Free writing-
I wrote this a few weeks ago for an english assignment and decided I would post it on here and see what people think :)
Free writing-
I was told to set a timer for 3-5 minutes and free write. In other words, write about something that interest me and write whatever came to my mind about that subject for a few minutes. Here is goes...
Justice- one word, one word heavily laden with so much meaning for so many. Justice, something some never experience in their life due to many circumstances. Some never seek justice, instead they chose to sit back and ignore the plights of other people's lives, While others assume because they have never directly experienced injustice or met some who has, it simply doesn't exist. But for me, it is something I have always felt a strong pull to bring into the lives of those suffering from injustice. I myself have lived life in a country where injustice never effected me personally. But as I get older I realize more and more how much injustice is in the land of the freedom, and equality. Justice is something that is needed everywhere in the world. In some places it may be more apparent than in others. In some countries the world can see the injustice people are suffering at the hands of the government, in other countries, such as the United States, people don't seem to realize the injustice and corruption, because of the freedoms we have in this country, most people don't realize the severe injustice being suffered in this country. People assume corruption of the police and law enforcement is a thing of the past, unfortunately it's not. And how do we explain the massive numbers of children being sold into forced prostitution in our own country? This is just one example of the injustice being suffered in one place in the world. There are so many more! So why do we not fight for justice more? Why do we fear those who bring injustice and persecution?
The need for justice in the world is so great. So what are you going to do to fight for justice?
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Day #1- Sunday
I know this is wayyy over due, considering it has been over a month since I posted the teaser, But here it is.
Our first full day in the beautiful state of NY was spent in the city itself. But thats not how our day started.
At 7:15 am we had to meet outside to pray before boarding our blue school bus into the city. (it blended in so well in the south Bronx, not!). Little did we know before boarding our bus we were gonna need a lot of that prayer for our bus. We had some pretty major mechanical problems, things like the brakes not working very well and reverse not working hardly at all. Minor issues of course...
One our way into the city we had a group prayer for the day and how God would be using us to minister to the city, then we had 30 minutes of silence to do our morning devo which Ben had prepared for us. This first morning we read Psalm 48:1-14
It talks about how the temple was a place of refuge and shelter at the highest part of the city and we were challenged to think about how things have changed in our cities because of sin, the church is a place of hypocrites and people are afriad that they are too sinful for church so they just never go because they don't want other people to judge them.
At Revolution Church we were able to see how Jeff and Rachel and the others involved in ministry there have been able to start breaking down the stereotypes and get a big variety of people through the doors. People who may not have associated with a church before a church like Revolution came to their area of the city. And get people united with others believers in the congregation they may not have otherwise even talked to. The diversity in the room was so refreshing. One thing I was challenged so much by at Revolution was the way these people, who live in an area of the city where they could very well be killed for their beliefs, were absolutely living out Romans 1:16-
I am NOT ASHAMED of The Gosple, because it is the POWER OF GOD for the SALVATION of EVERYONE who BELIEVES: First for the Jew, then for the Gentile.
They were so unashamed, they didn't care what Joe Schmo sitting next to them thought about how they were worshiping, they were there to worship God and live unashamed for him. It was very challenging for me, how many times am I more worried about what other people think about what I am doing during worship, am I singing on key? did I just clap to loud?
And the truth is, even if I was singing horribly off key, clapping as loud as possible on the off beat, if I am praising God and only focused on worshiping him, nothing else matters. Why do we worry about what other people think, we aren't there to worship them and make them happy, we should be worshiping to bring glory and honor to God.
After church we stayed to have lunch with the congregation and were able to talk to some people about why we were there and just meet other members of the church. Then after we finished lunch, we all got back on the bus and we brought a few people from the church with us. Some we dropped off at their appartments, and some we brought with us to go on our NYC exposure trip. We first drove around quite a bit and then we went to down town Manhattan.
In Manhattan we walked around time square, and my group which started out as me and Ali, joined up with big John, and Josh S.
We went into the HUGE toys-r-us, Madame Tussauds, the Ripley's believe it, or not museum. We also went to some famous singers restaurant he recently opened on broadway, I can't remember who he was but I know his guitar was named and is almost as famous as he is!
We walked around times square and the surrounding areas for about an hour, handing out tracts and seeing the sights, then we walked over to meet our bus.
From Manhattan we made our way over into Brooklyn and drove past some beautiful neighborhoods, then we made our way to one of my favorite places of the week...
CONEY ISLAND!!!
Coney Island, seems like a pretty normal place from the movies and the name right? WRONG! That place was pretty crazy, But I loved it! The people were... well they were people. It was pretty fun to sit back with a Nathan's hot dog from the original stand on the board walk and just people watch to relax. I again ended up in Ali's group, it was just her and I. We were given tracts to hand out by Jeff and big John. So as Ali and I were walking trying to figure out who to talk to first these two guys probably in their mid twenties walked up to us and asked Ali to take a picture of them. Some background, Ali is an AMAZING photographer, and she was carrying around her quite impressive camera, which these two clearly noticed. So after Ali took a picture of them I took advantage of them standing there to hand them a tract, we ended up having a really awesome chance to share with them as to why we were in NY and what we were doing here. They were both from Long Island and the one remained pretty quiet after reading the tract but the other who had originally approached us starting talking about how he had been saved the year before while serving our country in Iraq. He was stationed in a very war torn area and was the only troop from his unit who returned. He said it was after is best friend was killed within an hour of being with him that he realized he needed a savior and ended up going to a fellow soldier who he knew was a believer and accepted Christ. It was a pretty cool conversation to have in a place like Coney Island. After we said by to them Ali and I were walking around and saw the same 2 guys talking to 3 guys from the revolution church who had come with us. We thought it was pretty funny, and also God clearly had more to be done in their lives, such a cool moment.
After this Ali and I decided we were ready for our Nathan's hotdogs and went over got our dogs and were just sitting on the boardwalk staring out at the water which was really pretty the way the light was coming down from the clouds. Perfect timing of course, right as we started walking to meet up with everyone, the rain that had been holding off all day started to come. We then decided where we were gonna head for dinner, we decided to head back to Manhattan for pizza.
When we arrived in Manhattan we went to the uno's at pier 16 in downtown by the water front, while some of us were a little disappointed we didn't get to have pizza in little Italy and had to have Chicago style in NY we were just excited to be eating!
Dinner turned into quite the event when I had a small altercation with another girl in the bathroom. It mostly consisted of a girl clearly under the influence of alcohol screaming profanity at me and me barely being able to understand a word she was saying while trying to explain to a girl from Italy who spoke very little english what was going on. Needless to say there were MANY misunderstandings in that 5 minutes. If you want the whole story just ask me about it sometime.
I also forgot a pretty big detail about this first day of the trip. I might have mentioned it in passing earlier, but here it is in detail. Saturday morning I hadn't been feeling great, sinus headache, ear ache, but really nothing out of the ordinary for me. Then as the day went on my symptoms seemed to get worse. By lights out Sat night my voice was a little raspy. And then Sunday morning rolled around. I had NO voice. For one of the first times in my life I had completely lost my voice! I had “lost” it a few times before, meaning it got a little worn out by the end of 3 day swim meets. But never like this, I could barely say a word. But if you know me at all, you know that not having a voice does not stop me from talking!
I made it through most of the day having to whisper to whoever I was sitting next to, or shout to be heard, well what I though was shouting and apparently I was still very quiet!
Who knew quiet would be used to describe me, ever! Especially when I am with my best friends in one of my favorite places in the world!
So as you can see, this complicated things. Me trying to speak to someone to explain what was going on (which I was a little unsure of myself) when they didn't speak the same language, and I am sure my own english was almost as unintelligible as the girl who was slurring her speech like NO OTHER!
So over all, it was an interesting first day. From Uno's we drove around manhattan for a bit, slowly making our way back to the Bronx. We got to drive through Alphabet city where the German consulate happens to be located which made me VERY excited! Then from there we drove back to the bronx to drop the people who had spent the day with us back at their various apartments and then headed back to camp. We got back really late after a 6:15 am start. It was sometime after midnight by the time we got back to our dorms, just in time to go get in bed for a longgg nights sleep... NOT! Maybe in some alternate universe, nope, we had team debriefing. Which thankfully was pretty short. Not super short but it could have been much longer!
After that we truly crashed into our bunks after a LONG day!
Plus we had to be up 7:30 technically but if you wanted any chance of a shower it was up at 6:30 to have time to get ready for a long day of physical labor around the camp.
Well there will be more about day #2 Monday in a post hopefully later this week.
Thanks for reading about my adventures so far!
In service to Him,
Abby
Galatians 2:20
Our first full day in the beautiful state of NY was spent in the city itself. But thats not how our day started.
At 7:15 am we had to meet outside to pray before boarding our blue school bus into the city. (it blended in so well in the south Bronx, not!). Little did we know before boarding our bus we were gonna need a lot of that prayer for our bus. We had some pretty major mechanical problems, things like the brakes not working very well and reverse not working hardly at all. Minor issues of course...
One our way into the city we had a group prayer for the day and how God would be using us to minister to the city, then we had 30 minutes of silence to do our morning devo which Ben had prepared for us. This first morning we read Psalm 48:1-14
It talks about how the temple was a place of refuge and shelter at the highest part of the city and we were challenged to think about how things have changed in our cities because of sin, the church is a place of hypocrites and people are afriad that they are too sinful for church so they just never go because they don't want other people to judge them.
At Revolution Church we were able to see how Jeff and Rachel and the others involved in ministry there have been able to start breaking down the stereotypes and get a big variety of people through the doors. People who may not have associated with a church before a church like Revolution came to their area of the city. And get people united with others believers in the congregation they may not have otherwise even talked to. The diversity in the room was so refreshing. One thing I was challenged so much by at Revolution was the way these people, who live in an area of the city where they could very well be killed for their beliefs, were absolutely living out Romans 1:16-
I am NOT ASHAMED of The Gosple, because it is the POWER OF GOD for the SALVATION of EVERYONE who BELIEVES: First for the Jew, then for the Gentile.
They were so unashamed, they didn't care what Joe Schmo sitting next to them thought about how they were worshiping, they were there to worship God and live unashamed for him. It was very challenging for me, how many times am I more worried about what other people think about what I am doing during worship, am I singing on key? did I just clap to loud?
And the truth is, even if I was singing horribly off key, clapping as loud as possible on the off beat, if I am praising God and only focused on worshiping him, nothing else matters. Why do we worry about what other people think, we aren't there to worship them and make them happy, we should be worshiping to bring glory and honor to God.
After church we stayed to have lunch with the congregation and were able to talk to some people about why we were there and just meet other members of the church. Then after we finished lunch, we all got back on the bus and we brought a few people from the church with us. Some we dropped off at their appartments, and some we brought with us to go on our NYC exposure trip. We first drove around quite a bit and then we went to down town Manhattan.
In Manhattan we walked around time square, and my group which started out as me and Ali, joined up with big John, and Josh S.
We went into the HUGE toys-r-us, Madame Tussauds, the Ripley's believe it, or not museum. We also went to some famous singers restaurant he recently opened on broadway, I can't remember who he was but I know his guitar was named and is almost as famous as he is!
We walked around times square and the surrounding areas for about an hour, handing out tracts and seeing the sights, then we walked over to meet our bus.
From Manhattan we made our way over into Brooklyn and drove past some beautiful neighborhoods, then we made our way to one of my favorite places of the week...
CONEY ISLAND!!!
Coney Island, seems like a pretty normal place from the movies and the name right? WRONG! That place was pretty crazy, But I loved it! The people were... well they were people. It was pretty fun to sit back with a Nathan's hot dog from the original stand on the board walk and just people watch to relax. I again ended up in Ali's group, it was just her and I. We were given tracts to hand out by Jeff and big John. So as Ali and I were walking trying to figure out who to talk to first these two guys probably in their mid twenties walked up to us and asked Ali to take a picture of them. Some background, Ali is an AMAZING photographer, and she was carrying around her quite impressive camera, which these two clearly noticed. So after Ali took a picture of them I took advantage of them standing there to hand them a tract, we ended up having a really awesome chance to share with them as to why we were in NY and what we were doing here. They were both from Long Island and the one remained pretty quiet after reading the tract but the other who had originally approached us starting talking about how he had been saved the year before while serving our country in Iraq. He was stationed in a very war torn area and was the only troop from his unit who returned. He said it was after is best friend was killed within an hour of being with him that he realized he needed a savior and ended up going to a fellow soldier who he knew was a believer and accepted Christ. It was a pretty cool conversation to have in a place like Coney Island. After we said by to them Ali and I were walking around and saw the same 2 guys talking to 3 guys from the revolution church who had come with us. We thought it was pretty funny, and also God clearly had more to be done in their lives, such a cool moment.
After this Ali and I decided we were ready for our Nathan's hotdogs and went over got our dogs and were just sitting on the boardwalk staring out at the water which was really pretty the way the light was coming down from the clouds. Perfect timing of course, right as we started walking to meet up with everyone, the rain that had been holding off all day started to come. We then decided where we were gonna head for dinner, we decided to head back to Manhattan for pizza.
When we arrived in Manhattan we went to the uno's at pier 16 in downtown by the water front, while some of us were a little disappointed we didn't get to have pizza in little Italy and had to have Chicago style in NY we were just excited to be eating!
Dinner turned into quite the event when I had a small altercation with another girl in the bathroom. It mostly consisted of a girl clearly under the influence of alcohol screaming profanity at me and me barely being able to understand a word she was saying while trying to explain to a girl from Italy who spoke very little english what was going on. Needless to say there were MANY misunderstandings in that 5 minutes. If you want the whole story just ask me about it sometime.
I also forgot a pretty big detail about this first day of the trip. I might have mentioned it in passing earlier, but here it is in detail. Saturday morning I hadn't been feeling great, sinus headache, ear ache, but really nothing out of the ordinary for me. Then as the day went on my symptoms seemed to get worse. By lights out Sat night my voice was a little raspy. And then Sunday morning rolled around. I had NO voice. For one of the first times in my life I had completely lost my voice! I had “lost” it a few times before, meaning it got a little worn out by the end of 3 day swim meets. But never like this, I could barely say a word. But if you know me at all, you know that not having a voice does not stop me from talking!
I made it through most of the day having to whisper to whoever I was sitting next to, or shout to be heard, well what I though was shouting and apparently I was still very quiet!
Who knew quiet would be used to describe me, ever! Especially when I am with my best friends in one of my favorite places in the world!
So as you can see, this complicated things. Me trying to speak to someone to explain what was going on (which I was a little unsure of myself) when they didn't speak the same language, and I am sure my own english was almost as unintelligible as the girl who was slurring her speech like NO OTHER!
So over all, it was an interesting first day. From Uno's we drove around manhattan for a bit, slowly making our way back to the Bronx. We got to drive through Alphabet city where the German consulate happens to be located which made me VERY excited! Then from there we drove back to the bronx to drop the people who had spent the day with us back at their various apartments and then headed back to camp. We got back really late after a 6:15 am start. It was sometime after midnight by the time we got back to our dorms, just in time to go get in bed for a longgg nights sleep... NOT! Maybe in some alternate universe, nope, we had team debriefing. Which thankfully was pretty short. Not super short but it could have been much longer!
After that we truly crashed into our bunks after a LONG day!
Plus we had to be up 7:30 technically but if you wanted any chance of a shower it was up at 6:30 to have time to get ready for a long day of physical labor around the camp.
Well there will be more about day #2 Monday in a post hopefully later this week.
Thanks for reading about my adventures so far!
In service to Him,
Abby
Galatians 2:20
Thursday, July 29, 2010
New York Overview!!
Alright, So I am not much of a writer but I recently took a 1 week trip to The Bronx NY that changed my life and I just have so many stories to share and things to say about that trip that a blog seemed like the only reasonable way to get everything I wanted to tell everyone,out. That is without spending the rest of my life talking about it. So here we go!
This will be short because I really need to get some sleep. So this will be just a quick explanation about what I, a 16 year old girl from the Washington D.C. suburbs, was doing in an area like the South Bronx.
My youth group from church took a trip to partner up with Children's Bible Fellowship (CBF) based in Carmel NY, about an hour north of the city, and The Revolution Church located in Hunts Point, South Bronx.
CBF runs two summer camps in Carmel. One, Camp Joy, is a camp for kids from the inner city, most all from families living in poverty, and who otherwise wouldn't get the chance to experience a summer camp.
The Other, Camp Hope, is geared also towards kids from the inner city, however, Camp Hope is for kids who are typically outcast and scorned by society where they are from, it is a camp for the Mentally and Physically handicapped.
All the campers are sent to camp on money donated by the generosity of others, they don't have to pay anything. A large number of kids who come to the camp have never been out of the boroughs of NYC. A few of the campers are from the projects of Jersey also.
The camp is where we stayed for lodging, so for 2 of the days we spent time doing various jobs around the camp. But there will be more about that later on.
The Revolution Church was our other "base" in the city if you will. Revolution Church is also supported in part by CBF.
The Revolution Church is based in Hunts Point South Bronx, It meets currently in a small rented space Located in downtown Hunts Point on Lafayette Ave, and Longfellow. The Revolution Church is an urban church that reaches out to the many hurting people in the Bronx. The need in the Bronx for a saviour is huge! The Church works to reach out and share God's love with the community and has been blessed with some great growth over the past few years. The church is made up of Pastor Jeff and his family, Jon who works for CBF, pastor Bryan and a few others also help out. This is the "staff", most are volunteers. There are also a few members of the church who are very involved who are from Hunts Point.
We did work in the city with pastor Jeff and some of the other members of Revolution church.
Most of what we did in the city was handing out tracts, giving meals to the homeless, doing shows and performing for kids at the park and doing outreach with them, and singing on the subway and Staten Island Ferry.
We also went to the Sunday service at Revolution, and the Wednesday service at Beacon Bible Church in Kingsbridge near Harlem, and the Thursday service at Revolution church.
So basically most of our work on this trip consisted of reaching out and loving those who didn't have a whole lotta love in their lives.
Over the next few post I will share a favorite story or two from each day and a basic outline of what we did each day.
Well that is all for this post.
So Thanks for reading!!!!!
Abby
This will be short because I really need to get some sleep. So this will be just a quick explanation about what I, a 16 year old girl from the Washington D.C. suburbs, was doing in an area like the South Bronx.
My youth group from church took a trip to partner up with Children's Bible Fellowship (CBF) based in Carmel NY, about an hour north of the city, and The Revolution Church located in Hunts Point, South Bronx.
CBF runs two summer camps in Carmel. One, Camp Joy, is a camp for kids from the inner city, most all from families living in poverty, and who otherwise wouldn't get the chance to experience a summer camp.
The Other, Camp Hope, is geared also towards kids from the inner city, however, Camp Hope is for kids who are typically outcast and scorned by society where they are from, it is a camp for the Mentally and Physically handicapped.
All the campers are sent to camp on money donated by the generosity of others, they don't have to pay anything. A large number of kids who come to the camp have never been out of the boroughs of NYC. A few of the campers are from the projects of Jersey also.
The camp is where we stayed for lodging, so for 2 of the days we spent time doing various jobs around the camp. But there will be more about that later on.
The Revolution Church was our other "base" in the city if you will. Revolution Church is also supported in part by CBF.
The Revolution Church is based in Hunts Point South Bronx, It meets currently in a small rented space Located in downtown Hunts Point on Lafayette Ave, and Longfellow. The Revolution Church is an urban church that reaches out to the many hurting people in the Bronx. The need in the Bronx for a saviour is huge! The Church works to reach out and share God's love with the community and has been blessed with some great growth over the past few years. The church is made up of Pastor Jeff and his family, Jon who works for CBF, pastor Bryan and a few others also help out. This is the "staff", most are volunteers. There are also a few members of the church who are very involved who are from Hunts Point.
We did work in the city with pastor Jeff and some of the other members of Revolution church.
Most of what we did in the city was handing out tracts, giving meals to the homeless, doing shows and performing for kids at the park and doing outreach with them, and singing on the subway and Staten Island Ferry.
We also went to the Sunday service at Revolution, and the Wednesday service at Beacon Bible Church in Kingsbridge near Harlem, and the Thursday service at Revolution church.
So basically most of our work on this trip consisted of reaching out and loving those who didn't have a whole lotta love in their lives.
Over the next few post I will share a favorite story or two from each day and a basic outline of what we did each day.
Well that is all for this post.
So Thanks for reading!!!!!
Abby
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