July, Conference, Performance Review and Vacation Time!

Good Morning Friends, Family, and Internet Wanderers!

I am so happy that you are reading this and I hope all is going well with you, as it certainly has for me. This past month has been both full and restful, a combination that I do not usually get to experience and I am excited to share with you how God has been at work recently.

Thanksgiving

Early in July the lead pastor and I rented a car and drove out to Saskatoon for the Canadian conference's national gathering. This event was a blessing in many ways for me. The first blessing came in the form of good conversation and connect with my lead pastor. We have always had a good relationship but being that our offices are not in the same place I do not connect with him more than a couple times a week. This was a good chance for socializing and relationship building which I valued. When we arrived at our destination we bumped into the head of our conferences mission organization who invited us out to super. Now I do not like to use names here but this guy is one of my personal hero's as I see Jesus in everything he does. So spending time around a table hearing stories and being generally encouraged was worth the trip on its own. The conference itself was also a huge blessing as I got a chance to briefly re-connect with people from TREK a few years ago, and meet some new people doing cool new things. (One guy found a way to make eyeglasses for less than $5 and in 5 minutes. He is going to 3rd world countries with this technology to bless them). 2 big highlights from the conference were listening to one speaker recite from memory the book of Ephesians and talk about the benefits of the practice of memorization. The other highlight was hearing from the head of our Brazilian conference and his stories of faithfulness and the overall desire to promote unity in our churches. The trip was condensed into four 16 hour days and when returning I was both tired and energized by the experience.

This past month I received my annual performance review as well. This is still something that gives me a degree of anxiety as the review is primarily based on a church survey, in which members and attenders are invited to give feedback on me specifically. Yet because I focus primarily on youth and young adults it was a bit discouraging to see a good chunk of respondents write that they felt they did not know me very well. Yet overall this still goes into the positive and thankfulness section of this post. The review was overwhelmingly positive and while there are a few points of improvement that stand out for me to work on I overall felt encouraged in this process.

This past month I was also blessed to be able to take some vacation time. Since I do not have a lot of resources at the moment, I did not have any plans to go anywhere, instead I decided to work on improving a skill over the week and I took my first ever swimming lesson. For whatever reason as a kid I never took swimming lessons and I have spent most of my adult life afraid of water deeper than my waist. I had originally intended to take this class with a friend in a similar situation, yet he changed his mind. The class I signed up for listed itself as adults only and so I figured I would have the pool to myself and the class, this was not the case and I ended up learning alongside many children in the pool. It was a humbling experience, yet I feel like I gained so much for it. The biggest issue for me was simply being comfortable in the water and while I still have a long way to go I feel much more confident and have a lot more skill than I did before.


Prayer Request

This month I received another financial update and boy do you need to read those carefully. Since the generosity of people such as yourself has made fundraising relatively simple for me I have not paid much attention lately to how I am doing. Now as it stands I am still ahead of the need for funds and have the next 4 months of funds raised, yet when I read the report, I misread something and for about half an hour thought I had run out. Minor panic attacks aside I am so grateful for the generosity of everyone. Right now I am over the halfway period of elevation, which means for the past  2 years, 3 if you include Trek, people like you have faithfully been contributing to my fund and have literally supported my serving this church and its people. My funding right now is good for another 4 months which means I will still need a little more to end the year, and hopefully a bit more still so that the trend can continue of having a few months already in the bank ahead of time.

As regular readers will remember this past year the youth team lost leaders due to them moving away. Thinking about the coming year the church still very much needs another female youth leader. One person has been approached but she seems hesitant, and while the church does have several women who I feel would be good leadership candidates it seems like there is still a lot of stigma against working with youth in the church. Perhaps it is just personality types but youth work has always been a joy for me even when it is exhausting and I do not understand why so many seem resistant to the idea of being a leader. Please pray with me for God to bring us a female youth leader to serve our growing group of young women

Then my final prayer request involves trusting God and being bold. As much as I often talk a big game I find that I am guided a lot more by fear than by anything else. Doing a lot of introspection lately has revealed this to me and I do not want to go where fear leads. There are specific examples I am thinking of but in general please pray for a holy boldness. To have confidence in the word God speaks to me and then the boldness to act on it.

Thank you so much for you continued support both prayerful and financial, without you this would not be possible!