DNow 2011

This last weekend, I was in PTC to lead a group of 11th grade girls for my church's Disciple Now. Each year, members of the church open up their homes to groups of middle and high school students. The students are led by college kids, and each group is "adopted" by a Bible study class that provides the meals and transportation for the weekend. It is an intense weekend of studying the Bible, hanging out, worshiping God, and playing games. Since I have never worked with anyone over the age of 12, of course I ended up with 11th grade girls! The girls were awesome, and, just so you know, our 11th graders DOMINATED game time and won ice cream for all of us :)

The team who dominated

This year, the theme was "Smoke... Where there's smoke, there's fire. And where there's fire in the Bible, there's God." The students learned about the character of God through times in the Bible where God shows up as fire. It was incredible! I had never realized how much God is associated with fire. Check out the stories in Exodus 3, 1 Kings 13, etc where God provides Israel with His presence, food, guidance, and power. God was definitely at work lighting fires in the students' lives, burning away impurities, and refining us all just like gold is refined in a fire.

As God was refining me this weekend, I made a commitment to help lead a small group from our church to Spain later this year. We are be trying to establish a partnership with missionaries there, and this trip will be exploratory, to see what that could look like. This is a big deal to me, because I have been running from Spain since I studied in Madrid in 2007. It was a rough time, and I never wanted to go back. I lived in fear for years that if I commited to being a missionary, God would send me to Spain. However, "Perfect love casts out fear" (1 John 4:8), and over the past 4 years, God (who IS perfect love) has been working that fear out of me. In fact, He has given me confidence to overcome my former fears of falling and dirty-old-men as well! The culmination of all of His work, showing me over and over again that He is trustworthy, that He is in control, and the He is loving, seems to be this trip. I'll let you know more as I learn more about what we will be doing, when we will be going, etc.