Truckee Meadows Community College

Every week, I get the amazing opportunity to go up to our community college to hang out and lead a Bible study with the small but growing Intervarsity chapter at our junior college.

Last week, we gave away about $200 worth of free food to students and also got about 20 new interest cards from students interested in joining our chapter. Please pray for us tomorrow that students would come and that they would want to get involved and become part of our chapter that wants to boldly proclaim the love of God on campus!

Prayer Ministry was an adventure!

THE HIGHLIGHT of my Urbana experience was that everyday I got to be on the Prayer Ministry Team with about 70 other prayer ministers(Intervarsity staff). Everyday we had two prayer ministry seminars, after which we would just pray with people. Prayer ministry was such a fresh and exciting adventure for me and the people I prayed with because it really is about helping students enter into a conversation with God, but letting God lead the conversation. Prayer ministry is really a different way of praying. Instead of us leading the conversation with the things that we want to talk about, prayer ministry is about stopping, listening, and giving God control of the conversation. It was a blessing to see the many students receive words, affirmations, healing, and blessing from their Heavenly Father.

I think my favorite story was from one of our prayer ministers who shared one crazy experience praying with a girl whom she met and had a crazy life story. The girl shared about 4 different traumatic life circumstances that had happened to her at different ages, and then shared with the prayer minister that a psychologist had diagnosed her as having a multiple personality disorder. The Prayer minister having never prayed for anyone like this said, "okay, well lets just go to God and see what He has to say about this" So they listened, and the prayer minister told the girl that she felt like God was telling her that he wanted to "heal all of her parts". So one by one, the prayer minister asked the Holy Spirit to bring forward each of the girl's personalities one at a time and then asked God to heal each one, by bringing wholeness to each of the personalities.

Then after that, the prayer minister asked God to lead them again, into what they should do next and felt like God was saying that he wanted "to knit all of her parts together". So they prayed that God would knit all her parts together. And the prayer minister asked the girl how she felt and the girl responded that she felt "gluey". That is probably the craziest most amazing story of healing that I have ever heard of! Someone at Urbana was healed of a multi-personality disorder!

Urbana 09....Strive to be forgotten

Urbana 09 was amazing and once again has left me and 16,000 other college students with much to take back to our college campuses, our communities and churches. One of the most impactful messages that I heard was a 15 minute interview with Patrick Fung, the first Asian General Director of Overseas Missionary Fellowship (OMF) International. Patrick shared with Urbana his story about how he became a Christian and about how God called him into ministry after he and his wife became successful and wealthy doctors. He said that in order to go into ministry and at the same time honor his parents and his in-laws(and to lead them to the Lord), he and his wife made the decision to give all of their life savings after 7 years of working as medical doctors to their parents(in order to provide for them in their old age, as they knew they wouldn't be able to when serving as missionaries).

Patrick shared about a story of when he visited a library in London that had archives of 1000's of files, where each file represented one life that died in order for the gospel to be spread in China. It was after knowing this fact, that Patrick realized that these nameless forgotten people were probably the most important workers in the 21st century as they made Christ visible and not themselves. Patrick encouraged us to love and serve people in very tangible ways rather than focusing so much on publicity for events. To listen to his interview go to http://www.urbana09.org/program.webcast.cfm, Day 2.

What is true discipling?

At our staff retreat, "Cultivating Leadership" conference, some "Intervarsity giants"(aka, the "greats") have been challenging me so much in what I think is important "staff work". One of the main topics was about Discipleship, and what do we think discipleship looks like. The simple answer should be: what was Jesus' mission when he was on earth? To share the gospel. Isn't that what he discipled his followers in? And so, instead of following my default discipling method(which is to meet with students, hear about their lives, their "boy or girl problems"...) I should be discipling students in how to share the gospel?

It looks like, from now on, going to the dorms, talking about Jesus= discipleship.

Story from the beginning of the year

Meet Lauren and Amanda

On the first day of dorm move-in, I met a freshman named Lauren. As I got to know Lauren, I found out that she is Christian and she introduced me to her roommate, Amanda. Lauren and Amanda are both bubbly, energetic freshmen who I loved spending time with. After inviting Amanda to a couple Intervarsity events, I quickly learned that Amanda wasn't interested in anything related to "church stuff" because she grew up going to church with her mom, but later in her teen years had some bad experience with her mom that left her scarred and hurt. So she didn't really feel ready to go back into anything "church-related" because she was so wary of the whole thing.

“Keep inviting her!”

But something inside me said: “Keep inviting her!” So shared with Amanda that I wanted to invite her to different things because I wanted her to feel welcome, but that if she chose to come or not come, we would love her the same. So one day, we invited Amanda to dinner with our small group and….SHE CAME. Another time, we invited her to Large Group. She didn’t come the first time…..but the 2nd time SHE DID. Then before we knew it she came to our small group Bible study EVERY WEEK! During one of our small groups, we were studying the account of Lazarus’ death and resurrection and talked about how Jesus is ABLE to step in and fix our hopeless situations. In our passage, we saw that Jesus was able to raise Lazarus back to life and restore a brother to two grieving sisters. Then I asked our Bible study if there was any hopeless situations in our lives now that we want to ask Jesus to step into? And guess who was the first to respond?! Amanda.

I guess that was Jesus, wasn’t it?

Amanda begins to share with our small group, “I have been trying to see my brother who lives 30-40 minutes from Reno forAmanda even came to our fall conference- 2nd from right. the past 4 months because he’s autistic and paralyzed and lives in a home. But every person that I asked to give me a ride either didn’t have time or didn’t have a car. So I was getting really discouraged because I wasn’t sure the next time I’d be able to see my brother. But two days ago, I was sharing this with a couple people from Intervarsity and one of them said that he could take me. So I get to see my brother for the first time in 4 months….tomorrow. I guess that was Jesus, wasn’t it?”

Thank you for praying for students like Amanda that they would recognize Jesus for who He is, a living and compassionate Savior, that wants to step into our lives and restore our hope! --

Prayer Requests

This week our Large Group's topic is "Are You Satisfied?". Pray that non-believers would come and see what following Jesus means!
Pray for an International Thanksgiving dinner, that students from all over the world would feel loved and get to hear about Jesus!

Monday morning prayer

Our staff team this year began getting together every Monday morning at 6am for prayer. Convicted that if we want to see God do truly great things in our leaders, in the dorms, on our campus, than we need to be praying. We didn't know what our prayer time would look like, but we decided to come and listen for what God might show us, tell us, encourage us, direct us to do. This prayer time has been incredible! With listening prayer, we pretty much sit and ask God to speak to us thorugh pictures/images, scriptures, words and then we sit and be quiet for 10-15 minutes and then share what we were thinking. It's been pretty cool to see God show us what he is doing. For example, this week someone saw Jesus as a garbage man and this week there has been a lot of students dealing with the garbage in their lives. We also one week saw a picture of one of our staff fishing for "a big fish" outside the dorm she has for her Bible study. And funnily enough, this freshmen from that dorms, who is Muslim and is a student senator has just started coming to their study. We are praying that God would continue to reach this "big fish's" heart so that he may know our amazing God!

Coming to Southern California Next Sunday!

Hey Everyone!

It's been a while since I've written last, but I am excited to be making a visit to southern california this next weekend, October 23-26th(Friday-Monday). I would love to see you all!

Blessings,
Amy