Insomnia

Okay so I am a pro at sleeping. It typically takes me 3 alarms to wake up in the morning... I have this really, exceptional roommate who is a human alarm as well. She touches my leg everyone 20 minutes, tells me to wake up in the sweetest voice, and sets hot coffee on my night stand... which makes me think that it's gonna be hard for me to find a husband who will measure up to her.

But falling asleep, sheesh, that is another story.

So I can't sleep tonight and thought that I could fill you in on this week. Well, not all of it, so I'll pick one part. And maybe by typing some things out they will leave my head and I will have less going on in my brain. It's like a circus in there.

So tonight I led this Bible Study that we actually call a discipleship group (every Tuesday night it starts at 7:30 pm and goes until someone complains and reminds me that they are college students and have work to do)

The girls in the group are Molly, Morgan, Margaret, and Nicole. We try to be nice to Nicole even though her name doesn't start with an "m" and she's from Honduras. These girls are amazing. They love serving this ministry, but even more so they love serving the kingdom of God

We have this map of the campus- each dorm that we know people in mapped out with multi-colored sharpies and every week we write down the girls we've met this semester and where they live. If any of these girls saw it, they would think we were majorly weird and stalking them. But really, we pray for them. We ask God to take these girls lives and transform them into women that love Him in a really radical way.

A lot of times, doing this gets the girls in my group talking... they tell me about meals they had this past week with girls on the chart. Or ways that they are seeing God move that girl closer to knowing Him. To us, each name is someone who God has made in His image and really, passionately loves. He has a plan for each of these girls and we are really hoping that He'll let us be part of that plan.

"Come, follow me," Jesus said. "And I will make you fishers of men..."

New Pictures...

This is Stephen and I (in the front row) with our team of students at the Summer Project. There were 4 teams total this summer. In this picture, we just had our field day competition (relay races, team cheers, games) and we won... of course.







Here is a picture of me with the other team leader girls. We lived in a room together this summer and helped run/organize the project. On this night, we dressed up for an event we put on called the "Nursing Home Boogie" all the students dressed up like old people (wore depends diapers, walked around stopped over, put baby-powder in their hair) and we had a dance, an applesauce eating contest, and bingo...

One of the students, Katie a senior at Coastal Carolina University, worked at Liberty Inn in Epcot. This is her in the hotel room one day after work showing off her fancy uniform!














This picture is back in Chapel Hill one Sunday after church- Susie, Anne, Sandra, and Katherine are sophomores at UNC that I met last year and continue to get to know and spend time with!










Two of my favorite students took me out to dinner for my birthday and got me flowers!

Better late...very, very, very late... than never!

Hello friends and family! I am sick today. And after browsing BBC and Nordstroms.com, and responding to old, old e-mails, it popped into my mind to update my blog! Here is what has been going on via a month-by-month update...

1. May 2008- said good-bye to most of the students for the summer, took a course at Wheaton College towards a Masters degreed called: Spiritual Formation and Witness. Had the joy of studying and experiencing God with students from Uganda, Rwanda, Brazil, and Boston, MA! We spent 5 days dialogging over prayer, how not to always be so busy, American materialism, and how to engage with what God is always doing around us. After that I took a vacation with my dad and my best friend Betsy to Nevada! Dad played poker and Betsy and I enjoyed all the lights, swimming pools, good food and a Cirque de Soleil show that Vegas had to offer.

2. June 1st 2008- drove to Orlando, FL for Campus Outreach's Summer Project. Here we had 150 students (31 from UNC and NC STATE!) come to learn about God and work at Disney World for 2 months! Students live in a hotel and we get them a job working 40 hours a week at Disney. In the evenings, they attended meetings where they learned how to grow in their relationship with Christ. There were also a ton of social activities for them.
I was there with the students for 2 months! I was a team-leader. My friend Stephen and I led a team of 35 students. We helped the different rooms on our team get to know each other, grow in their faith by meeting with them one-on-one-- often showing them how to study the Bible, and sought to develop in their planning and leadership skills by putting together a big weekly meeting! (the big weekly meeting includes skits, worship music, and a talk... the students learn how to do these over the summer then they do them on their different campuses throughout the school year!)

3. August 1st 2008- left Orlando (Very, very sad after all the new friendships I made) and drove to Chapel Hill! Two of my roommates from last year got engaged and I had to find a new living arrangement. God is so faithful. The house I live in this year is even closer to campus and bigger. I rent a room in this house along with 4 other girls. 2 are also on staff with campus outreach and the other 2 are graduate students at UNC.

4. August 22nd- 1st day of class! We helped students move into the dorms and showed our sophomore student leaders (those who want to learn how to minister to their peers here at UNC) how to reach out and build friendships with those around them. We asked many of them to go to the dorms with us and meet freshman. We have been following up with the new people we've met ever since... cooking meals for them, inviting them and their friends to tailgate with us, bringing them to our campus meetings, we held a retreat for the students, visited them in the dorms, eat with them in the cafeterias, asking them to our awesome church (www.summitchurch.cc) , but overall building friendships with them and asking God to give us boldness and creativity as we point these students to the purpose life they can find in a relationship with Jesus.

April Rewind...

Strange places that I slept this month.

In a box...

An organization at UNC hosted a night called "Box Out" it was an opportunity for students to experience homelessness in a small way by giving up the comforts of home for a night. Two of my favorite friends I've made this year- Anne and Sandra- asked me to be a part of their box community so of course I said yes, good opportunity to sleep outside. Our box was in the shape of a castle, amazing! I really enjoyed this night, met some great students who really cared about empathizing with people in the community who were less fortunate than them.

On the beach...
One night at the cafeteria freshmen Lizzy and Katherine were saying how much they wanted to go on a road trip to the beach but couldn't find a ride. So I said that I would take them! We drove 3 hours to Wilmington and slept on the beach. The next morning we watched the sunrise and drove back to Chapel Hill so they could get to class in time! The girls and I had a blast bonding in the car- we talked a lot about relationships and how to build a relationship that is focused on honoring God. On the way home we listened to an awesome sermon about how lots of people think that Christians are really narrow-minded, it started a great discussion.

On this deflated airmatress...
This airmatress just stays in my car, I don't even bother putting it back in the house! For the last 3 weekends I have gone on a road trip to Charleston, SC for planning/leadership training for this summer! I have been asked to be a team leader at our Summer Orlando Project-- it's a cool role where I will work about 15 hours at Disney, play a part in organizing the Project meals and socials, and lead a team of 40 students along with my team leader partner Stephen. To lead this team, I get to spend a lot of time with Sarah, Adria, Felicia, and Alex- four girls that are going to be room leaders. They get to experience discipleship first hand for the first time. The girls in their rooms this summer will have the joy of having a woman who walks with God pour into their lives- teaching them how to study the Word, pray, reach out to their co-workers at Disney World, and learn how to tend to their heart and character to walk with Jesus for a life-time! I love it, it is an honor to help lead and develop these women.

This picture is of me and Zach-- Zach is on staff with Campus Outreach at NC State and will also be a team leader this summer in Orlando.

Love is in the air...

Two of my favorite people are engaged!

Katie, my roommate and fellow Campus Outreach worker, is marrying her boyfriend Landon, a CO staff guy at NC State, this October! Woo hoo, I will miss her so much but am gaining an awesome new staff worker since Landon is gonna move to our campus and help us reach more men! Katie and I have lived together the last 3 years and I've learned so much about God from her

Katie, my SISTER, is marrying her boyfriend Drew! She came to visit me last week and Saturday when she flew back to Chicago Drew popped the question. When I tell people about the two of them I tell them about how I don't know how two people could be better matched up. If I could handpick a guy for my sister, it would be Drew. The joy I feel about a guy like him joining our family is inexplainable. He brings so much laughter and depth to our relationships, particularly how he loves my sister and is a big brother to Steven. I see God reign in their relationship and they are so in love and selfless towards one another. This is such good news.

Memorial Service

As I said in my last post, I went with some students to a memorial service about Eve Carson last week. There were over 10,000 students, faculty, family, and friends of Eve in the Dean Dome and the service was so beautiful. Eve's friends said the most wonderful words about her, they described her as one of those rare people that you meet that longs to change the world and is actually doing something about it. Here is a little of what the student body president just before Eve, Seth Dearmin, said about her:

"Eve was certainly more than a laundry list of superlatives [...] Let us today shed our last moments of silence for Eve. For though she led her life fully, she was not able to lead a full life. From this point forward, we must speak loudly and act boldly. Eve's mantle has been passed to us."

Eve was a prestigious Morehead-Cain scholar and a North Carolina Fellow who studied abroad in Cuba and spent summers volunteering in Ecuador, Egypt and Ghana as part of a school program. She was a political science and biology major. She was one of the top students in the class and was valedictorian of her high school. People just adored her, she was always dancing and making people laugh. Her best friend Anna said that Eve genuinely loved getting to know people and validated them when ever she could.

Walking up the bleachers I started thinking to myself how rare a life like Eve's is because there aren't many people out there who believe they can make a difference in this world. I thought to myself- although I likely don't have the courage to do so-that I would like to trade my life for Eve's, so that she might go on living and impacting people. Then it dawned on me in a way that's what I'm doing here at Chapel Hill. I will likely never travel like she did and achieve academically but perhaps I can lay down my life in order that students here at UNC will know Christ in a deeper way. Knowing God through relationship with Jesus is the only thing we can do with our lives that will truly bring transformation. And that will last forever.

And you don't have to be a full-time campus minister to do so, you can trade your life for other people's just by spending some of your time praying for them, offering a listening ear even when you need to be doing something else, and by sharing what God has given you.

Eve Carson

The Thursday before I left Carolina for Spring Break there was a lot of commotion in the Student Union. I was meeting with a student and we asked the editors of the Daily Tar Heel (the school newspaper) what was going on- they told us that the unidentified student shot the morning before was actually student body president Eve Carson.

School police made an announcement a few moments later and as some of her friends found out for the first time that Eve was lost to them, a lot of emotion and anger came out. It was so sad to see these students grieve.
Having lost a few friends myself, I can kind of relate even though all of our sufferings are so different.
Last week they found out that the men that shot Eve were in a gang in nearby Durham, they had also shot a student from Duke University in January.
Please pray for the students right now, not just here at UNC but all over the country. And pray for the people who have known nothing but violence and find their lives wasted away by the influence of gangs.
There is a memorial at the Dean Smith center tomorrow for Eve and I am going with a few freshman girls, I pray that we can somehow find Christ together in the midst of so much hurt.
I was stunned to realize the impact Eve's short life made on this world- look at this web-site to learn more about her and the ways her one life has changed things:

http://universityrelations.unc.edu/alert/carson/