Last Day

So today was the last day. I was at Trinity Baptist again and overall it was a really great day. I had the opportunity to talk to one of the guys who leads worship there and our conversation was really uplifting. We talked about having more than religion and how important the relationship aspect of Christianity is and how often it gets overlooked. After a week in a city where everyone tries to keep God out, there are churches of people who are seeking to spread his light. Even though we feel like we were fighting this battle all week, there are people in cities like this all over who have to fight every single day. It was just really encouraging to share a common ideal with someone who lives so far away. It made me really think of the verse for the trip “All over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and understood God’s grace in all its truth” Colossians  1:6.

God’s word and light really is still out there, aching to break free and be set upon the world. I think it’s important that, as believers, we all understand that we’re not alone in the fight and that maybe one day the love of Christ won’t just sporadically span throughout the country, but cover the world.

I’m so excited and enticed by God at the end of this week. Being my first mission trip, I wasn’t sure what exactly to expect. But I witnessed more growth and faith in this amazing group of people than some see in their entire lives. I myself became so dependent on God that I know that when it comes down to the wire, He’s the only strength I can truly rely on. I saw breath being breathed into churches who haven’t been able into inhale comfortably in so long it seems as though they’ve been put on a ventilator; just going through the motions. 

As a group, we’ve never been closer. I’ve been able to develop new relationships with people that I’ve only ever known as acquaintances. I’ve seen people bust through their comfort zones and restrictions they put on their abilities and replace them with the glorious light and comfort of God. In doing so, they have completed tasks and enticed SO many people to Christ. It’s literally amazing how a few days can so totally impact our lives. I’m going to Guatemala this summer, and before this trip I was afraid of things that  I may have to do in order to glorify God . I know now, though, that when I trust him, I can accomplish anything and that fear is just somewhat of an excuse to be mediocre.

That’s the most important part of this trip for me: God is not mediocre. And God doesn’t accept mediocre. The problem with cities like LA is that everyone accepts a mediocre emotional life. People everywhere continually search for emotional stability in tangible and faulty things. Being good enough isn’t good enough for God. Christ didn’t die on the cross in the most violent sort of way for us to walk around taking Him for granted.  Taking the easy way out is taking Christ’s death and life and belittling them to the point that they are just things we think about on major holidays.

LA 2010 reaffirmed a faith that I didn’t realize was faltering. 11 people got baptized this week. ELEVEN. And being part of that group, I still can hardly believe it. For those who think that a mission trip doesn’t make a difference, they have never been more wrong. To take a group of faithful people, who love Christ and came here to spread his light, and take them to the point of merely obeying God, that’s an amazing thing. If anything, the mission trip impacted our group by making them realize how important obeying God is. But there’s more. We impacted a city. We fought the fight. We got up every morning and worked to draw people to Christ. And if we can draw people in by making a church look great, painting or passing out flyers, just think about how much of a difference could be made by doing even more. This is the first mission trip of many for me. I know that God is not mediocre. I know that he won’t accept mediocre. And I hope that everyone we’ve encountered saw the power of Christ this week. If we were able to even make one person see that, then it was time well spent!

Heart-Scraping

I feel like today really started with Nick’s sermon tonight. Well…”sermon” doesn’t exactly fit, when you think about Nick Cooper…message…Yes. Message is a better word I think. After a day of physically getting down to business at Trinity Baptist (after, of course, my day of evangelism…which lead to the tears) we met in the sanctuary for Nick give us a pretty powerful message. He began by saying that powerful people aren’t tired. Which really slaps you in the face when you feel like you want to sleep on the floor…and when you may or may not have fallen asleep on the steps outside the church with a paintbrush in your hand. If you think that’s a joke: nope. Legitimately happened. To be fair though, it was only for about 3 seconds when my painting partner woke me up. Does it count? You decide. My vote is no, however.

Anyhow, Nick opened with the powerful people bit and then went on to say that powerful people impact the world. And to be a success he referenced Romans 5. He said you have to

1. Go after peace.

 2. Stand in Grace and

3. Have hope.

Which, coincidentally, you can only get when you’re chasing after peace and running behind the safety shield of grace when you feel yourself slipping. It’s weird how Nick can completely captivate a room by breaking all the rules. It’s something to be admired, I think. Countless people try to break rules every day and in their radical quest to reach people, they often turn them away. But Nick has this ability to reach every person sitting in the room merely by saying he doesn’t care what we think, as long as he is spreading God’s light to the world. The message was awesome. But what really got me was the realization peace is only achieved when you go after it. It doesn’t fall into your lap.

More often than not, I have the tendency to love the grace, and have the hope. But the hope continually falters and the grace becomes an excuse for messing up. I think that this is where most Christians fall short in making a difference, they forget that to get peace, you have to bow down to God and give him what is keeping you from having the peace that is yours for free, that Christ died for. It’s like today when I was laying down tile (tangent: construction work is definitely not my strong point). First, you have to peel up all the tile, and it was pretty hard to get up. This can be compared to the obvious sins that take prayer and a little work, but are pretty easy to overcome. Then, you have to scrape all the old glue off the floor that that held those tiles down. Now that is some work. That is like the deep sin of your heart: the hidden sin that makes you have no peace. You can’t really see it, but when you start scraping, it comes off little by little. And your hands hurt, your back hurts, your knees hurt. It literally hurts when you have to scrape away the deep sin. So once your floor is all clean, you have to fill the holes and the cracks with cement filler. Just like that filler, Christ comes into your life and fills all the cracks. All the holes and all the ugly spots that the glue of deep sin once stuck to. But even after the holes are filled, and God has some time to fix your heart, He goes back and scrapes the holes. He continually perfects them and makes them smooth. It’s almost as if the holes never even existed.  Only after every bump is smoothed, that the new glue, the Glue of Christ is reapplied and the new tile, the new life is laid down. See, the hidden parts, the holes and the glue hold down the outward appearance. The part that the world sees. And if you don’t keep up maintenance on the tile, taking care of it, the process has to start all over again.  It’s extremely tedious and painful. But the end result is a beautiful peaceful tile design. The only way to get all this accomplished is by letting God fill the holes that the deep sin filled for so long, and may still be filling. Once he fills those holes, once you let him scrape your heart and take away the bumps and the ugly parts, the new tile/life can sit beautifully and evenly. That peace that comes with God filling your heart comes from allowing him to take away the bad, and add the new.

I know that this analogy may be a little far-fetched, but when you think tiles for a few days straight, it makes perfect sense! I just know that God has to continually scrape my heart and make it smooth so that my life matches my heart. Sometimes it’s so easy to walk around and have God in your heart, but not allow him to smooth you out, or still have the old glue holding down the old sin that your heart and your life don’t match up. It’s up to us to allow God to do all this work, and it’s going to hurt, but I know that the end is worth the pain and that waking up every morning knowing the ultimate God loves me and wants me for his own is something that needs to be shared with the world.

It’s Wednesday night, and as far as I’m concerned, LA 2010 has been a success!!

Changes

Today started off pretty weird. After probably the longest day of my life, I spent a lot of time praying last night for God to prepare my heart to evangelize today. I realize that the day of rejection was only a small glimpse of the rejection Christ felt every day of His life. I know now what it feels like for people to turn down the one thing that means the most to you in this world.

 So I walked into breakfast all ready to take on the world and Nick automatically told me that I had been changed to a new group. And I would be tiling a floor. After a back and forth conversation about me wondering if he was changing me because I had a minor (ok major) cry fest after I got back from all the slammed doors last night. He assured me, however, that the fact that I was broken hearted but more because they needed me at a new site. Although not entirely sure that the move wasn’t attributed to the tears, I moved on to a new crew.

 It was a complete switch from the day before! I laid tile like a mad woman. And had the amazing opportunity to get closer to some people I knew, but wasn’t very close with.

 Speaking of getting closer to people, last night before bed I had a lot on my heart. Emotionally I felt broken and needed some advice. Instead of asking, I sat alone and was eventually approached by Rebecca. I’ve known her for a while, but we had never really had a legitimate conversation that consisted of more then the usual “hey how are you?” We ended up talking for a really long time and the best part was, it was like she knew exactly how to open my eyes. For the first time in a long time, I was able to see some of my flaws and things that I was doing to hurt my relationships with other people, but more importantly, my relationship with God. After talking to her, I was left unable to point fingers or blame anyone but myself. When I woke up this morning, I realized how blessed I am to be on this mission trip and have the opportunity to talk to and connect with so many people!

 Tonights service: awesome. Bobby Scott preached and it was as if he was specifically talking to each individual person. After 5 baptisms (that’s right: 5), Mr. Scott talked to us about loving God and staying on the path chasing  after him. Personally, I knew that he was talking to me when he spoke about the “christian checklist” I mentioned yesterday. He used Paul in Phillipians 3 and counting everything that you own, tangible and not, as loss in the eyes of Christ. He asked us if when we are at our lowest point, when we have absolutely nothing, would we still count Christ? If we were to divide up everything we own into one column, and put Christ in the “asset” column and put everything else in a column that meant nothng, could we do it?

 After a few literally life changing days, I know that Christ died to be my everything. And to not give him every part of my heart, to not let the perfect surgeon go in and take out every bad part of my heart, is to let what He did for me in vain. I don’t want to live my life not honoring Christ and not giving him glory with every aspect of my life. I know that if I’m going to do all these wonderful things, like come to LA on a mission trip, I need to let Christ take over my heart to be successful. And as long as He dwells within us, we can all be successful no matter what the task.

The Plunge

Well, today we got assigned to our crews. The funny thing is, I had a gut feeling for the past week or so that I would be put on the evangelism team. I knew that the people who knew me within Paradigm would push for me to step into the role of evangelist because most people see me as the outgoing sort of girl. The only problem is, I have not only been expecting to be on the evangelism team, I was almost terrified of it. But I knew God would put me where he wanted me, so at 10 am this morning my team went out into the city to spread news of a church whose numbers need some help.

We were given a list of what to say, how to say it and some really good advice: “only 3 out of every 10 doors you knock on will come open the door…if they’re home.” 30%…it sounds pretty much as minute as you can get. If I was a gambler (which I’m not) I would never bet on 70% failure. But because I love Jesus and he’s changed my life, I went out with a let’s-get-‘em attitude.

Needless to say, it was really hard. My team and I tried to keep the spirits high and the momentum going throughout the day. They shut the door, we moved on to the next house. They said they didn’t need prayer, we prayed anyways. They wouldn’t come to the door; we left them a packet on their doorstep. And as the day went on, I felt pretty good; I kept letting the denial sort of roll off my back. And there was A LOT of rejection. More than I was prepared for. Everyone tried to prep us, telling us that a lot of people would be shut off from wanting to hear what we have to say. But as much as someone can try to prepare you, it was one of those things you don’t listen to because you have to experience it.

And oh did I experience it today… I’ve always been the sort of girl who doesn’t get told “no.” If I don’t agree with something, I’m the first to speak up and I’m usually listened to. If I don’t agree with a grade I received on a paper, I make my case in my professor’s office and usually get the points I believe I earned. But today, I feel, made up for a lifetime of open doors. Door after door was shut on us. Gates surrounded over ¾ of the houses we walked by, and we weren’t allowed to go into the gates. So 75% of the houses, right of the bat, were off limits for us to talk to about Jesus.

On the bus ride to our nightly worship, I sat and started to contemplate on all of this. Rejection after rejection was screaming at me to stop. To give up. When we got to dinner, I lost it. I realized that for the first time in my life, I was being told “no” over and over. And I couldn’t handle it. I officially became the crazy girl who cries at dinner and has to leave. A good friend came up and told me to read Jeremiah 1 tomorrow in my free time. He gave me a brief synopsis, saying that people aren’t rejecting me, they’re rejecting Christ. And it’s my job to go out and be there to let them know their options, and if they still turn away from Christ, then they have to deal with it in heaven. It was a comfort, but my heart was still aching from the rejection and the knowledge that such an influential city had gated itself off so well, that getting through seems impossible.

A week ago, I was giving my testimony to a girl I disciple. I told her that I had been baptized, but before I was saved. And it was about a week ago, I realized that the bible says that we’re supposed to get baptized AFTER we’re saved. I got baptized because I realized I hadn’t been, and everyone I knew had. I figured, it was something I needed to check off on the “Christian list” so many of us are accustomed to living our lives by. So I talked to a few people and to Nick and Ryan and we decided that I needed to get re-baptized because everything finally “clicked” for me. I wanted to obey God and he tells me to get baptized, and I wanted to get everything in the right order. So the plan was for me to get re-baptized tonight. But after a day like today, I almost turned away. I felt my heart hardening and telling me that it wouldn’t make a difference anyhow. I know now that that was just my flesh feeding me all sorts of negativity.

I, Kalie Larson, got baptized tonight, March 15, 2010. And everything made sense. I knew why I was doing it and I knew that the aching to obey God was a little better because I made a step in the right in the right direction. Nick told everyone before I “took the plunge” that I have been saved for a long time, but that I got things out of order and I wanted to get them right. He talked a little bit about baptism and told everyone that there were probably a lot of people who needed to the same thing, and that he was proud of me for being courageous enough to step forward and obey God. Because of that, 4 other people got the courage to come forward and make the decision to be baptized. That’s 4 believers that I go to church and paradigm with. Nick came up to me after the service and told me, that even though I felt like I hadn’t made a difference today, the mere act of me stepping forward had influenced and given other people courage to do the same, to step forward and obey God. Of course, the glory goes to God because he has probably been knocking on the doors of people’s hearts for as long as he was me. But after a day like today, I really needed that encouragement.

It’s completely weird how, at exactly the right moment, when you’re at your weakest point, God will use you in the most perfect way to make you realize that everything you’re doing to shine His light is TOTALLY worth it. I know that tomorrow, I’m going to get doors shut in my face. I know that people are going to be rude. I know that those gosh darn fences are going to be up at most of the houses, keeping us out. And I know that there will be even tougher and stronger fences around the hearts of some of the people we talk to. But I also know, that, “in all things, God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” Romans 8:28

Tomorrow is a new day! And I can’t wait to get a hundred doors shut in my face, so that maybe I can bring even one person closer to eternity with a wonderful and merciful Savior. God can use me. God can use a rock if He wants to. I mean, what more encouragement does someone need than knowing you’re exactly the right person for exactly the right job that God has planned for you? Tonight….that’s all the encouragement I need.

The Adventure Begins

Being 21 and on my first mission trip has proved to be quite an adventure thus far. It seems a bit odd, though, to have everyone ask “Oh is this really your first mission trip?” It’s pretty much become evident that I should have gotten into this business a while ago J .

Before I came on the trip I had a lot going though my head. Questions like: What exactly will I be doing? Answer: They’re too vague to really be sure what my specific jobs will be. How involved with the people will I be? Answer: Involved. Why does everyone love mission trip so much? Most common answer: Because it’s awesome. So..basically…on day two of being in California I know that…I’ll be working…maybe with people…having an awesome time… In my “younger” (that’s right, early twenties is tragically old haha) days, before I really understood what having a relationship with Christ was, this probably would have really bothered me. But now, that I have Christ living inside me and aching to be spread to the dark places of the world…well, I just think it’s awesome too.

I’m not going to sugar coat the bus ride…20-something hours in a seat with a bunch of people who have the “Oh my gosh let’s stay up all night” attitude sort of threw me off at first. I knew that as soon as I got on the bus my negativity would either make or break the ride. But as soon as I got on the bus, I went through the list of things I wanted accomplished on this trip. One of my items was to grow in relationships I normally wouldn’t. It’s funny how when you ask God for help He will often times just throw you into the middle of a test and say “well here ya go!” As soon as I realized what He was up to, I changed my mindset and began to see the beauty of being in a crammed space with a bunch of other believers talking about God and getting hyped on the fact that we’re going to be showing Christ to people who might go their entire lives without getting a glimpse of who He is if we weren’t going. The jokes, games, seat switching and the sound of everyone who didn’t want the person next to them to know they had snacks opening them at 3 am to sneak them made the trip on a smelly double-decker bus more than worth it.

We got to Redondo Beach last night and headed straight for the pier. As we were walking around, getting food and eventually moving to the beach, it was weird how my perspective of this trip had changed. At the risk of sounding cliché, I will say that Sunday morning had a huge impact on my life. Nick decided we would worship on the beach, something I probably would have been uncomfortable with a week ago. But I was genuinely excited to be praising my God and having people walk by and stare…it’s an awesome feeling knowing Christ is sitting right next to you giving you a “hey go ahead and stare..or, even better, come join” attitude. Nick spoke a bit and then had us do something weird. He told us to walk into the surf and write the one thing that we needed God to wash away in the sand, and then let him wash it away. I wrote something down and then realized that I had written down something I was comfortable with other people seeing. So I went farther out into the water and wrote down the one thing that I truly feel like keeps me back from Christ. And then I watched Him wash it away. Now he obviously didn’t completely heal me but just the symbol behind it made it really quick. I looked at the sand and realized that that sand was once huge rocks. And now it’s soft between our toes. God is a continuous ocean working on us and washing away the things that keep us locked away form Him. This morning helped me realize that I can’t wait for my heart to be soft as the sand that covers the beaches. I made a decision about the trip this morning: let God heal me and slap me around a bit with his waves of mercy…he’s always trying. And I can let him do it the hard way, or I can just give in. So here we go! LA-Mission Trip-2010. Guns up! Let’s do this!