I am teaching a series at North Beach called threads.  It’s a 4 week series on community and how we are interwoven together in relationships.  So in looking at different things on community and on the church I found this video by Francis Chan talking on 1 Peter 2:9-10.  It’s  about how we are part of the church.  However, God is telling us that we are apart of something bigger than ourselves.  

Watch – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9iJSkn5jwQ&feature=related

Click on this site to see some videos we uploaded from the Chicago Mission trip.  We have Pastor Andy sharing, Keegan showing how powerful Turpentine is, The Everything Skit performed at the Hesed House and a youth pastor from Geneva First Baptist way too excited to sing Take it All by Hilsong.  Good stuff. 

http://www.youtube.com/user/NorthBeachOnline#play/uploads

We were blessed to be able to work very closely with Pat and Barb this past week so we wanted to hear from them and what this week meant to them. Follow the link below and click on “Interview with Pat and Barb”.

http://web.me.com/matt.lane/LEAD_222_Chicago_2009/Podcast/Podcast.html

Thanks for the prayers! God bless!

Yesterday was a complete and utter blessing to both Hesed House and ourselves! Praise God! We arrived at Hesed House flustered, trying to get organized for the day with our assignments sheets for the day. Painting, landscaping, cleaning… etc. We all worked diligently to get everything accomplished before lunch. Speaking of lunch, our food providers brought us home-made pizza, Popsicles and drinks– EXCELLENT.

During lunch we celebrated Pat’s birthday– one of the head directors at Hesed House. Cassy made her a cape that had the initials S.P. on the back (Super Pat) that glittered with hearts. We all signed and dated the cape and gave it to her along with a cake and flowers– it was a very special time to spend with her on our last day at Hesed. After lunch, we finished up a few work projects and then got ready for the Samaritan’s Feet shoe-drop. For those of you that don’t know what Samaritan’s Feet is: it is an organization that provides brand new shoes that are donated by companies like NIKE and others. The shoe-drop works like this: stations are setup for foot washing. Foot washers wear gloves and use soap and water to clean the feet of those getting new shoes. People getting new shoes also receive a new pair of socks. Through the foot washing, we get a chance to hear peoples’ stories and pray with them. It was an excellent experience! Pictures will be posted below.

Before the foot washing, we were able to put on the “Everything” skit for the residents at Hesed House. Many were touched on many different levels. Very cool.

After the foot washing, we all tackled the mural. Lorena headed up a really cool project  of making a mural on one of the walls of Hesed House. Again, pictures are posted below. It’s a really neat pictures of a sunset that will have Hesed House’s logo in the center and words of encouragement around it. It’s beautiful!

Toward the end of the day, we all finished up projects and said our goodbyes to Barb and Pat and the rest of the volunteers at Hesed House. It was an emotional and humbling experience to be able to serve Hesed House and be apart of their family for a week– and hopefully longer.

Thank you for the prayers! Stay tuned for the recap of today. Want to get that posted tonight so look out!

Apologies for not being able to post yesterday. It was a long, hard, EXCELLENT day that deserved going to bed early. So, this morning, we’ll share the amazing things that happened as well as our day off on Wednesday.

First, our fun day started off with a leadership experience. The experience was meant to stretch us and take us out of our comfort zone without causing too much chaos out in public. The activity was called One Meal, One Day. The concept is basically this: If we (the entire world) were to skip one meal for one day, and donate the money that we would have spent on that meal to someone like Compassion International or Horizon International, we could eliminate global hunger. Not too bad, right? So, to start our activity, we were challanged to go to one of the local food stores and make notes on the different combinations of food could get and how much of each food there were. Did you know that Meijer sells over 200 different types of cereal occupying 1440 cubic feet of space in their store? Or that there are 32 different brands of bottled water? Or over 100 different types of salad dressings? This exercise oppened our hearts and minds to the reality of just how blessed we are with the hundreds of thousands of food options we have just down the road.

Part two of our activity was to go out into a public space and just talk to people about the concept of One Meal, One Day. We all had One Meal, One Day T-shirts on provided by Compassion International, so they saw who the organization was. We had flyers and stickers to give to people just in case they wanted to donate money to Compassion– they can go on their website to do that. However, some decided to give money straight to us which was just as good.

The experience stretched our leadership skills of being able to talk to people we don’t know about an important subject. It ended up being a very good experience!

Around noon we headed out for the big city: Chi-Town! We drove into the big city in our lovely vans. It was a lot cheaper than taking the train from Geneva (12 dollars per person). We parked at Moody Bible College and made our way to Michigan Ave. and got to Giordano’s Pizza early to beat the rush. Afterwards, we went to Navy Pier. Pictures are posted below of our fun day. Check it out!