Wow wow wow'ed by God in Anchorage this week!

This past week was a great one with lots of great and awesome things God did in the lives of the students!!

Our 3 groups were from the San Fransisco area, Idaho and Seattle area. They were great and worked sooo hard this week!

Unfortunately I don't have lots of time to write now, but I'm gonna write kind of bullet-point style about some cool things.

1) Again, the poverty/homelessness simulation was awesome and eye opening for students... almost every group talked to homeless/poor during the time and learned a lot!

2) Every Thursday we have a community picinic where the students invite all the people they met in the community that week that they have served or worked alongside... The last 3 weeks we had 20-30 people show up. This week BLEW us away!! We had 250!!!! We fed soooooo many of the homeless and hungry in Anchorage! AWESOME!! We had so many that we had to make a couple shopping runs as well as run back to the church to grab all the extra leftover food we had... At one point Amanda and I prayed that the food would multipy (we still had a LONG line of ppl in the community, but only 40 hamburgers left, and none of our 70 students had even eaten yet!)... So God didn't multiply the food: He multiplied the number of people we fed though!! He doesn't always answer our prayers the way we want. :) It was a wonderful experience. So many people came because our students were meeting and talking to SOOO many people this week in the places they were serving.. Plus, word also spreads. :)

3) One of the students had an amazing conversation with a man this week as was serving at a place called Bean's Cafe, which is a homeless day shelter. The man told the student that he could tell he was thinking about starting to use drugs when he arrived back home after the trip... He told him NOT to start and that it would ruin this student's life, just as it had his own. The amazing thing is that this was TRUE!! This student had considered starting to use drugs when he got home... After this incident with the homeless man, he told his entire youth group about it and what had happened, that he had thought about starting use drugs, and that he heard the voice of God directly through this man telling him not to!! Awesome!

4) I heard directly from many students this week that they had grown a lot in their relationship with God and that they wanted to serve and know Him more, and to serve more at home in their communities... This is so exciting!!

Praise be to God! Many more exciting things happened.... I got to have so many conversations with students this week about their lives, and how God had challenged them this week.

Next week we have a group coming from Michigan, I believe... A VERY small group this week compared to usual... only 20! This will be nice, because I think we'll be able to have more conversations with them and get to know them better..

Only 3 weeks to go! The weeks are flying! I come back August 8th already... I'm kind of envious because my youth group back home at Woodland Hills is leaving this week to go on a YouthWorks mission trip.. I wish I could go with them! I see how all the youth groups that have come grow so close together and have their eyes opened and I see how impacted they are to come home to make a difference..

Did I mention that 32,000 students will go on YouthWorks mission trips this summer? Pretty exciting... Especially considering the theme of God's beauty, mercy, justice and humility .... I've seen students eyes be opened to the poor and needy here in Anchorage left and right. How awesome for all these students to go back to their communities and to have a passion for service and love toward others, just like Jesus...


Waiting and expecting to be even more wow'ed by God...


Blessings,
Sarah