Truth is who You are

Bula Bula!

For all of you non-Fijians, "bula" means hello and is pretty much the most common greeting I've heard here in Fiji.

So let me start by updating you all on what went on before we left the States. I drove with my mom and sister to Indy from Cleveland last Wednesday. I met the rest of my team at the Crowne Plaza hotel near the airport, where we stayed until we flew out Friday morning. At briefing we had several training sessions to prepare us for the 6 weeks we would spend in Fiji. The three main themes were Love the Lord, Love your team, and Love the World. The training about loving the Lord was very impacting and really gave me some vision of how I wanted to see my personal relationship with God grow through reading the bible and prayer. We also took personality tests to learn about ourselves as well as how to love people better with different personalities than us. I learned that I fall under the category of "Melancholy" (kind of depressing label right?) which doesn't mean I am sad all the time, but that I place a very high value on Order, which is definitely true of me. We also learned about the Fijian culture and how to deal with any culture stress that might occur while we are here.

So Friday came and at 4:00am we left the hotel for the airport. We flew for about 2 hours to Houston, then 8.5 hours to Honolulu (where we had a 12 hour layover...not a bad place to be stuck for 12 hours...we went to the beach!), and then 6.5 to Nadi (pronounced non-dee) where we caught a bus that took us to Suva in 4 hours. Basically we were all exhausted by the time we got here, but we forced ourselves to stay up until at least 8pm to help with jet lag. I'm pretty much over jet lag now, I can stay up til 10 or 11 and wake up around 7 or 8.

We are in Suva, Fiji for the majority of this trip. To help me describe what Suva is like, you need to basically forget EVERYTHING you have ever thought about Fiji. Suva is a port city, so there is no beach. Also it rains just about every day, at random times and with no warning. Sometimes they are brief showers, other times they seem to be off and on all day. We have had several hours of sunny weather though. The city is pretty busy, with taxis and people walking everywhere. There are also quite a few tall buildings in the city. I don't really have a good grasp of the layout yet, but I'm slowly learning. The city is also kind of (for lack of a better word) dirty. It reminds me a lot of Lusaka, although the city is right on the ocean and does have some quite beautiful views of the mountains. Internet is also hard to come by, so I am at an internet cafe right now, paying for internet just like last year.

The people in Fiji are super friendly and always are greeting us as we walk around the city or on campus at the University of the South Pacific. Our time on campus this week has already seen tons of fruit for our labor! After only 2 days of sharing our team saw 38 people place their faith in Christ! On the second day of sharing our faiths on campus I went with my new friend Marcus. We met a guy named Sakaria and we sat to talk with him about the Gospel. We shared how God loves us and has a plan for our lives that we can experience through a relationship with him, but since we are sinful we are separated from God because he is perfect and Holy, but since God loves us he sent Jesus to earth and He lived a perfect life that did not deserve death, but he chose to die in our place to pay the penalty for our sin, which does deserve separation from God. I have never shared the gospel and had someone understand it as well as Sakaria did, and then have him say that he knew he did not have Jesus in his life. We asked him if he would like to do that right then with us, and he did so we prayed with him and he asked Jesus to be his savior. We then made plans to meet up again with him on Friday of this week to continue to discuss what it means to have a relationship with God. We also saw 2 friends place their faith in Christ in a similar fashion later that day. It was a very exciting day of ministry at USP and definitely energized me to keep pushing hard this week, even when I was tired or maybe no in the mood to be on campus.

So that is basically what has been going on in Fiji...some other side notes: I absolutely love my team, many of them are from Miami also, but there are several who aren't and I have enjoyed getting to know them all. I also have been enjoying pretty much everything I've eaten, which has often been seafood. I have also been running just about each day with different friends on the project which has been a sweet way to have good conversations and stay in shape! I also got to reunite with the STINT team that is here for the entire year, which has been really cool because 4 of them helped out with Student Venture in Oxford, OH with me, 1 of the guys, Dave, was my bible study leader and discipler during my sophomore year, and the last guy, Rob, is just hilarious and I've missed seeing at Miami.

I am looking forward to keeping you updated as I continue to live out this adventure in Fiji. It seems like I should be able to update this blog every week at the least. I hope you all are doing well in the States, definitely feel free to send me e-mails or facebook messages with what is going on with you!

Posted by Kevin Joseph Timmons at 10:53 PM