My prayer

As I've been through my first month of school I've learned some things.
1) I have gotten a lot better at communication skills! It makes it easier to live with roommates, thats for sure!
2) I love my classes so so much. Most of them are right up my alley and are truly going to help me with my future career which is exciting. My two favorite classes are Comparative Religions, and Epistemology and Worldview. Obviously I love them because I love people, and I love to learn about people!
3) I love Jesus a lot and am content with Him as my best friend. There have been transitions this year with living in an apartment and not living right next to a lot of my friends. Its also been busier this year. I'm really trying to just focus on God and friends come second. I'm not hanging out with a lot of my friends from last year, but am instead spending a lot more time with God, and I'm loving it.
4) For some reason, I have missed Africa a ton. And here's where the prayer part comes in- I am praying that God will help me love my friends and fellow students as much as I love the people of Africa. There are days (probably about once a week right now) where I just want to jump on a plane and head to Africa! But I know that God has bigger plans than me, and if He wants me to jump on a plane, He will provide.
5) God blesses you if you bless Him. Sounds kinda weird but its true. If you are putting Him first, giving Him your best, and loving Him with all of your heart, He will bless you back. I don't have a job right now, yet I'm not broke and I'm not worried (I was for a while, but now I'm not). As long as I am putting God first, He will provide for me. I've switched to a different church this year, and the pastor has been preaching sermon after sermon about giving your All to God and seeing His blessings. People have given testimonies about how they have given up buying a house to give the money to God, or sold an expensive car to give the money to God...and I don't have that stuff or a job, but what I do have is time. So I'm giving my time to God by leading a biblestudy for freshman girls, and hanging out with international students. I figure, since I don't have a job, I've definitely got extra time on my hands, so why not give it to God? He has truly been blessing me through this. God is so great! Thats all I wanted to share with you guys :) Thanks for your prayers!!

The End of Summer :( :( :(

Sigh. Summer is almost over. I have 13 days left to be exact. I have a lot to catch you all up on!

First, The Middle East.
I can now call "The Middle East" Jordan. Yeah, I went to Jordan. It feels great to say that. As you know, I was there during the month of May. It was AMAZING. In a nutshell, these are the things that we did: worked with UNICEF to plan an event for Iraqi (Kurdish) refugees, taught English at an orphanage, taught English at the company we worked with, hung out at the University of Jordan and brought students to our English learning group, started a conversation club dedicated to watching American movies and discussing them, took food poor believers to a suburb of Amman called Zarqa, took food to Iraqi refugee women that are secret believers, and lastly loved on the fieldworkers there by spending time with them and praying with them. We did a ton of different things. All of them were great learning experiences. The girls and guys had separate apartments that we lived in, and we took taxi's everywhere we went. We ate out for most of our meals and through all of that we were immersed in the culture and with the people.

There are two main questions that you are going to ask, and yes, I can read your mind ;)
1) What was the weather like? (If you aren't thinking this, then I guarantee someone else is). It was HOT!! And yeah, we were fully covered except for our heads so it was extra warm. But you know what, I wouldn't have wanted it any other way. I'm glad that we respected their culture and dressed conservatively.
2) Did anyone accept Christ? The answer is no. For one, its illegal to be a Christian. And secondly, most people are afraid to even talk about Christ. One thing we learned to do was to be patient and to pray. We prayed that God would lead our conversations with people instead of forcing conversations about Him. Sometimes I would get to share a small thing about my faith, and other times I would just rememeber to pray for that person and that a believer would come alongside them and share their faith.

We got to see some pretty amazing sites while we were in Jordan. I'm just going to name them and you can look them up if you want to know more! We went to the Jordan River and saw where Jesus was baptized, Mount Nebo, Wadi Rum (think Lawrence of Arabia), The Dead Sea, The Sea of Galilee, Petra (one of the NEW Seven Wonders of the World), and a saw some Dead Sea Scrolls and the Jordan Archaeological Museum.

There is so much more for me to share with you, but I just cannot fit it into this space. If you want to know more, you can give me your email address, and you can also look at my pictures on facebook.


Summer-----As soon as I got back from Jordan, my parents surprised me at LAX! They brought me home to Oregon and then I got to work :) I have worked as the summer intern in the Childrens Department at my church. Some of you may remember that I did this last summer as well. It is a paying job so I've been able to save up for school! I've also babysat and housesat to supplement that. Now I'm headed off to CBU for the fall. I'm taking 16 units this semester and crossing my fingers that I can find an on campus job like I was able to last summer. I am going to be living in an apartment on campus with two other girls so I'm very excited to be even more of an adult this year! I will try to keep you all updated on my school year as I go along.


Thank you all for your prayers and support as I went to Jordan this summer, and I know that many of you have continued to pray for me while I've been at school and at home. I consider you to be my family and I am so grateful for your love and prayers!

Getting Ready for Take-Off

I'm leaving for the Middle East on Monday! I've been waiting for this day since December...I've had 3 hour long meetings every Wednesday night, for the entire semester. Can someone do the math to see how much time I've put into this? To tell you the truth, this is something I've been wanting to do for a long time, longer than just this year. And to be even more honest, this is something that a lot of people would want to do, Christians, Muslims, and Jews...can someone else add up how many Christians, Muslims, and Jews there are in the world? Hm. Well, anyways, all of that said, I am so so excited. This past week has been lonely, but good for me, and for my relationship with God. Its been refreshing and rejuvinating, and it was just what I needed. For those of you that don't know, I'm staying with some family friends in Apple Valley, CA until I leave for my trip. I am so grateful to them for letting me come into their home for a while! The reason I've been lonely though, is because the kids are in school, and both parents have busy jobs, so I've been left to my own devices during the day! I love the relaxation, and the tme with God, but I don't love the quiet. In fact, I was telling the mom today that I miss having 26 girls around, talking about boys and hair and makeup (this is weird for me, girls usually annoy me!!), and I miss that roommate of mine whom i loved...and also hated at the same time! This year was amazing, and I learned a lot, and I'm even more excited to see what God has in store for me next year. Phew, this is just a taste of what has been rollin' around in my head for the past week :) Good stuff huh? Anyways, back to the upcoming take off. Please be praying for my team as we head over to the Middle East. We're all excited to do what we're going to do, and see what we're going to see...and thats about all I can say....which is why I got sidetracked in the first place, because I didnt want to waste a blog on one sentence that is completely ambiguous and would just make you all even more curious! I know I'm definitely giving you all some vague stuff to pray about so, uh, good luck with that :) Thank you all again! And I'll see you sometime in June when I head back up to Oregon!

$$$

Hey Everyone! I know its been a while since I've made a post. In the past month or so I have been very busy! I had midterms right before spring break and then I went home for spring break and brought my friend Holly from school/Seattle with me. Some of you probably met her. After that I drove back down here and some friends from Oregon came with. That was a fun filled but very busy week for me, trying to combine school, work, and hanging out with my friends from home. The same day that they left to go back to Oregon my ISP team had a car wash for our trip. We raised about $450 dollars in five hours and we are very proud...I also got a tan, just in case you were wondering. Saturday I tried to relax but ended up doing a lot to prepare for Sunday's event. On Sunday, first I was announced as a member at my new church down here (and they said my first name wrong...but thats a whole different story) and then I spent the following 6 1/2 hours at our Night of Islam. Our team put on an informational event at a church here in Riverside. The event included a potluck with food from the Middle East, tables decorated with Middle Eastern themes, a worship portion, prayer for the Middle East, a love offering and two different speakers. One speaker is a professor at my school named Ramy, who has travelled all over the world entering war zones and such. His life amazes me and I would like to follow in his footsteps...scary I know! The other speaker is an older man who fled from Lebanon with his family after his 2 million dollar business was burned to the ground because he was a Christian. Both stories touched our team, and the 75 people who attended the event. At the end of the night we received a love offering of over $1500. It was so amazing that complete strangers would give so much to us, and offer to pray for us! Although this whole weekend was awesome with our fundraisers and such, my team still needs about $18,000 as a whole. So if you have not given yet, you still can! And if you cannot give, then please keep us in your prayers because we definitely need them! We still have two more fundraisers to go, so be praying that they both go well. Thanks everyone!

Intensive Training Weekend (ITW)

This past weekend was intensive training for my trip in May. To say the least, it was emotionally draining and I learned a lot. There were many simulations of different cultures, specifically the culture of a closed country, since that is where I am going. The training took place on campus and we pretty much had the entire campus staked out for what we call ISPLAND. The first night we walked around in the rain for hours with our luggage at the "airport". This simulation involved going through security, getting visas, going through customs, and exchanging money. During this time "security officials" asked us questions about why we were there, and there were people walking around trying to steal our things such as passports, luggage that was left unattended, and pretty much anything hanging out of pockets. We could not talk loudly, and we had to stay with our group. After exchanging our "american money" for ISPIES we bartered for a taxi. The driver tried to rip us off by stealing our luggage, didn't know where the market was, and drove like a crazy person with Indian music blaring. We finally got to the market and bartered for our food for the next day. During this time there were "crippled" people begging, and other people bumping into us in order to steal from us. Throughout this time, everyone had accents that were hard to understand. All in all, this was the easiest simulation that we had. The next morning we were woken up to the Call To Prayer which is Muslim. The women were told to put on our hijabs (scarves over our heads) and the men had to put on prayer caps. There were rules we had to follow. The women could not speak loudly but rather had to whisper, we could not make eye contact with the men, we had to sit in the back of the worship center, or if punished, in the lobby, we had to walk behind the men, we could not speak to the men, and we had to serve the men without making physical contact. After an entire day of this these are some of the emotions we had gone through: feeling unwanted, dirty, alone, helpless, ugly, and lonely. This simulation brought many to tears as we realized what 1 billion Muslims deal with all over the world every day. When this simulation was over our boys brought us flowers and thanked us for going through what we had to. The next simulation was going to a house church. We were all given directions on how to get to our house church (there were many all over campus), and we had to memorize a password. We traveled in groups of three and had to make up reasons as to why we were out late at night, since police were everywhere. We had to hide our Bible's since they were contraband. Once reaching the housechurch and saying the password, we were ushered into a dark room with only a flashlight. We read scripture from a sheet of paper, sang, and prayed, all while whispering. Several times we had to stop and wait for the police to leave the area. In the end we were all praying for our brothers and sisters in Christ who go through this every day. Every year 100,000 to 150,000 Christians are murdered for this. Sunday was the easiest day. We walked to church in the rain after bartering for our breakfast. Then we went to a nursing home across from the school and spent time with the residents there. We are going to go back for an hour every weekend to build relationships with these people and show them Christ's love. We then walked to a place to eat. After this there was one last simulation called bafabafa. This is very hard to explain...so look it up on the internet :) After this whole weekend, I not only gained understanding and knowledge of the people in the country I am going to, but I also grew closer to my team of ten. We never argued, were always concerned for each other, and made compromises. I am now even more excited to go on my trip!!