Missions Trip Blog - Post One

Apparently Heather and Jordan are BFF's....

After a rather quiet and long drive we arrived at Crossway Christian Church at around 9 am Sunday morning. The service was good. Paul led worship with Jordan on keyboard, Jason on bass, Heather on vocals, and some other guy we don't know from the church on drums. (Or at least the person writing this doesn't know him.) After church we went to the church picnic for lunch at the local city park. The weather was wonderful. We were there for an hour or two and Jason had the chance to play softball with most of the people from the church. Jordan spent the time reading under a tree beside the softball field and the rest of us besides Paul hung out by the swing sets. Then we went to the house we are staying at while here and put away stuff.

Paul and Angie took naps while the rest of us played a rousing game of... CLUE. :D *cough* It was quite interesting, and we can all agree that Jordan and Jason are rather competitive people. u_U Jason ending up winning. ;) No one was sad about that either, except maybe Jordan. Actually, I think most of the girls were ready for the game to come to an end. Haha

Then in the evening we went to Crossway's youth thing. There were about 23 of us in all and it was incredibly fun. We played a couple games and got to hear a girl named Jennifer's testimony. It was amazing!! Ask one of us team people about it sometime... O! And we also got to teach them a game: HOUSE ON FIRE! Bwahaha. Yes. WE have passed it on, and Jason actually enjoyed playing it!

Monday: After everyone had gotten up and used their allotted "15 minutes" of bathroom/shower time, we sat down to an awesome breakfast provided by some of the lady's at Crossway. It was probably 8:30 or so by the time we ate. After breakfast was quiet time. IT lasted about an hour and afterwords we all gathered together for some worship time in the living room. Which lasted till... 11ish? Then we watched the "Three Chairs" teaching by Leif Hetland. Basically it talks about three different chairs, and which chair are you sitting in.

...*jason comes over to kara sitting on the laptop typing away and asks to post* ...

Jason: hello fellow americans. jordan used up more than 15 minutes to wash. this made me have to move faster and that is hard considering it was about 7:26 in the morning. the breakfast was amazing, except for jordan he has some weird ideas for breakfast sandwiches. toast and STRAWBERRY jam and eggs, sausage, cheese. who uses STRAWBERRY jam on a breakfast sandwich? yes i will admit i fell asleep during the movie. i'm sorry. oh and i got a door slammed in my face. have you seen my face its awesome. who in the world wood slam a door in my face?! i stood there for a second after it happened and was like wow my awesome face just got slammed. but just pray for this mans deliverance. other that......my face got slammed. peace out ill be back, and stay tuned for more of me and my awesome face.

... *kara regains the computer*...

Anyways. So lunch was around 12, and made by our wonderful mum, Angie. She made a delish lunch of sloppy joes, cantelope, and tots. :D Jordan enjoyed the tots. After lunch we changed into paint clothes and left for the church. At the church we painted for a couple hours. From say...1ish to about 4:37? At which time we went back to the house to change clothes, eat some snacks, and..hang out... till around 6:00 when we went BACK to the church to meet up with Conrad (the pastor), grab some invite fliers for a kids summer party event tomorrow night, and go prayer walk/hand them out through the surrounding streets/houses around the church. We broke into 2 teams of 4. Paul, Heather, Jordan, and Hannah were in one, and Angie, Kara, Jason, and Jessica were in the other. From there, each team broke into a team of two, each part of the team taking one side of a street and getting the houses on that side.

The experiance was good. Many of us were amazed to find that not only were we not nervous about talking to complete strangers, but we enjoyed it! There were differing reactions, with some people being very nice and open, to others who shut you down immediately. Paul and Hannah (in a team of two) were actually able to pray for an older women (60's) for healing who had been experiencing headaches/blackouts and seizures since the age of 4! Please continue to pray for her. Also, they were able to talk to a young guy named Dylan. He was high on drugs and Paul totally had a word for him. It was a pretty interesting exchange and Paul asked to pray for him. Dylan said no, so God told Paul to tell him that tonight when Dylan has a dream to PAY attention because its going to show him that God is for REAL. Please be praying about this as well!

So at around 8 or so we all got back to the church and Conrad asked if we could all pray together and then asked if each of us could pray at least a LITTLE! Let me just say - the prayer time exploded! It was amazing and awesome! Just praying over the town of Urbana, the Crossway Church, and the people we had come into contact with tonight! And also for the event tomorrow night. Please keep that in your prayers as well. Its for one hour and the team will be doing a skit at some point during the evening. Also, Conrad was thinking it would be cool if we could run one or two of the game booths they will have. Please be praying about it!

After the prayer time we all felt incredibly encouraged and excited. We came back to the house for a late supper provided once again by an awesome couple from Crossway! :) They stayed and ate with us. We had a lasagna supper. Yummm....

Cookies were next on the agenda! We had told someone on Sunday that we would make 4 dozen cookies for the Tuesday Night Summer Party, so tonight we made up the dough. The guys took care of the sugar cookies and the girls tackled the monster cookie dough and the oatmeal cookie dough. Tomorrow sometime we are going to try and actually BAKE the cookies. We are also going to Conrad and Vicki Esh's house for lunch at 12! Then in the evening is the Summer Party... Its going to be a busy day.

Jordan: well today was like a very interesting day as some of you know it takes me a little bit to get moving in the morning and when i heard my alarm it was 6:55 but it was set for 6:45 so as you can imagine it put me behind now if jason had got up and went when it was his turn he would have had a whole 7 minutes more and i would have only been "OVER" 4 minutes other than that things are great it was really nice to hang out with the crossfire youth group (Crossways youth ministry) on sunday they are a lot like our church today was a really good this morning devotions was good but it took a while to get into it but the toxic hard tile stuff we put out in the bathroom counter cleared our heads and me and mi amigo senor jason started to see a pink bunny but it turned purple and then rainbow so after that things cleared up with one massive head ache but the rest of the day was extremely good thank you for reading this very personal letter to all you River Fans Have a great week Love Your Beloved Freederick III. this is jason! JORDAN I GOT UP RIGHT AWAY!!! he likes to make me look bad. by the way my face is still awesome.

This is Paul... Anyways the day was really good. we are all really tired and off to bed, be praying for us that we would have an amazing time with the Lord this week! the prayer time this evening with Conrad was a real breakthrough moment for the group, God's presence came strong and we entered into a time of deep intercession, it was powerful! Thanks for reading this long post and please leave comments so we can see who is reading this! we will try to post some pics some time!