Here are some quick things to pray for.

Praise

• Friday nights – As we continue this experiment with Friday Night ISI at UTA meetings at two locations (early & late groups), God continues to bless. This last week is a example of how God is working. The late group had a student who just got baptized this last week. In the early group, our volunteer Cal had some significant conversation with several students which led to him meeting with a South Asian person of peace and starting to set up relationship with a couple of other students. Roy also had a couple of significant discussions about Jesus with the result being one East Asian couple taking the discovery Bible study “cheat sheet” with the intention of doing a family discovery Bible study group in their apartment. Praise God also for workers for the Harvest. Keep on praying for more. The fields are VERY white for harvest who want to be loved on and who want to learn more about the God of Creation and His Son.
• PTO (Passing Truths On)- Three PTO groups have started. PTO groups are a 16 week mode of discipling students where they are trained to 1) become disciples who train disciples, 2) learn the essentials of how to walk with Jesus, and 3)  learn how to start and lead discovery Bible groups. One of these groups is being led by a couple of American volunteer girls who are learning the process themselves and are passing it along immediately to another students. Ron is training one other key volunteer on how to lead PTO groups. Roy is leading an on-campus PTO group with three students and also  two volunteers who are learning how to lead these groups. Roy is also doing one PTO group using video Skype to disciples a student in Colombia and another one in Mexico. This process of starting these groups helped us too to tease out who the followers of Jesus are, those who the seekers are and whose not interested in Spiritual things but have a deep relationship with us.
• Right Now Conference – Roy and staff members, Jeff, Hannah, Judy and key volunteer, Tom joined in a conference to learn how to minister together with churches from the 20-30′s demographic. Tom and Judy also were involved with a conference with business leaders on helping believers see “Work as Worship” – using the workplace as a place of ministry. We need to help our students to have this perspective. We also were able to network with business leaders in the area to kick off a new ministry that we are looking at related to students in internships.
• Lisa is enjoying her new job because she is actually encouraged to share her faith with her students. It does require more outside time with students and it has less regular hours than her previous job.
• Ti* is getting more and more involved with Boy Scouts and playing the cello. He is getting better at both. In scouts, he has had the opportunity to learn things such as orienteering and tying knots. Cha* is really growing into a sweet young lady who loves to do crafts, cook, and spend time with her friends. She even made her own dalmatian Halloween costume. Jonathan is navigating through his sophomore year of high school and is learning how to be more responsible with managing his home work etc.
• Phoenix Training – Ron, Roy & Derrah had the privilege of training the ISI Phoenix team of 12 in some of the things we have been learning in our work with M28/CPM using video Skype. Imagine training a group of 12 people  hundreds of miles away with three local presenters and still be able to see their reactions, give feedback and everything. What a blessing that was to join hearts with kindred spirits and they seemed to grasp it. We hope that through all this training in M28 all over, it will catch sooner than later and a student movement will spark.
• At TCU, the team continues to flourish with several students growing through the Bible study there. Sharon, Sarah, Tim, the Moores and the rest of the team are ably leading the team. Recently, 8 UTA ISI students joined with 8 TCU ISI students in helping out with the Fall Festival as volunteers at Christ Church Assembly of God in Fort Worth. The student’s eyes were open wide as they were part of 300 volunteers who served 6000 kids and family members. They were touched by how a church would do such a thing through volunteers and donations without government help or anything. They asked many questions including “Why?”

• The 2011 EMBA students are here. A very different group that then 2010 group but we are very much blessed by them.  Also, the students are very much attracted to Ron’s Golf lessons(20 of the 35 went to the first meeting) and 27 of the 35 came to our house from Friday night group and we have a full table for discussion group and Bible discovery group This has been awesome!
• The kids are finishing their semester and Charis and Tim won many awards for their school year. We haven’t heard about Jonathan’s year yet.
• Final preparations for our trip are coming together. We are almost there! Hard to believe.

• For the EMBA 2011 group,
  • Pray that we can find enough friendship partner host families for these students. Almost all of the 35 signed up and we are still very much short.
  • Pray for a someone who could help instruct the students in golf while Ron is recovering from surgery. This is a very pressing need as so many of them want to learn.
  • Pray for a home to host a sort of “grand opening” welcome party for them in late July.
• Keep on praying for Ron as he deals with the prostate cancer. His surgery is coming soon.
• Keep praying for our city mobilizer, Jeff who is struggling with his mother’s terminal illness. Pray for his son too who is struggling with some unexplained extreme headaches.
• Continue to pray for Roy’s Irritable Bowel. It’s getting better but not completely.
• Pray for people who will step up and do the stuff Ron and we do for the UTA ministry and specifically the Friday group in June, a very important time for ministry while we are gone and Ron is recovering.
• Pray for the final week before the Asia trip. Pray that we don’t forget anything. Pray that we can get our hearts in a ministry mindset. (abiding in Christ) and we can get rest now before things get crazy. Continue to pray for the right heart for our kids… Pray that God will do something incredible for them on this trip.
• Pray for airport pickups for new summer students. Pray for good relationships and that we can fine people of peace who God has already been working in.

It really was an honor to lead five young men through their last year of Cub scouting. Two of them completed their Arrows of Light, the highest awards in cub scouting over the course of six months. Two of them completed every requirement for the Arrow of Light except the time requirement in just three months. Wow. These were some motivated young men and I and their parents are all incredibly proud of them. We had a ceremony to honor them this week (see pictures) Please pray that their experience with us will help them to move more towards God in their lives.

Our TCU graduation (see pictures at bottom of set) was also sad in many ways. My friend Hiro, whom we knew before he was a TCU student and who just recently met the Lord and Liz, who was become a leader among the ICF and several students will be sorely missed. Actually, Hiro will be back and I am excited about continuing to be a part of helping him grow in Christ. Please pray for these students as they leave.

• Family weekend at TCU went very well. I got to spend some time with a Japanese couple and other Japanese woman. It’s been a long time since I’ve had so much time with Japanese and it was a real blessing. They are not believers and we had a delightful conversation about all sorts of things. I also talked with a new believer Japanese and he will probably be the anchor of a new Training for Trainers (T4T) discipleship group for young believers that I will be leading at TCU.
• The trip to Colorado Springs was somewhat refreshing because we learned so much about different ways people are doing ministry and preparing students to make an impact back home. I was encouraged that the team there felt that we were on the right track with our work with CPM’s. (Christ Community Planting Movements).
• Pray also for clarity in Tim’s scout pack that Lisa and Roy are in leadership with. We are struggling at the pack level though our den is going strong. Pray for a fishing trip we are taking the boys on this Saturday.
• Keep praying for Jon’s heart and that he survives his dabbling in existentialism and the writings of its secular champions.
• Pray for a special project that is just starting where we help students in their post college transition that Jason and I are working on. We are in the pre-design phase. Pray for clarity of direction and focus and again balance.

We also were part of a pilot program to preview a bunch of videos called “God Provides” produced by Crown Financial Ministries.  These are really first rate videos that explores what real faith looks like from many angles through key Bible stories. The ones called “Lifted Up” and “Abraham and Isaac” were tear-jerkers for me.

Another interesting thing happened this week. My son T-10 was part of the awards ceremony for his 4th grade class. It was really cool. He won a bunch of academic awards including getting the high score for the math Olympiads, being part of the 4th grade Battle of the Books team which got a silver metal and he was chosen as the student of the year for his home room. We were so excited. Anyway, it was kind of interesting. We had to go up for the final award because they honor the parents as well as the students for that particular award. Of course I forgot and wore the rattiest pair of shorts and polo shirt I had that morning (almost didn’t take a shower) because it was fairly early in the morning and we usually don’t have to do much at these events. Anyway, during the ceremony I was feeling some discomfort in my knee. Not too bad but it was getting progressively worse. By the time it was time for us to go up, I could barely put weight on it. It was scary. I managed to get up there with Lisa because I didn’t want to ruin this special day for my son. Anyway, after getting home, the situation got progressively worse. By the evening, I could barely walk. I borrowed a colleagues crutches. It made it hard to sit for a ministry meeting, etc. It was difficult. It was a struggle to even get from my office to the kitchen at home. I was thinking it seemed like swelling and inflammation and didn’t feel any structural damage so I decided to wait till the next day. Well the next day, while weak, I was able to walk and everything was slowly getting back to normal.

God really reminded me of something yesterday. It takes so little time for a situation to go from great to bad to great again. It takes very little for that to happen. This reminded me of how fragile we are and how much we depend on God to keep us doing the things that we do. Pray as I send Alex off on Sunday and as we welcome several students from the airport this week.

Today, we got to be part of a community “carnival” at that apartment. We played sports with the kids. There was face painting, manicures and pedicures for the girls, arts and crafts for the smaller kids. There also was a baskeball hoop and all kinds of sports equipment. There was lots of food and wonderful fun.

My job was to go around taking pictures of everyone especially the families. Many of the families have very few pictures of them and so taking their picture is a very special thing. One little boy was having so much fun, he kept asking me to take his picture over and over again in funny poses. This will further the long term ministry of the apartment church as Andrea will be bringing these pictures for the families to take as a special gift. It made me very proud to see my kids getting into it and “making sacrifices” to do it. Jonathan was playing football with little Joshua (Understand Jonathan hates football… this was a image sacrifice in a big way) C-6 played with the kids though she cried a bit too because they didn’t want to play with her doing the stuff she wanted to do… Of course that is normal and you should have seen her before we went, we wanted so bad to go.

The people from the church were incredible. A couple of teenage girls were doing the manicures and pedicures… It kind of reminded me of Jesus washing the disciple’s feet. Some of the teenage boys were playing all kinds of stuff with the kids. Seeing some of the guys painting bag “pumpkins” and some of the gals face painting and shaving ice. It was really really special. Anyway, it seemed that everyone came away with a big smile.