Saturday, June 18, 2011
Hard to believe that 2 weeks from today we will begin our journey back to the United States!
Well, here is what has been going on since I last updated:
Last Sunday we had our first official Men's/Women's times on project. The men started off with a little bit of touch rugby, which the STINTers graciously taught us. It took us a while to get the hang of it, because you can only pass the ball backwards, which goes against our instincts in every other sport (football, soccer, basketball, etc). Eventually we figured it out and were able to have a pretty fun game. We're going to play again today and I'm really excited to keep getting better! After rugby we then cleaned ourselves up and then met up again to listen to Joe talk about biblical manhood. We went through Genesis and looked at how God created men and what our roles look like. The basic summary that I took from the time was that men are to reject passivity, lead courageously, accept responsibility, and look towards the greater reward (eternal rewards). It was really cool and growing this past week to examine my actions and see how they lined up with these 4 points.
Monday was the Queen's Birthday, which is a national holiday in Fiji. We started off the day with Bill, our director, giving a talk on our Identity in Christ. A question that Bill asked that really challenged me was "From 0 to 100, how accepted do you feel by God?" And of course my "humble" answer was somewhere between 70 and 90...because I could always do better or improve they way I am living, right? Well the truth is that I am 100% accepted by God, all the time, because Jesus has already done the work to pay for my sins as well as done the work to make me completely righteous in the eyes of God! I should be able to answer the question with a loud and bold "100!" every time. The very fact that my instinct is to say something less than 100 indicates that I am believing that my acceptance is in some way linked to my works, and not completely in the work of Jesus. I've also seen that the temptation is to take advantage of this acceptance and do nothing but live for myself. However the way God works in our hearts with this acceptance is that we are moved to live for Him, and because of His acceptance, we have the freedom to fail miserably in our strides to live for Him, and he still accepts us 100%! This message could not have been more needed, because ministry on Monday was a "failure" by our standards. Since it was a national holiday, all but one of the campuses that we went to were completely closed, and the one that was open had very few students present. The day pretty much seemed like a waste of time and resources. What made it worse is that we all felt embarrassed that we had geared up for the day and made plans to go sharing on campus or whatever, and then had to go home without doing much of anything. Thankfully Bill's talk on our Identity in Christ was still fresh in our minds so we could reflect on how even though our efforts failed, the day isn't a failure and our acceptance is still 100%. The freedom to fail was made so much clearer and beautiful to me.
Tuesday was a pretty cool day that God continued to teach me stuff through my own failed efforts. I made an appointment at one of the FNU campuses with a guy I had met the week before. I showed up and waited for an hour and a half before leaving to head to another meeting I had. While I was heading out Sean, one of my roomates who I share a cell phone with, told me that my guy had just texted me and was going to be there in 45 minutes. I still had to head out to my next meeting so Sean decided that he would meet up with the guy I was supposed to meet. He eventually did show up for Sean and they had a great conversation and went through one of the follow up bible studies. I am very thankful that God used that day to show me that even when my plans fail, His always succeed, even when we don't see how.
Wednesday was typical for the first part where we focused on our own relationships with God and met in our bible studies for more Philippians. But in the afternoon we had a bit of fun and divided up into 4 teams for a scavenger hunt! It wasn't a typical scavenger hunt, each team was presented with a list of tasks to photograph or video tape for different point values. Some examples are: Drive a taxi, fit all 7 team members in a taxi, form a massage chain with at least 10 Fijians, pick a coconut from a tree, find free wi-fi, play in the mcdonald's playplace, kiss the national director of crusade for Fiji, have the entire team go down the water slide of our hotel's pool, etc. It was a ton of fun and great way to spend our Wednesday afternoon.
Thursday we mixed things up a little and did a neighborhood outreach with a local church. We all went door to door in a neighborhood and passed out copies of the Jesus Film on DVD and comment cards. We collected contact information of the people we gave the DVD to and on Monday people from the church are going to follow up with them and see what they thought of the movie. Hopefully this will lead to a lot of good conversations about who Jesus was and what it means to have a relationship with him.
Yesterday we had the privilege of going to see a provincial rugby match at the national stadium. This was my first live experience of an official rugby game. It was really cool to see how excited Fijians are for rugby and for there respective teams. The game was really exciting; there were a lot of scores and someone even had to be taken off the field on a stretcher! It made me even more excited to play with the guys today, even though we will just be playing touch rugby.
Look for an update from me this Friday. Saturday we will be heading to the Student Conference for all the students involved in Student Life in Suva. After that we will be heading to Mana Island for our debriefing so that we can share and process all that has been going on in our lives during the past 6 weeks, and then we will head to Nadi for 1 night before we begin flying back to the U.S.! I most likely will not be able to update after this Friday until I am back in the U.S. Please continue to pray for our project that we would push hard this last week on campuses and that the Student Conference would be a great way for those involved in Student Life to grow close to God.
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