Seeing God Work

This past week I did something with my church called Houston Project. We do it every year in the summer for 4 nights. 1,500 of us went to 19 different sites across the Houston area and put on Vacation Bible School, fed the homeless, and just ministered to kids and adults alike all over the city. I did it last year and loved it and I got to go back to the same site with my sunday school class again. My site was a church so the cool thing is we spend a few days there and invite kids in the community but after we leave the church is still there to minister to those families.

Some of the challenges of the week:
We didn't have near as many kids as we expected the first night, I think we only had about 50-60 and we were expecting more like 300 so that was kindof shocking. We had tons of volunteers with nothing to do. I was with the 3 and 4 year old class and there were 4 of us and 3 little ones to hang out with

The weather on night two was not so great, it rained right before and made it really humid and we didn't grow a whole lot in numbers but we did have a few more.

Personally it was hard for me to go from working 8-5 and drive straight there and get home around 9:30 each night...so worth it though!

Highlights:

We had a ton of salvations, at least 6-7 that I know of which is amazing. And beyond that, most of the kids and a lot of the adults there had NEVER heard the story of Jesus before, so being able to share that with them I hope changed their lives forever. Our little ones in our class learned all about how God loves them, how Jesus is their friend, and how Jesus gave His life for all of us so that we can be close to God again. Such a blessing to go from the first night where they didn't know anything about God and doing the felt board Gospel presentation to them, to night 4 where they could retell the story. Planting seeds!

These kids got so much attention from us and as one little boy told a friend in my sunday school class, he felt so good that someone cared so much about him (referring to God sending Jesus to die for him). A lot of these kids come from pretty messed up broken homes and are one of like 6 kids and just don't get a lot of one on one positive attention so it was great to just love on them and have fun with them.

It really brought in perspective how important and simple it is to tell others of how much God loves them. I got the opportunity to talk to my coworker a little bit about what I was doing after work those nights and I hope it was just a starting point to sharing something more. God has really been challenging and growing me a lot this last year and I am just trying to be obedient. Not just for me but for the sake of sharing the Good News with people who really need to hear it.

God is faithful...by the end of the week our numbers TRIPLED! Everyone says "it's not about the numbers" but it totally is...we want to impact and show love to as many people as possible, and we definitely want to see as many people come to Christ as possible ultimately. We prayed hard for more kids and adults and God brought them. It was an amazing week. Totally wore me out but I loved it.