New Orleans Part 2

I’ve been thinking about a lot of stuff the last couple weeks. It seems hard to believe that that is all the time that has passed since the trip to New Orleans. It already seems like the whole trip is fading away into a memory. Something that I’ll be able to look back on and say “remember when?” I’m not sure if I can really say the lessons I learned down there will always be with me. I say this because I’m not sure if I really learned anything new. This seems to be a struggle that at least I deal with quite often. I’ve grown up a Christian and grown up in the church. I’ve heard so many sermons and Sunday school lessons that it seems like I never hear anything new (which all goes back to Ecclesiastes). I know a lot of this is a pride issue but also I think it’s because the basics of Christianity are so simple. Love God, love others because God loves you and forgives you no matter what. Now I say there simple but actually understanding them is a different matter. At the same time though I’m not sure how much someone can get out of a sermon, I’ve heard time and time again that Jesus loves me no matter what and that he can forgive anything. I have no doubt about that. I’ve heard that God blesses you through your giving. I’ve heard so many lessons on tithing I could probably write a book It’s gotten to the point where I rarely get much out of sermons besides cool verses. I feel like the five things that really help me grow my faith are these: Meeting in small groups such as kairos or prayer groups, Worshipping God whether it be in song or just meditation on his glory, spending time digging into the Bible, prayer and serving and putting his the things I have learned to good use.

Now back to the New Orleans trip

The trip allowed me to do all of these things. We got to work in groups, worship in groups, talk in groups, and pray in groups. We got to sing praises to the Lord whether it was during formal worship services or just having a good time in the vans. I was able to set time aside to continue reading through Luke. But by far the two greatest things I was strengthened by was the prayer and service. See I’m not sure if I learned any new lessons. It helped reiterate the power of prayer to me. And that’s something that I’ve really been thinking about these last few weeks. In fact you’ll probably see me write more about prayer soon. It was just incredible to be able to see so many people be prayed for and give us prayer requests. I got home and just had an urge to go around to random people asking for prayer requests. I didn’t, which I regret and I can come up with excuses why I didn’t and shouldn’t have but I don’t want to dwell on that right now.

As I just said the other huge thing was the service aspect. That’s why we went after all, to serve. At times I just sort of shut my brain off and did things there are points of time in my memory of the trip where all I can say is “I’m pretty sure I did such and such” instead of details it’s sort of like a giant block in my mind where it says “at this point in time I SERVED.” And I may be completely wrong on this but I see that as a sort of good thing. It doesn’t matter how you serve as long as you do it. I know what we did as a whole down there, and I know at least to some extent what is still being done down there. But the details aren’t what matter it’s the action. I don’t think I learned a whole lot from serving itself but it’s something I needed to do. It’s something we as the body of Christ need to do. I know we were where God wanted us doing what he wanted us to do.

Quite a few scattered thoughts in there but I hope you can get the gist of it all.
God bless

One last thing, there are a couple of places where people who went on the trip have posted pictures you can see them all at these places:

http://spaces.msn.com/members/wadedara/

http://spaces.msn.com/members/carfreakgm/

http://spaces.msn.com/members/yrdnal2000/