Monday, January 25, 2010

Student Prayer Request

Thanks for your prayer support!  I am continually reminded how, if the Lord’s not working than nothing I can do will change a life.

This last week me and an older student met to share the Bridge with a sophomore named “T.” T has popped up several times in the last year (usually at the most random times…) and even came on the CA Camping trip with the Nav Group. He’s had a tough background and openly describes God as “the chick from the bachelorette. Where she’ll give all these guys tests to weed out which ones she wants to keep.”

T shared with me that he thinks it’s more than coincidence that he keeps running into Christians around campus, and is generally confused about who God is.

As the older student and I had lunch with T and shared a Gospel illustration with him, you could tell gears were clicking in T’s head. He put together the dots that God isn’t malicious or spiteful, and does in fact love everyone; sin is the problem. He understood Romans 3:23, 6:23, and Ephesians 2:8-9 to mean that we can never do enough good things to get right with God, because He’s Holy and we’re not. And that that’s why we need Jesus. T also admitted that he felt like he had one foot in the boat of believing in Jesus, and one foot still on land. We concluded the time by me asking whether he wanted to spend time next week reading the Bible some more, to which he replied “I’ll think about it and get back to you.”

Please pray for T. I feel confident that a good seed has been sown in his heart. Pray that God would protect that seed and continue working in T until he can say with confidence “I’m putting both of my feet in the boat and not looking back.”

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

On Haiti

The catastrophe in Haiti is horrible. However, I am not praying it would be rebuilt exactly like it was. Over half of the people there practiced Voodoo in some form, while roughly 80% is some distorted form of Roman Catholicism. I pray aid comes quickly and in abundance, but also that somehow God would use this situation to cause the Gospel to spread in a society which is very far from knowing Him.

Saturday, January 9, 2010

North Korea [Urgent]

On Christmas Day, Robert Park (28 years old), was arrested by the North Korean after crossing into their country with letters asking NK to close down their concentration camps bringing a message of “Christ’s love and forgiveness.”

Robert Park grew up in Tucson, AZ and grew up attending a church that one of our staff members go to.

His intent was to leverage his life to speed the fall of the unstable NK regime.  Currently 1000 people per day are dying from starvation in North Korea.  His hope was that because he was an American that his capture would serve as a catalyst for people around the world to demonstrate against the atrocities that are happening to a helpless people in North Korea.

Robert asks for these prayer requests during an interview he had on Dec. 22, 2009:

  1. Declare God’s love for N. Korean and pray for their salvation. (John 3:16-17)
  2. Open borders to bring food to areas that need it most (Matt. 25:35)
  3. Close down concentration camps and free all political prisoners (
  4. Unification for South and North Korea under a transformed leadership. (Daniel 5:18-21)
  5. Freedom, salvation and new life for N. Korea…for God’s message to ring clearly through Robert’s love for the N. Koreans. (Amos 5:21-25)
  6. The impact of Robert’s message to be widespread and that there will be a global outrage and outcry especially in the church over the human rights abuses in N. Korea.  Ask ourselves what can I do to help?  Robert’s actions have shown us that we cannot stand still and do nothing.  May Robert’s message unite us to take action.  (John 17:20-23, Isaiah 58:5-12)
  7. Encouragement, continued spiritual strength, and protection over Robert.
  8. Peace and comfort to Helen and Pyong Park, his parents.

 

Coverage on the Incident:

CNN

Fox News

AZ Star