Pep-in-the-step

So I don't have much time to write or much to report, but we had a small moral booster today that made me excited so I thought I would quickly share it.

We go and do the prayer station at least twice a week every week, but it has been extremely hot for the past two weeks. However, today it was a cool 76 degrees outside with continual pending rain that never came!

Side note it has not rained a single event we have done out but it has been especially rainy/overcast the entire summer, so someone must be looking out for us. And other side note every time we are praying at the prayer station and it is crazy hot outside a cloud ALWAYS comes while we are praying! Pretty cool.

Anyways, today with the cool weather we easily had over 30 people stop and pray with us, share their lives with us, and talk with us! It was great to see at least 5 former faces like Lizabeth, Compton, and others! It's nice to be known around the neighborhood and it was nice to have a large number of people share in life together!

Tonight we are having a group Bible study . . . and that's where I'm headed!

Katie Claire Morrison

On Monday July 14th I woke up, much to my dismay, to a 70% chance of rain with clouds filling the sky, rain already drizzling down, and a forecast of thunderstorms by 4pm.

At about 3:15pm I received a text message from Jordan (the other guy intern and special helper of the day) that said, "Jesus must love you man! Would you look at that sun!" The clouds had parted and deceased and the set up was perfect and so it began.

Katie Claire and I had a lovely afternoon of walking through the best New York has to offer in Central Park! We eventually ended up at the boathouse where we rented a row-boat for the afternoon. Properly disguised as a celebration of being together for 20 months we had a great time exploring the lake in Central Park! After making our rounds in the lake we found ourselves in a little secluded cove and decided to dock and pull the boat up on land while we looked around at the beautiful greenery surrounding us. In the small dirt path that sat next to the water's edge laid a sideways tree that hid a treasure behind it. After stepping over the trunk Katie quickly figured out what was up with the rose petal path! We walked around the corner to a little gazebo where our friend had laid out my gifts to Katie.

The next hour was a great time together and we walked up the stairs of Wagner's Cove as a newly engaged couple!!

We found ourselves at Cherry Hill and a horse and carriage promptly picked us up and we rode throughout Central Park behind Romeo, the beautiful white steed.

What perfected the night was meeting our parents in Little Italy for dinner and sharing stories and celebration together!

The Parents are coming! The Parents are coming!

The Morrison clan and Newton clan arrive in the city tomorrow at various times!!!

Katie and I are pretty ecstatic since these opportunities only come around once in a blue moon!

We're also excited because they get to experience some of the things we are getting to see and learn and hear . . . which will hopefully open up new worlds of thought and questions for all of us.

It's late and as I'm sure I could ramble I think I will leave it at that. We are excited!

Brokenness

No matter where you go there will be common and unique brokenness and pain.

In Uganda, there was sickness, death, and poverty.

In Russia, there was excessive alcohol and a lack of beliefs and values.

In the Bronx you can imagine that there are all kinds of brokenness, but the one that seems the greatest has had its effects in the other areas of the world I have been to as well.

We were talking to a group of women who had just came to the Bronx to teach at one of the local schools. They were asking people lots of questions like what they did during the day, why they were here and specific questions to us like why are you here, has this worked at all and other lines of questioning. They said that a police officer had mentioned something profound to them earlier that day and shared it with us . . . he said "the biggest problem of the Bronx is not in its crime, drugs, or anything you might first think of . . . its the lack of fathers."

Growing up without a male figure (or female figure for that matter) creates brokenness (at least in the sense that it lacks wholeness).

This creates tons of secondary problems as well. There is a lack of leadership because no one has seen a mentor or father figure lead in their lives. Males and females alike do not know how to step up and shepherd others, but only know how to get by themselves.

This naturally creates problems within a church that relies on mentoring and lay leadership.

In conjunction with this, I am reading a book called The Shack, which eventually personifies the Trinity. God, "the father," is portrayed as a large black woman, which is interesting in itself and most definitely throws the character in the book off a little bit. God responds to the question of why do we call you father/mother/or whatever we call you. In the book God answers by saying "we knew that fathers would be lacking in people's lives more than a nurturing mother so we chose to be primarily represented in that way." (This is all my paraphrasing by the way). Of course God is not male or female, and he has qualities that reside in both and all, but I thought it was interesting how the author saw fatherlessness as a huge problem in which perhaps God understands the best (of course) and hopes that we will be able to live a whole life by taking him as our mentor and father if we have a good one or not here on earth.

It would be great to pray for this hurting section of New York and for New York as a whole in this area. That God would raise up men willing to stay with their families and be responsible in their lives, which will hopefully in turn produce leaders that are more able because they have learned from the leadership of males and females alike!

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There are a few other "problems" and struggles/frustrations we have been going through as well lately and I believe I am better understanding why and how and what etc, but prayers for patience and an abundance of love would be great as well! Perhaps I can elaborate more at some point or another . . . I hope your summer is going well and that you are constantly learning about the community around you, about yourself, and about the King of the world!

Hot Dogs

What do you get when you mix the biggest tummies in the world with a stop watch, a crowd of 50,000, and a bunch of hot dogs. . . .

The fourth of July at Coney Island at the World Famous Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest.

Did we witness Joey Chesnutt eat 10 (10!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) hot dogs in his first minute? YES!

Did we witness both of the contenders eat 59 hot dogs in 10 minutes? YES!!

Did we witness each of the finalists eat five hot dogs in less that 4.2 seconds? Not quite, but it was close!

And yes Joey Chesnutt won the match to keep the hot dog eating title, the SUPERBOWL of eating, in the U.S. of A.

(P.S. one of the contenders ate 1.5 gallons of Chili in 5 minutes and 25 seconds.) I feel like I could go into all sorts of theological discussion from here, but I will not go there right now!

Goodness gracious!

Flushing New York

No I am not talking about the verb, but the recent visit to the far corner of Queens called Flushing. About a week ago me and the other interns visited the area to understand what our world may be looking like in the near future, if not now.

As we began to walk (about a 6 block walk) we found ourselves running into a couple of Hindu temples, a Seke (spelling?) worship place, an Asian denomination church, a Jewish synagogue, a Buddhist temple, an Islamic mosque, a Catholic church and a few other lesser known religious gathering places.

In 6 blocks!

We then began to ask ourselves two questions.

First, a broad question for all of humanity - why do we believe in God? This created subquestions like how do all these religions come to be in the first place? How did each religion start?

The second question was how is Christianity different than the world religions of the past and present?

New York is a hub for pluralism and a global context. You can find every tribe and every way of doing things by walking down a few blocks. There are countless numbers of food styles, tons of different languages being spoken, and tons of communication breakdowns between people.

I think it is very important to wrestle with those questions as well as understanding the world we live in. Obviously to reach out to the culture of New York, one must be familiar with the people he/she is reaching out to. With the internet and the flurry of information flowing into rural areas as well as the cities people are connected with all types of realities, knowledge, and choices.

So why is our faith tradition unique? What do we have to offer the world?

And how do we reach a world that has the information of the world at its fingertips? that is post-modern? that is post-Christian (as some are calling it in America now - or at least in Europe) that is moving and living in cities more than ever before? that is more of a melting pot than ever before?

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I wish I could give you our entire conversation, because it deeply explored what we believe and what the world is going to look like in the coming years.

In other news, our house church Friday night was a great experience . . . it is so great to be in an atmosphere that the common goal is to seek and discern truth. It is something we experienced a lot especially in Russia, and it's just really great to be able to agree/disagree and everything in between with a community and figure out what God is trying to tell us through his words! Our communion time was also phenomenal as we invited God to be with us and then in a pop-corn like way we gave up to God our prayers, sang songs we felt led to sing, read scripture that we were thinking about, and shared the body and blood of our Lord and Savior. It was a great expression of a community of faith coming together and worshiping.

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Also - I love central park! We were able to listen to a free concert by the Philharmonic orchestra last Tuesday night and there were approximately 8 billion people there with us. It was great!

I also spent yesterday there watching the diversity of God creation interact and exist among his beautiful creation. It was quite an experience, I highly suggest doing it sometime!


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My parents and Katie's parents are coming up in a little less than two weeks and we are extremely excited to get to show them the Bronx! It's easy to talk for hours about my summer experiences, but it's so difficult to be able to actually describe faces, people, culture, events, and experiences to the detail they deserve, so I'm excited they will be able to get a taste of life here!