This week has been awesome. Our theme is humility...which is horrible and fantastic at the same time. Humility is something that is easy to talk about but really hard to truly understand and try to live it out. God has been convicting me big time, but that's a good thing. I need humility in approaching God. I need humility in my job here as Operations Director. I need humility in putting others before myself. Basically the whole pride/humility issue has been prominent in my life.
My birthday was on Monday so I took the day off of work and spent the day with friends. I have never felt so loved -- it was surreal. My roommates from APU, Bianca and Mika, drove out to take me to lunch and we got to see each other for the first time since project started. It was so refreshing! Everyone here on my project went out of their way to make sure my day was special. My roommates here, Janee and Alex, decorated the inside of my room, while other people decorated my door with sticky notes and wrapping paper. People here wrote cards and people from home (IL) sent cards/gifts in the mail. A cake was made for me and Trevor (a guy on project who has the same birthday as me!), and we got to spend the evening of our birthday worshipping our Lord -- what could be better?!?
Work at camp has been busy. There have been so many kids this week! It's easy to view teaching swim lessons and lifeguarding as redundant, but it has been cool to challenge myself in always being intentional with the children and in giving all of my energy to them. Building relationships with coworkers has been harder than I thought it would be, but progress is still being made. Tuesdays after work all of my coworkers play volleyball at the beach and I have been able to attend this for two weeks in a row! This week me and the other Cru employees taught our coworkers how to play spike ball (if you still don't know what this is, I am disappointed in you for not looking it up when I talked about it in my post a few weeks ago). They got really into it and hopefully we will be able to hang out with them more and play lots of spike ball.
Tonight (Thursday 7/18) the Women's Team put together a dinner to thank the men here for everything they do for us. We dressed in black, put red ribbons in our hair, and served the men dinner. We wrote them cards to thank them for how much they have done for us, and we performed a dance for them on stage. I was surprised to find how much joy it brought me to serve others instead of being served. The night was a total success! After dinner one of the men on our lead team gave a short talk about the power of prayer and the importance of prayer. It is definitely something that I will be thinking about and praying about that (yes -- praying about prayer) for the next few days.
Overall, this week has taught me so much about the importance of community. By lifting each other up, we can never end a day in a bad mood. As this is the midpoint of project, it is easy to hang out with the people that you connect with or are close to, but this week I have prayed about expanding my horizons. I have been able to get to know several girls that I never really talked to until this week. I am so overwhelmed with God's goodness in this. Every single person on project is here for a reason and they all have blessed me or will bless me in my time here.
Now that I look over this post, I guess it's not brief after all. When a girl's gotta talk, a girl's gotta talk. Thank you all so much for your support prayerfully and financially this summer. It is changing many lives!
Prayer Requests
- Energy for all of us. I work 40 hours a week and sleep very little. Many others here on project have a similar schedule
- Continued safety -- one of the guys here on project almost got hit by a car on his longboard earlier this week...it was scary!
- For the people of Santa Monica, that their hearts would be opened and that God would prepare them for conversations that we might have with them, and that they would be encouraged and see something different in us.
- For wisdom as all of us are here without staff. Wisdom for the lead team as they make decisions and wisdom in the decisions that all of us make with our time.
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