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