I hope this fall season is treating you well! I love the changes in colors and the crisper colder weather that comes with this season! Well I have lots to get to so I am going to jump right in. As many of you know I am here in Fort Collins, I was browsing through flights one day a few months back and found an absurdly cheap ticket, so I jumped on it and was delighted to see that the cheapest dates happened to fall close to my Mom's birthday. So I decided that it would be fun to surprise both my parents, they were both shocked and I had tons of fun planning and scheming all of the fun surprises!
In a few days I will be heading straight from Denver to Richmond, Virginia. There is another YWAM base there and some of our Pismo Beach staff have been living there for a few months helping staff one of Richmond's schools. So I will be doing a pastoral/encouragement visit, as well as be able to have an opportunity to share with their Discipleship Training School, DTS, about Project 61 and the opportunity for them to come and staff in Pismo if they feel God leading them into long-term missions with YWAM. This will be my first time recruiting and so I am nervous to say the least but I am praying that God will give me the words to say and that I will really be able to share from the heart. So if you think of it please keep me in your prayers over the next week! Richmond also offers lots of urban ministry, which opens up potential opportunities for me to bring an outreach team in the future, so I will be scoping out the various ministries they offer there as well.
I want to share a story with you about a recent community outreach that our staff did together. As I have shared, we as a base spend every Thursday afternoon doing outreach in our community. It often looks different every week, but we go out with the same passion and purpose each time. Our desire is that we would build more and more relationships with people in our community simply sharing the love of Christ with them. The Pismo area is a very wealthy and affluent area and we often find that people are very complacent and un-interested in God there. So unlike somewhere overseas, where you can walk up to anyone and strike up a conversation about God, here we have to be a little more creative to get people's attention. So a few weeks ago, we made a sign that talked about Jesus washing his disciples feet and set up shop with our towels, buckets of water, and soap right near the pier. As people walked past us we simply asked if we could wash their feet. As you can imagine we got lots of weird looks and a few offensive responses but some were generally curious. So, we were able to explain that we are just a bunch of young people that love God and love people and want to bless and pray for people as we wash their feet, simply humbling ourselves to serve God's people. We were surprised at how many people let us wash their feet after we explained why we were out there and people walked away rather blown away and I believe rather blessed.
As I am sure you can imagine this was not the most comfortable thing in the world for any of of us to do, I honestly felt really foolish at first and after several people asked us if we had some sort of weird foot fetish, I was ready to throw in the towel. But as the time progressed and we shared our hearts, I began to see that God was teaching me just as much as those that wanted to know what we were doing. During our time out there, He rather sweetly reminded me that so often I place myself above others, I often catch myself thinking that I have it all together and know what I am doing. But by this physical act of washing feet, I was reminded that I am just as much of a sinner and just as broken as everyone else, but it is through Him that I have been saved by grace. It was like a beautiful picture of the broken serving the broken, being humbled before one another, laying down our rights and saying God loves you to someone. Whenever Scripture talks about people washing each others' feet, I see it as symbolic, not only of being humble before another, but as symbolic of washing off all of the crap that is on that person's feet, all that they have accumulated over their journey. It's kind of beautiful to think that Jesus wants to wash the hardships of our life journey off of our feet, and so I believe as his disciples, we are called to both metaphorically and sometimes physically wash the feet of others.
Well, I will end this post with some prayer requests, hopefully in the next few days I can write another one and share with you the exciting new developments of Project 61! But if you could lift up the following in prayer, I would really appreciate it:
- I spent a day in the ER while I was home and because I do not have insurance and am no longer a Colorado resident, I will have to pay the bill out of pocket. I am relying on God to provide the finances because I do not have them. If He lays it on your heart to help me financially with this, please email me at Jacque17lyn@aol.com and I will let you know to go about that, but I also really appreciate your prayers as well.
- I recently have undergone several health related tests trying to figure out what is causing some of the problems I have been experiencing. I still am not 100% sure but think that I had an ovarian cyst and recently have been suffering from kidney stones again, so please pray that I would be healed completely from these things and that I would not suffer pain from them anymore.
- That God would continue to give me wisdom and discernment about Project 61's 2010 outreaches.
- That God would bring the right people for each outreach and that we would really be a team focused on impacting the world for God's Kingdom.
we're praying for you from the holy land...http://holylandprayer.com God bless.
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