The first ten days have flown by here in North Myrtle Beach, SC! After many staff meetings and ministry trainings, staff work days setting out picnic tables, cleaning grills and checking keys for student housing, students have arrived! We have 68 students from 33 campuses joining us this summer. Staff will stick around for another 5 weeks to help lead the students in ministry, and then after July 1, the staff head home and turn over leadership of the summer mission to students. As we have been preparing for student arrival, I'm reminded of the moments I experienced the Lord in new and exciting ways on my own Summer Missions: The Badlands in 2006 and Brazil in 2007 as a student, and in East Asia in 2012 and the Middle East in 2014 as staff. A crazy thing happens when you have a community of staff and students who love the Lord and want to grow closer to him and want to share their faith. Already we've seen the 28 person staff team bond over shared experiences we've had. There are staff that have lost parents, grew up in divorced homes, have family who walked away from the Lord, are currently dealing with anxiety and depression -- yet none of these things define us. We are defined by the love God has for us and the fact that he did an incredible thing by saving us from our sins, something we could never do. I love summer mission because it forces me to preach the gospel to myself every day as I remind students of it and share it with others. And it's a chance for us to build into our students our theme for the summer, that our lives are His. As a result of the incredible, life-changing love he has for us, he calls us to respond to him by giving him our lives. We have 4 main goals this summer as we seek to shepherd and train our students - that as a result of our lives being His, we will...
I can't wait to see how God works in the lives of our students and staff this summer at NMB 2016!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Amy WellnerEncouraging others to intentionally live out their God-given identity. Archives
September 2022
Categories
All
|