welcome to new york

this is the best group photo currently available off facebook. we obviously love NY

So this summer I'm in New York working for Center for Student Missions (CSM). What happens is different your groups throughout the nation come to CSM for a week and my job is take them around the city, teach them about the city and about God's heart for the poor, and connect them with the different inner-city organizations that we partner with. We've been training for the last two weeks and our very first group is due to arrive in a couple hours. It's gonna be crazy. I feel kind of unprepared but that's okay. We've been having a great time these last two weeks. All the interns (there's 8 of us) are real tight. And we have people from all over the states [oregon, pennsylvania, texas, michigan, virginia, new york, and guyana]. It's been a lot of fun and there are already a lot of great stories. I'm gonna hold have to save the stories for another time but i do want to share some verses that have really been speaking to me over my stay here thus far.

Ephesians 3:19 - "May you experience the love of Christ, though it is so great you will never fully understand it."
Ephesians 3:20 - "By his mighty power at work within us, he is able to accomplish infinitely more than we would ever dare to ask of hope."

God is huge. His love for us is greater than we will ever be able to understand. And his power is greater than we could even fathom. But to see his power we must ask him to show it to us. The more we seek after him and the more we ask him to reveal himself to us, the more we will see and come to understand of him.

I'm coming to realize how important having an open heart to God is. My biggest problem is that i always want to get what i feel like i'm entitled to. So when i don't get what i think i deserve or want, i get angry. This causes me to lose sight of what's important and of the life i have been called to. I just get too caught up in my own desires that i don't really try to listen to what God's trying to tell me. I feel like this is the greatest obstacle to me asking to see God move. When i get in a state like this sometimes i become too content in how i'm behaving, or too blind to realize how i am behaving, and i refuse to acknowledge God's desires in those situations.

My prayer for this summer is that God would really break me down. That i would be able to open myself more to him and allow him into the areas of my life that i have tried to keep him out of. And that he would not allow me to continue to run in my ignorance.

Song of the semester/year: In Your Freedom, by Hillsong United