon. There’s a resort village called Heavenly with shops, restaurants, and a movie theatre where about 40 of us went and saw Jurassic World, and a smaller group is planning to see Inside Out on Wednesday. There’s also an ice cream shop at Camp Richardson that, on any given night, someone from Cru will be there. And, finally, we have a family room at Tallac Village that people are always playing games or watching movies or playing music in late into the night.