Tag: ministry

“Dude, [Anonymous Student] snores like an injured rhino.”

This past week has meant the official end of the honeymoon.  Students are coming to grips with the fact that they have over a month and a half left to live with each other, and that (contrary to first impressions) they don’t actually like everyone here.

The guy that leaves his socks on your bed is tolerable, for the first week.  By the second week, you are daydreaming about creative ways to get on his nerves.  The girl that has that “unique” laugh the first week is the girl with the “annoying” laugh the third week.

And this is precisely why I like summer projects.  We get to build into students in a “real-life” environment here in ways that you just can’t simulate anywhere else.  Nothing highlights our need for growth like exploding at a roommate because they left their dirty dishes on your beach towel, again.

Pray for this week, as we begin to teach students an option somewhere between fist-fighting and passive-aggressive facebook messages.  Resolving conflict (and learning how to resolve conflict) now will literally change the family tree of these students, as they set patterns of Biblical relationships.

If you are wondering where we take students to learn this, Check out Matthew 18:15-20.

Until then, we’ll just keep waking up the rhino, or just go ahead and put it out of it’s misery.

“I’m just trying to figure out why God has me here, working at the Boardwalk this summer…”

Pretty typical line to hear from one of our students.  But it didn’t come out of the mouth of one of our students.  It came out of Audrey’s mouth.

Audrey is an international student from Singapore who is involved with Campus Crusade for Christ back on her campus.  She’s here for the summer with an international exchange program that brings in students to work at the Boardwalk.  Her friend Pei-Yi is here with her.  Audrey was invited to dinner here at the Peter Pan Motel by one of our students, to meet some other Christians.  That’s when Rachel met her.

“I wasn’t expecting it, but God just dropped her right in my lap,” says Rachel, a rising sophomore at Texas A&M.

Over the course of dinner, Audrey asked Rachel if she could be in her “Action Group” Bible study this summer.  Since that’s not really an option (our studies have specific material that is geared toward summer project participants), Rachel suggested that Audrey bring some friends and they do their own study once per week.  Later that week, when Rachel and Audrey invited Pei-Yi, she was quick to respond “…but I’m not a Christian…” expecting to be told it was a believers-only party.

It wasn’t.

Rachel, Audrey, Pei-Yi, and Yi (a young believer from Malaysia) are meeting each week as an unlikely and cross-cultural Action Group.  They are going through a study called “Creation, Fall, Redemption” that clearly explains the storyline of the Bible, and points them to Jesus.  They’ve already been through week one (creation) and Rachel was pleasantly surprised that even Pei-Yi has been participating and contributing interesting points to the discussion.

“It’s not that she’s a non-Christian because she’s rejected the message of Christ—she’s simply never heard the message of Christ clearly presented,” says Rachel, adding with a smile, “I’m so sure she’s going to trust Christ this summer.”

For Audrey, hopefully it’s becoming clear why God has her here for a summer working at the Boardwalk.

“Even as we were coming here today, I still didn’t have a good grasp on what exactly you guys are doing here”

As I shook the sand off of my foot to put my flops back on, I reflected on what Perry had just said.  Perry and Natalie are avid readers of our blog.  They typically check out our goings-on at least three times per week.  (Go ahead and comment, already!)  And even they weren’t so sure exactly what our summer was all about.

We were walking down the boardwalk, watching their kids ride roller coasters and enjoying a brisk July evening by the bay.  They drove over an hour from their house to see us.  It was great hanging out.

There’s something to be said for coming out and seeing for yourself what a summer project is all about.  But for those of you who (unlike Perry and Natalie) live thousands of miles from here, you’re relying on our blog and newsletters to communicate what we are doing.

Perry was interested to find out, for example, that the students are here for 10 weeks, and that the staff leave after 5 weeks.  That’s right, on Tuesday morning we are stuffing the last few items into our then-fully packed Windstar and heading out.  We’ve appointed and trained our replacements in every area of the project, from the student directors all the way down to Action Group Leaders of each individual study.

Once the staff leaves, the project can really start.

I don’t even remember the last name of the staff guy who discipled me on summer project in 2000.  That’s because the best part of project is once the students take over. If it wasn’t for facebook, the students here would forget my name, too.

It’s humbling to think that God is waiting for me to leave to really take my students to where he wants them.  But it’s so satisfying to know that the whole reason I am here is to set the stage for the real play.  Just because I’m not the one who gets to fire the cannon doesn’t mean it’s not exciting to load it.  I think I’m done with conflicting word-pictures.  By the end of this paragraph we’ll be firing actors out of a cannon.

So, swing by sometime between now and Tuesday.  We can get you a pass for free rides on the Boardwalk, and I’ll be able to really explain what a summer project is.