Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Dominican Day Five

Tonight will be short since I am pretty tired...today was a slower day compared to yesterday which I believe was much needed.
1. Met with the guy from yesterday again today and Collin got to speak with him and challenge him today. Pray that God would continue to work on his heart. Praise God for his friend and herd desire for him to come to know the Lord.
2. Pray for the health of our group...our leader is not feeling great right now and he could use recovery prayers. All of us have so far been covered by Gods grace in our food and water supply. Also pray that the water in our hostel would start working again as it has been in and put for days so we are lacking on showers and the ability to flush our toilets.
3. Our group is heading to Bochchica tomorrow which is a ways away...pray for safe travels for my group and that God would still provide us with conversations throughout the day.
4. Tomorrow is a vision meeting with some of the Dominicans we have met so pray that God would put on their hearts to be a part of this church plant. Also pray for our final dinner with people on friday and that the Lird would produce a lot of fruit from it.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Dominican Day Three but technically Four

Look around at the nations; look and be amazed! For I am doing something in your own day, something you wouldn't believe even if someone told you about it. Habakkuk 1:5

I think this verse pretty much encompasses my groups day at the university.
1. Last year as I mentioned and you can read about is that my group prayed to be invited to an English class to share the gospel. This year that prayer was answered and multiplied as if God had shot it up with steroids and then handed it back to me. Pray for the roughly 150 people that we were able to share the gospel with today...that we were encouraging to the Christians in the classes and that the seeds we planted in the hearts of non-Christians that God would work with and water for salvations and strong disciples to grow.
2. Today just as I thought God was not really using me at all on this trip because I cannot speak Spanish and all I can do is pray...God provided me with a conversation with a young man that had a soft heart and spoke English. We talked through a lot of basic issues that were hindering him from having and relationship with God and through His grace and wisdom we were able to make significant progress in the Gospel and we are meeting again tomorrow...pray that he would continue to have a soft heart when we meet tomorrow and that the tract would make sense to him and that God would continue to lead us in conversation with him tomorrow.
3. Pray that our two Christian friends that took us to the English classes would be bulky up through our laborers and that they themselves would become key laborers in our church plant as they have so much potential in the university to reach so many students with the Gospel.
4. Pray for continued humility in our conversations with people...boldness in talking to people about the Gospel and continued reliance on God and not on our own strength and abilities.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Dominican Day Two

Hi family and friends... I had limited ability to post from my iPod so I will probably just stick to prayer requests.
1. Pray that the Lord would provide us with divine appointments...so far conversations have been very encouraging, God is definitely working in the Dominican as many already have a Christian/God foundation that has made it easier for the Gospel to go out to ppl with soft hearts.
2. There is a possibility that three girls we spoke with prayed to receive Christ and became Christians...only the Lord knows the condition of their hearts though so pray that he continues to guide them to Him and eventually lead them to salvation.
3. All the other Dominicans we have had conversations with...language has been a bit of a barrier but God has provided us with tracts that very clearly share the Gospel and thankfully the Dominicans are extremely friendly and more than willing to sit and read throuh the tracts with us...it's amazing to see people come to understand Christ and the Gospel through a simple tract...they are such a blessing
4. Pray that we would continue to be bold and encouraged in the Lord and humble and confident in sharing the Gospel...pray that we would continue to find laborers for the future church that we will be planting here in Santo Domingo and that the gospel would reach the nation through this church and the power of the Holy Spirit!

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Day Eight

Hola! Today will be the final blog post of this trip. Something funny that happened was when I originally sat down to write this, Elizabeth appeared behind me and had just arrived at the hostel! So I hung out with her for about 5 minutes and took her down to everyone else. More good news is that Michaela is here, at the hostel! I have not seen her yet because she is still sleeping but I am thankful that we will get to hang out with her before we have to leave. So now for the update from yesterday (Friday).

We started off our morning like we always do and then my group ended up going to a different location today, Parc Guell. We hung out in the parc for awhile and there were just so many people it was hard to try and start any conversations so we ended up leaving after about an hour and decided that we would go to the location where we were all going to hang out that night and talk to people there. Jason had said that we would go to mass sometime while we were here because I had never been to one but that did not really work out. BUT he did let us stop into this massive Catholic cathedral on the way to our location. I walked through the chapel and then I ended up making my way into a shop...I was very stunned that they would be selling things in a church. We then went into the sanctuary and I was walking with Gina and I sat down with her to talk to a couple of nuns. As odd as it sounds this was actually an answered prayer, I have always wanted to sit down and speak with nuns about what they believe.

The entire conversation was in Spanish so I was bascially just trying to listen intently to figure out what they were saying. At the same time we were talking to the nuns there was a woman there that Jason was trying to talk to...he had shown her one verse that he said changed his life and as soon as she was done reading it she came over to Gina and I and intercepted our conversation. It was probably the worst time ever because from the passages that Gina had shown the nuns they had come to the agreement that it was by accepting the gift of Christ rather than good works that you go to heaven and then the woman came into our conversation. :( I struggled a lot to understand what this woman was saying but one sentence that I understood clearly was when she said that the Bible is a good book BUT we are not suppose to follow all of it. She also said that Jason was too obsessed with the Bible...I thought that was kind of funny :)

After our time at the church we went to the location where we had invited people to hang out that night and Heather had a great conversation with a man who was not sure he was saved and by the end of their conversation Heather was able to show him through the Bible (Romans 10:9-10, etc) that in fact he was saved and he could be sure that he was going to heaven. He was so thankful that Heather had stopped to talk to him. Becky and Dayna also had a good conversation with a girl who was a believer and they were able to give her a Bible before she had to leave. Our service started at 6 and lots of people showed up that we invited and many just joined us to see what was going on. There was many good conversations going on during the night and our groups did not start leaving until around 9 or 10. After, our group went to dinner with Sergi, and because it was so late we had to walk quite a ways to find a metro that would take us back to the hostel. It was funny because we ended up going to Carrer de Balmes, the street that I was suppose to live on orginially when I was going to study abroad in Spain. We got back around one and I was much too tired to update...I made sure Micheala was in our hostel and then I went to bed. I am now off to pack before heading off for our final day in Barcelona. I will see many of you soon!! Adios!

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Day Six

Hi friends, today was good...kind of. We had our friends from the Madrid church arrive today to help us go sharing and translate for us. We were blessed to have Gina come with our group. She was able to help us right away starting from the train ride to our destination. She was able to help Jason share with some boys from Venezuela. We arrived at the Universitat again and I went with Gina and Nick sharing. It was interesting how so far during this trip I have been blessed with approaching people that can speak enough English and I can speak enough Spanish to communicate the Gospel but today we just kept running into people that knew very little English. Gina did a very good job trying to help us communicate and when we found ourselves in a rut she was very good about taking over and going through the whole Gospel and then handing them tracts to end our conversations. Even with Gina though the morning was still a bit discouraging. So far on this trip I have yet to have a conversation with someone who is soft and who really desires to know more about what we are saying.

The encouraging part of the day was when we went back to Iftikar's place for lunch. Iftikar is originally from Pakistan and I will stand by the fact that I believe Bollywood is an international language! When his employee was making my food I asked him if he was a fan of Shahrukh Khan and when I told him that I loved Shahrukh he told his employee that I should get extra meat in my wrap because I am a Bollywood fan. I think the fact that I was able to bond with him over Bollywood was why Jason later asked me if I would go with him and Gina to go talk with Iftikar again about the Gospel. He is Muslim and he spoke with Gina the majority of the time because he speaks Spanish much more fluently than he speaks English but from what I understood the conversation they went back and forth a lot between "this is what the Bible says" and "this is what the Koran says." After the conversation died down and Gina and Jason had moved on to sharing and talking with his girlfriend and employees, I started talking with him more about Bollywood. It was very touching because he took out his CD case and found a soundtrack to multiple Shahrkuh Khan movies and he gave it to me as a gift. I was very thankful that he was willing to give it to me. He had an employee that was from Nepal and he kept asking me to list the Bollywood movies I had seen and at one point he asked me to start singing the songs that I remembered. It was amazing how bonding Bollywood can be. Iftikar and his employees all asked me for my e-mail and it was also very touching because Iftikar said that if Shahrukh Khan ever comes back to Barcelona (HE WAS THERE IN JANUARY THIS YEAR!!) then he would get an autograph and a picture for me and send it to me.

After lunch we went out sharing again for a couple more hours. We had two longer conversations with a couple groups of girls. One couple we approached in the park was in the middle of either breaking up or the guy was trying to tell the girl he was with that he liked her and so we felt pretty embarrassed about interrupting them but luckily we were able to leave them with tracts. I think as Christians though we would agree the Gospel and eternity was much more important than whatever conversation they were having :) Our day was cut short a bit because Jason, Dayna, and Heather went to meet and have dinner with Sergi again and we came right back to the hostel.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Dia Cinco

Day Five down...this means only three days left. I felt very off this morning, and did not feel like I was very right with God this morning. We headed out a bit later today than we normally do and when we got to the parque today I went out sharing with Randi and I just felt like I was believing so many lies from the devil this morning and I was extremely afraid of approaching people. Randi and I finally sat down and just started praying for boldness and wisdom. After we were done praying a couple of girls had come and sat down in the park near our bench and we took it as a good opportunity to approach them. They both didnt believe in God and they believed in Science but they did not reject the possibility that God existed. They were willing to let us share with them and we were able to go through the whole Gospel with them but they still felt that they very much were sure in Science and did not think you could be both a Christian and do science. In order to get them to look into Christianity further we gave them booklets that presented the tough questions about evolution vs. creationism and I wrote my email address on them and just asked that they look through what we gave them and emailed me their thoughts about what we had in the booklets since they are both in the university studying biology. Pray that they would read the material and get in contact with us again, pray that God would lead them to truth as they look into the information that we gave them.

I was still feeling very off with God and I was just being very hard towards the idea of approaching people, especially after we ended up approaching a couple of French girls that spoke absolutely no spanish or english and had to cover it up by asking them to take a picture of us. Randi and I just decided to sit down and read our Bibles for awhile and try to get on track with God before we shared with anymore people. It was pretty crazy because throughout the day I was reading my Bible and I would share with Randi what I was reading (this happened about three or four times) and it turned out that Randi had read EXACTLY the same passage either that morning or in one instance I read to her the verse that she was owning for our mission trip...it was just very encouraging to read and talk with Randi and the Word.

We had lunch and chilled for a little bit before we met Sergi and Raoul for coffee. I did not really know either of them so it was a good time for me to just sit and continue to read my Bible. During coffee Jason had an opportunity to really build into Raoul who he shared with last year and it gave everyone else an opportunity to talk to and encourage Sergi. After coffee we met up with German who we had met the night before at the service and we arranged to meet with him for dinner tonight. He took us to a Chinese restaurant with REAL chinese food which made Becky extremely happy. In all honesty, German ordered SO much food that we had to head back to the hostel by the time we were done eating and did not have an opportunity to really get into the Gospel but he was happy to take tracts from us as we departed. As we were moving through the metro station there were just dozens of homeless people sleeping on cardboard boxes during the night...please be praying for the poverty that exists here in Barcelona.

The last highlight of our night is that as we were on the last train ride home, Randi and I had yet to work up the courage to start a converastion with the two women sitting across from us but God works in mysterious (AND REALLY ODD) ways. We overheard Becky telling Nick, Heather, and Dayna about an absolutely awful and disgusting Chinese dish, that I refuse to tell anyone else about, and it was seriously so horrific that the two women sitting across from us turned and were listening to her and it was through her story that we figured out that both of them could speak English. They were not related, one was an older woman and the other was a young half German, half Spanish girl. We told them about why were in Barcelona and we discovered that neither of them believed in God. Dayna started asking the German girl some very tough questions and while the older woman did not seem to be listening, she did put away her book as Dayna was talking so hopefully the Lord was drawing her in. We had to get off the train but we at least were given the opporunity to get them thinking about life. They both was happy to accept tracks from us and this conversation concluded our night. Be praying that in our last days we are really able to give our all to spreading the Gospel here in Barcelona and that we would continue to be focused on what is really important in this life, which is God. Buenas Noches!

Monday, March 15, 2010

Dia Tres

Greetings from Espana...today was a much better day than yesterday because God is faithful in reminding me that NOTHING about my life is actually about me and especially when it comes to sharing the Gospel it is not about me and all about GOD! I started off today pretty discouraged still and just believing a lot of lies from the last few days. My mother and Leah Wake left some very encouraging messages that really helped me be re-energized in Christ.

God really started showing us his faithfulness when we were on the train heading to our location. I feel that he really set up some divine appointments for us. Dayna had noticed a boy reading a music book on the train and she was thinking of approaching him when Jason decided to get off of the train a few stops earlier than we usually get off...but of course God was working and the boy ended up getting off the same time as us and Dayna approached him. He did not speak any English and Jason was able to communicate with him in Spanish. I felt very blessed by God that I was able to understand their conversation well enough to translate it to my fellow group members. I believe that we had a second divine appointment when we got back on the metro and ended up missing our final stop because we were speaking with a group of men from Israel. We were blessed that everyone was receptive to taking tracts and invitations to our service tomorrow so please pray that they come tomorrow.

We split off into groups again when we got to the Universitat (Jason, Me, Becky and Randi, Dayna, Noodles). My group went to the parque again and Jason spoke with a few groups of people in Spanish before we met up to eat lunch. We went back to the same place we ate on Saturday so that Jason could talk to the owner about the tracts that he had left with him the last time we ate there. While Jason was talking with him we were left in the dining area and I feel that this time was such a blessing. It gave Dayna and I an opportunity to just talk about God and Jesus. We got an opportunity to just talk about our struggles being here in Barcelona and also talk about things going on back home. It was just extremely refreshing to have a heartfelt conversation about Christ with another believer since being here. It was extremely encouraging and exactly what both of us needed to get pumped up about what God is doing here through our groups.

We spent a few more hours sharing, this time my group went to the universitat and Jason had a conversation with some more groups. I had spoke with Steph on the phone last night and she threatened that if I did not be bold and approach someone on my own then she would message Jason and tell him to make me approach people. Well, Steph did not have to message Jason because he went ahead and made me approach someone with Becky. It was good, something that I had been taking for granted is that God has been faithful in providing me with people who speak enough English and I know enough Spanish that we can get the Gospel communicated, I have yet to run into someone who speaks no English that I, alone, have had to share with unlike some of the other people on the trip, so I thank God for this blessing.

Coming back to hostel tonight for dinner was good as well because it gave all of us an opportunity to sit down as a group and just talk about what God has been teaching us in the last couple of days. Today really helped our group become more unified. Please pray that our conversations today really got people thinking and that people would come to the service we are having tomorrow night. God is good!

Philippians 4:13 "For I can do everything through Christ who gives me strength!" NIV