Shower time!

No, our shower works fine (as long as the neighbors aren't using water). Its baby shower time. On Friday we were all able to celebrate with Eddie and Emilie as they prepare for their baby boy to be born.


Emilie's due date is May 5th. I'm praying that he will come a day early, and be born on my birthday. Emilie is ready for him to come, its hard to be patient these last few days.


Here are a few pictures from the event:

He also celebrated Eddie, all the boys had their little thing. The two groups joined for present opening. And this was Eddie's first.

Emilie is glowing.

The girls did an amazing job planning it. They had all kinds of goodies and snack to munch on. My personal favorite are the chocolate covered pomegranate drops of amazingness.
We also got a good community picture. These are the seven of us that live at God's Resort, with the purpose of ministry and service to the neighborhood. (from L to R: Peter, Eric, Abi, Katie, Emilie, Eddie and Megan)

One more pic, the boys also jumped in on this one. Note Sergio! What an amazing community we have!

Sometimes I feel like our house is just one giant extension of the outside yard. Like the walls aren't really there, but are just mere allusions pretending to keep things out. We cleaned and cleaned on Monday and at the end of it, didn't have a lot to show for our work. Things look better, but they just don't look clean.

A significant hole fell out of my closet ceiling the other day during community dinner. Water had been leaking all winter and still hadn't been fixed this past Thursday when it finally just flooded through. My clothes were soaked, boxes wet, and debris was everywhere. Not the most pleasant experience by the end of it. The bugs are back. I killed four this morning getting ready in my room. I have to say I didn't miss them at all over the winter. The basement is flooded again, nothing too bad, but enough to make it stink pretty bad by and in my room and the porch smells like wet cats right now. It's really nothing new though which is why it is so funny that I am feeling it so heavily today.

We have lived at God's Resort now for 8 months and I would not take any of it back, but the house is wearing on me today. I am sure next week I will be a different person and it will be fine, but today my spirit is worn down by the chaos and disfunctional nature of our living environment.

A New Horizon

Do you ever wake up in the morning and just have an uncanny realization that today is a new day? Usually I feel this happen to me a few times a month , but it hadn't in a while until this morning. Megan and I started going to 5:30 prayer again. Actually we told Eddie he could host it at our home so we would have no choice but to wake up really (hey, we have to go to extremes sometimes to be disciplined right?). Having prayer in our house gives me a lot of peace. I remember how much these prayer meetings changed my life a year ago and coming back to them I just feel Him again.

Anyway, so this morning I woke up and we had prayer and then I had coffee with our new brother in the Lord, Vincent. Vincent is in many ways the male version of me three years ago. The similarities in our coming to the Lord are eerie at times. Talking to him this morning though about the struggles Christians face in their walk though was just outstanding. At the same time though, it made me realize a lot of the grey I have allowed to creep into my Christian walk. Grey that should appear much more black and white in a Christian following Christ. So this morning on this brand new glorious morning where the sun was actually shining for the first time in a while, I want to do something about it. Our adult sponsor on our trip to New Orleans asked me while we were down there what things in my Christianity I would take with me to Mission Year as my foundational truths and life commitments. At the time, I gave him a very typical church response, that though true was not very specific. Well it's time to get specific. For the next few months therefore that is my plan and I would love all the help and accountability I can get along the way. I want to look at where I am still falling short of glorifying God in my actions and discipline and quite honestly make a solid, tangible commitment to action to follow Him more diligently and faithfully. I am a person who needs structure and a clear response and without that my responses get all muddled with life and humanity. Why not take this time now while I have it to really look at and seek Godly disciplines in my life? I am tired of pushing life choices aside and saying "one day when I need to I will". That one day is going to come when I am not looking and I am probably going to respond in some pretty ungodly ways without having really given thought to what my life looks like when lived in line with Christ. So here I am diving in head first ready for whatever I may hit as long as it is on the way to Him.

The Past month at God's Resort

This past month has been a blur of emotions and events that my mind has still not wrapped around yet. All of February was so stressful at work because we were recruiting, interviewing, and picking new students for the Honors Program next Fall. It's a lot of work and a lot of emotions in a very small office and to say the least everyday was tiring. Emilie, Eddie, and Abi moved in and that was amazing, but a whole period of transition. I love all three of those people so I didn't expect any problems transitioning to community in a bigger group, but the whole month has just been hard. Reshaping boundaries, letting in new perspectives on your ministry, and sharing life with three extra people in a very close and personal environment has been rougher for me than I thought it would be. No idea why actually, but I do know I have experienced a range of emotions from godly to ungodly this past month and in the end I hope to come out of it a better person. God has really opened my heart to the selfishness that still lurks in its crevices and the ugliness of it all has really defeated me at times. As Megan said there is a difference between having community and having a community that does communal living. When community now means giving up what I considered my personal space it brings a whole new set of challenges. Figuring out how to operate in a Christlike manner communally is something I have got to figure out though if I am going to live on a team with five strangers next year. Having Eddie, Emilie, and Abi down there though has been a huge blessing. I hadn't realized how much I had cut myself off from my community until they all started showing up and I wanted to push them away. I no longer wanted to be transparent or share life honestly with them and that was a pretty fruitless place to be in life honestly. So I guess all of the stress and confusion of reentering my community is God trying to bring me back to a Truth I had pushed away. He has exposed the shallowness I had allowed in my relationships with the people He has given me to love and when I see that sin exposed I cannot help but strive towards eliminating it no matter how ugly the process is. Our good friend Peter and Eric are moving in as I type and it is just incredible to see the little community of close friends God is placing in our greater community at God's Resort. I know these next few months we will see something incredible if we are sensitive to His spirit and continue to strive after His teachings. We can use your prayers for our community that we will trust and love each other to the fullest capacity we can each day.

Community vs Communal living...

...we dont have it all figured out.

Mentoring

There are a lot of young teens at God's Resort. Only one of them is a guy, the rest are girls. They are 12 years old and as we all know, that is a very hard age.

One of the goals that we had when Katie and I moved to God's Resort was to start meeting once a week to talk and hang out with the "older girls"

We started in the fall, and i can admit that I didn't do such a great job at it, Ashley and I would meet about once a month. Katie did an amazing job meeting with Dominique, they would hang out once a week, eat together and just talk. It was such an amazing experience for them.

At the beginning of this spring semester Katie called me out on my lack of commitment to meeting with Ashley. So this semester we have been able to meet once a week. We usually go to Starbucks (Ashley usually orders a mocha frapuccino, which she used to call a moco frape) and talk for about an hour.

At first we would pick a random topic, on the spot and read what the Bible had to say about it. For Valentine's day I got her a year long devotional book. This has helped a lot because we read the devotional together, and then talk about the topic. This has been great. (especially when Ashley reads real loud about purity, sex and boys and the people around us give me a knowing look)

The "younger" kids have gotten jealous of the little extra time that the older girls get. E came up to Katie and I one day and told us that she had a proposal (her words not ours). Her proposal was that since Katie and I had extra time with the older girls, we should find time to spend some extra time and do fun stuff with the younger kids; and declared herself Katie's "partner" (which is the word that the young kids use for the mentor- mentee relationship) and that I was to be the other kids. She didn't really want an immediate answer, she wanted us to think about it, and then asked us every time she saw us what we thought of her proposal.

This is the amazon link to the devotional book Ashley got. Its a simple book, but very straight foward and to the point: Designer Genes Devo Book.

Lots to come!

So march is here, and we have been busy busy busy

spring break staring this week, Katie and Abi will be heading to New Orleans to serve with the College Age from College Heights.
Those of us staying are hoping to hang out with the kids since they wont have school.

at the end of the month College Heights has its "week of service"
their goal: to get the backyard ready for summer. with an area that the kids can play in that is safe.

Then, April... i cant even think that far ahead.

Finally the sun came out!

The sun finally came out last Friday after what has felt like weeks, even months of gray skys and cold. We grabbed our soccer ball and the kids and headed for the empty parking lot across from our house for a little fun and in the end a lot of pictures. Here are some great shots of the kids and our extended family here at God's Resort:

Where did February go?

It feels like last month literally blew by. Life was so busy that it was hard to stop and think about anything that was happening. I got accepted to Mission Year, an inner city ministry program, and will be moving in August somewhere unknown to me at this point. We obviously had our fun fiesta for Valentine's Day. We got a new roommate Abi, so now there are three of us. Eddie and Emilie, two our dearest friends, moved in next door to us. We went to Texas to a homeless outreach center to serve the homeless, but more likely we were the ones served. Here's a few pictures from that:

I am getting ready now for Spring Break during which I will be going to New Orleans with the College Age to rebuild houses. I am so excited for this trip. I am actually hoping to visit a Mission Year team while I am down there, but we'll see.

Things at God's Resort are going really well. The neighborhood has come alive with the warmer weather we have had off and on the last couple of weeks. We have had so much fun playing with the kids outside and getting to talk to people more. Winter is so hard because no one comes out of their homes. The kids have been coming over for homework help a lot more which is good because a lot of them have not been doing so well as we thought they were. Ashley and Dominique had a big social studies project and both of them did really well (A's)!!! There are a bunch of new tenants to get to know as well. It really just feels like having a huge extended family all around us. We have moved into the new auditorium at College Heights and it has completely changed our Sunday mornings, but so far we have really enjoyed all the changes. It just seems like lots of new things are going on and everyone is on one wild ride I guess.

Happy Valentine's Day!

So for Valentine's Day we had 19 kids, 4 adults, two tables, and 76 cookies to decorate. Here's what we got: