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.”

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.

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

Ariel’s job, take 2

So I just got a call from Ariel whose at work right now saying come March when the new medical center opens there’s a “very high possibility” she would be able to transfer to days on the pediatrics floor (where she currently works). This would be GREAT!!!  We are praying hard something would happen for her to get switched off nights, because it’s really been wearing on us the last several weeks.

It’s hard to not get our hopes up with this. We trust whatever God has in store for us is best. But we are definitely praying hard for this.

More MZMO

A few days ago Reed and I got the chance to share the gospel with someone from MZMO. We’ll call him “Jamie” (because the other guy who I know named Jamie reminds me a lot of him).

I’m not going to lie as I was making plans to get lunch with this guy I was really praying hard that God would give us a chance to share the bridge with him.  And God did!

He seemed pretty interested throughout.  Jamie’s grown up in the church but is really trying to figure out for himself what it looks like to have a personal relationship with Jesus. Pray hard that we would be able to get another opportunity to talk with him before the winter break.

Ariel’s (potential) new job update

Ariel still hasn't heard back from the manager as to whether or not she's been picked for the days position, but the more Ariel learned about it during the actual interview the more unattractive of a position it turned out to be.  The HUGE perk is that it's days.  However, the actual type of nursing it is is uninteresting to Ariel and would be pretty challenging. She's been working with children and the position is for adult women who've come out of surgeries, cancer, etc...  If she is offered the job we would need to pray more about whether it's really something she would want or whether we should stick it out a bit longer with her working nights on a floor she really enjoys with the possibility of moving to days on the same floor sometime in the future.

Thank you so much for your prayers!

MZMO

Here’s another dorm you can be praying over.

Turns out all of the freshman guys in the Bible Study I’m helping out with live either in this dorm or MZMO.  God’s given us 4 guys who live on the same floor here! Mike, his roommate Gary (both who came on the camping trip), Jake, and his roommate (I forgot his name).

Funny story: four years ago I was an RA on this exact same floor-4 MO.  Walking down it brings back some really good memories. Please pray for entrances to this hall.