Jan 24 2012
Doing Training. Lots of Travel.
The last two weeks have been a very productive time and God did many wonderful things in and through our ministry. Honestly, today I ran out of gas but that is okay. God seems be be giving me a couple of days of rest this week to catch up after non-stop stuff. God is good. Lisa and the kids too are in a busy time. Tim and Charis are in basketball right now and Tim continues in scouts. As I did some training with some ISI staff friends in Colorado who are just about to have their second wedding of the year of their two daughters, I was struck by the fact that in not too many years, we will have one in college and another not too far behind. Lisa and I celebrated our 18th anniversary yesterday. Wow… the time move so quickly.
Some quick hits:
- Roy and teammate Derrah spent Jan 13-16 in Colorado training people in some of the stuff we are doing in ministry with the M28 initiative. This was in a sense a dry run for another nationally teleconferenced training in Omaha in February and a international trip to do training in Asia in late March. God really blessed the time as people seemed receptive and open to trying what we were teaching: implanting church planting concepts in discipleship of students who follow Jesus. We also learned about what works and doesn’t work in training this material. Almost everyone there said that we encouraged them to really look deeply at how they do ministry.
- We welcomed several hundred new students at UTA. Roy helped out with the rides to Walmart and Roy, Lisa and the team helped out much with the Big Howdy party this last Saturday. On the Walmart run, in his group of 6, he met a young friend from Iran who really connected with Roy.
The day after arriving home from Colorado, Lisa had to wake up early in the morning to take T-9 to Downtown Arlington because they were going to be IN the annual Arlington July 4 Parade on a float presented by his cub scout troop. Later on, I brough J-12 and C-6 and we sat along the route, looking forward to seeing our family members there. 
As we were waiting we were treated to some wonderful floats, marching bands, horse teams, etc. all dedicated to America’s monuments. Even Nolan Ryan was there as the grand marshall and Elvi were riding around in their signature white costumes riding their motorcycles. T-9 cruised along on his scooter and looked great with his friends and mom.
n hamburgers and hot dogs and enjoyed the company of many friends, including some that we hadn’t seen in a long time and some we were meeting for the first time. One student, Jung, was back for only three days all the way from Korea and was able to join us! As it got dark we were able to enjoy some fireworks from a nearby park.
During part of the evening, I was talking to Ron Bunyard about the party, peoples, reaction, etc. and Geoff Carter, one of our small group leaders, came up to us and told us that there was a student who wanted to know how to become a Christian and he wanted us to come and help her. Ron, the local ISI minister, went over and shared with her the torn napkin (modified bridge) illustration… I watched from a distance. It was cool watching him and seeing him share something that matters so much to him to a new friend and watching some of our church people seeing it happen and obviously being encouraged by it.
control over it… There is no way we should have had enough food. When we started the evening, our estimate was that we would have half the food compared to last year and while we asked many people to double what they promised, we were concerned. We even asked our volunteers not to eat at first until all the students went by. What we didn’t realize is that students felt uncomfortable eating with their hosts not eating too… still God took care of that. The trickle of students slowed down early in the evening and there was plenty of food left so we opened up the eating to volunteers. We counted up all the tickets and there were over 200 students there AND we had so much food afterward that we had to take lots of leftovers to Arlington Life Shelter. It seems like every time we have a big even we have Jesus’ feeding of the 5000 played out and every time He comes through… I can truly understand now why Jesus had to do the “feeding” illustration twice and they still didn’t get it.
Cool technology angle and another feeding the 5000 story… During the evening, I was concerned about the seemingly small number of students and I didn’t want our church people to be disappointed. The BSM international ministry intern and I took out our iPhones and logged into our Facebook App and we updated our profile, to remind people about the dinner and we even went into the chat application to see who was on line on Facebook… I noticed a couple of international students that said they were planning on coming and some that said they wouldn’t. I invited them and one couple from Iran ended up coming with several of their friends. It was cool… and still, as I shared before, we handed out over 200 tickets for food… Wow!
photographers and Benji & Don, two professional level photographers were available and took some great pictures. I will post these as soon as I get the pictures from them. I know the students will be blessed by seeing themselves and their friends online and the students next year will be blessed to see what to expect so they may want to come.
The set up team, made up of mainly college students from the BSM and Lake Arlington Baptist church came 2 hours early and did a tremendous job of setting up the place to help the students celebrate. I’ve never seen college students work so hard. It was a REAL testimony.
The food came in late and there were some nervous moments as the time for the party to start came and all we had was fruit and one casserole. It reminded us of the fish and the loaves that the Disciples knew something about. With some tight muscles, we chose to trust and God seemed to bring just the right food at the right time. Even our Gnocci crew had a problem and came late… but that was perfect timing. If they came on time with what they planned on bringing, I believe it would have been gone much sooner and so the people who came late would not have had anything… God knows what He is doing.
The registration was brisk and yet we got all kinds of information from the students. The tables with all the different Christian orgainizations on campus had brisk traffic throughout and the serving lines were wonderfully staffed by an amazing army of volunteer from I don’t know how many churches. We had one Japanese American man come all the way from California (visiting his friends here) to make a stir fry dish for the students. Wow! Between Pizza boxes, there were home made pasta, Chinese dishes, rice, curry, you name it. Many student even contributed much. Further, since many of the students are vegetarian, there were tall signs carried by beautiful volunteers (Lisa included) indicating which foods were “green” and which ones had meat.
After lots of food and talk… Line dancing and Indian dancing commenced. Two days before the party we found out there was a mix up on dates with our usual, line dance instructor and so we were hard pressed. We sent out a request to the rest of our team and the UTD team shared the older lady to teaches their kids… Again God intervenes… It was a blast. She did a tremendous job. It was wonderful too, to see, some of our retired volunteers doing western line dancing with the “hip” young indians and chinese and others on the dance floor.
Finally, the students were allowed to let loose a little when we allowed them to control the DJ. It was good to see them release some of the stress that had built up in the last month in moving to America in a clean way. To many that was a testimony of grace and hopefully, it broke down some misconceptions about Christians that could lead to other opportunities to share Christ’s love in other ways in the future.
All in all. It was a wonderful evening. We also got over 130 sign ups for the next event, the Tour of Arlington, September 1. Please pray for this. We are very short on drivers to take students around Arlington, Fort Worth to see things in the area. It is probably the time when we get closest to the students of all the Big Howdy events.
(
(
I had a great conversation with a computer science major from Central America. We talked about all kinds of things from machine vision, to neural nets, artificial intelligence, what makes art art, to the metaphysical definition of a “person” from the perspective of catholics and protestant. We talked some about the Trinity and so many other things. He is a Catholic but he obviously enjoys reading the Bible and he attends our weekly bible study hosted by some local seminary students who are a part of our team.
forth from the party. She had so many questions and was trying so hard to learn as much as she could about living as a Christian and Christian things. Jonathan was even able to share some stuff with her. It was really cool to see him opening up about different things. Her questions ran the gamut of is there one truth that the Bible teaches to what books we read, etc. It was really fun to be around a person so hungry to relate and learn.
Powered by FireStats