So before I get into what I'm learning and stuff, I'll just give you a brief overview of what's been going on down here lately. So we finally have all our staff in for the summer, there's 12 of us in all, 7 guys and 5 girls. This past week we had staff orientation. We did team building exercises, life stories, spiritual gift inventories and personality tests. It was a great week to learn more about one another and to learn about each other's past and how God has redeemed them. We ended this morning by eating a traditional mexican meal called menudo, which is hominey and beef stomach lining in a red sauce. I've had it before and it's definitely edible, though not something I'd choose to eat. Anyway now we're gearing up for the summer, where we have week long groups every week. We have a group from Wisconsin and a group from Southern California in for all next week. It's going to be a busy summer! Also, this past week we built one our houses(12x12) in the lot next door where different staff will be staying in there for 2 weeks at a time this summer. I move in tomorrow morning with Clayton, Caleb, and Spencer, hopefully we don't burn the place down. Anyway, so that's kinda the deal for this next week, but it's mexico flexico so there'll probably be an adventure thrown in there somewhere.
As a staff we have been going through a video series called Basic by Francis Chan. It serves to take Christ-followers, old and new, and teach them the basics of a walk with God. This particular video that we watched most recently was called Follow Jesus. I feel like God has used Chan to continually lift my eyes to him and to show me areas in my life that I need to work on, areas where I thought I understood from being raised in the Church. His main question was, "What does it mean to follow Jesus?" If we think it's anything other then dropping everything an following him, we've deceived ourselves. In Luke 5, Jesus is calling his first disciples. He tells these fishermen to cast their nets in a different spot and they catch this amazing amount of fish. Then Jesus replies in verse 10b "Then Jesus said to Simon, 'Don't be afraid; from now on you will catch men.'" Jesus tells them, you're not going to catch merely fish now, you're going to catch men, you're going to make disciples and turn men to the Light. He's telling them, you can be so much more then mere fishermen, you can be fishers of men, but you need to leave everything and follow me. You know what they did? "So they pulled their boats up on shore, left EVERYTHING and follow him." They left everything. They counted it all, as Paul says, "lost for the sake for Christ Jesus my Lord." That's what it means to follow Jesus, to leave everything behind and go. John 8:31 says "If you hold to my teaching, you are truly my disciples." See the first thing Jesus said to his followers was to follow him and he would make them fishers of men. The last thing he said was to "go and make disciples of all men." In between he instructs on how to disciple others. His parables, his teachings, are how he discipled the twelve. If we hold to Jesus' teachings, we are his disciples, his followers. Again the narrow and wide roads came up again in this video. I've been thinking a lot about them lately. When you're at the narrow and wide roads, when you have a decision to make, either right or wrong, Jesus is standing there next to you whispering "I know it looks hard, that decision, that habit to stop, that think to say no to, but I'm so worth it." Do you deem Christ, who died on the cross for your sins, worthy enough to drop everything and follow?
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