The most impactful thing to this point has been the people, every one of which has been straight up amazing. The relationships formed here are unlike almost any other, that you can actually be friends with every person of a large ~63 person group; and at any moment go deep with your story and experiences with any one of them. Our room has formed a natural subgroup with the ladies next door, initiated by doing joint dinners between the rooms 5 nights a week. After dinner tonight we went for ice cream, and then spent the next several hours playing a game where each person wrote down an anonymous question that all 11 of us had to answer. Midway through we talked about the "facebook stalking" we all did before arriving and laughed at the crazy days just a week ago when we didn't know each other. As we went our separate ways for the night, we got back to our room and said to each other "wow, we lucked out and got an awesome group of girls next door."
God moving this week has been amazing as well. The staff team did a brilliant job in every session this week to teach the gospel and the spirit filled life, always pointing us towards Jesus. There has been many opportunities to focus on God and be in the word both privately and with others, and every person has made efforts to create those opportunities when they aren't readily available.
Being orientation week, we haven't yet thrown ourselves fully into evangelism and outreach like we will moving forward. We got out on the beach on Wednesday for a short while. I was able to have 2 spiritual discussions; one with a family vacationing from Pennsylvania, and another with a retired man from Roanoke, VA. The family was very open and easy to talk to; they proclaimed a catholic faith but didn't express any real understanding of the gospel message or faith playing any role in their lives. I had difficulty transitioning from spiritual* discussion to sharing the gospel* with them, but as we left my discipler, Hung, who has been amazing so far, discussed with me what type of questions might have helped the conversation and how we could improve in the future. He is a good teacher and I'm certainly learning from him. Our second conversation was with a retired man who was in the navy during Vietnam (though he was never deployed). His life seemed very empty: he had no ambitions or goals beyond exactly what he was doing at the moment, and claimed his life to be incredible because "It's just me. No one to answer to, count on, take care of, go home to or tell me what to do." There was no room to share the gospel with him, having no interest in spiritual matters; so prayer was the most we could do.
There's certainly much more than I can fit in a blog post, it almost seems a disservice to all God has done to try and summarize it like this (I didn't even mention God holding back Andrea for us!). I'm really looking forward to what is to come, because I know it will be amazing. I'm also pretty sure it will be amazing beyond anything I could build up or expect.
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