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joegevas
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Name: Joe
Birthday: 6/27/1981
Gender: Male
Interests: Baseball, basketball, football, reading, studying the bible, going to the beach, starbucks, barnes & noble
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
12/1/2005
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| So I took a short break from blogging. For those of you I haven't talked to in a while, I'm still alive and things are going great. Ministry has just been very consuming. We're finishing up our new student outreach portion of the semester next weekend with our fall conference.
Tonight at large group God encouraged us big time. We've been trying some new stuff with worship and really focusing on discipling our worship leaders pretty intensely which has caused our worship team to dwindle in numbers. So we've got two solid disciples that are leading worship, Josh and Te and they're doing great. Enrique and I decided that either he or I should be up there to help lead worship so that we can have some authoritative spiritual leadership during worship, mainly to pray. So this is going to be a first for me, to help with worship. I'll keep you updated on how that goes.
Like I was saying, God encouraged us tonight with a nice turnout of about 50 students and most of them were engaged the whole time. And after the service we had our final fall conference sign ups. Before tonight Enrique and I were pretty worried because only 8 of the people that signed up to come had paid any money. And if they don't pay they're not really committed to coming. So we were worried, but tonight after service we had 32 people sign up and pay! We couldn't believe it. And to top that off, we hung out after the service and danced for like 30 minutes. We were doing a lot of R Kelly, but keeping it holy.
Besides all of the numbers and facts, I feel like God has been giving me a stronger sense of love and care for the students at DH. Tonight while I was preaching I felt a great desire to have the word planted in their hearts. So many of them have been through so much crap growing up and I have been feeling a lot for them, especially when I look at them during a sermon. I'm not sure what it means, but it sure helps me to pray more for them.
I've been learning a lot of leadership lessons this month. Maybe I'll write about some of them on another post. | | |
| We just got back from a spontaneous late night hotok (not sure of the spelling) run. I love living in LA. Hotok is a Korean dessert that's kind of like a pancake with syrup in the middle. It's the bomb.
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| Today I visited an orphanage in Tijuana with some ministry partners. We went to the two same ones as last time and the dump as well and hung out with the kids, fed them, prayed for them, and played with them.
At the second orphanage we joined the Spectrum Ministries staff meeting. When I sat down at the table, the 50 year old woman was looking at me kind of funny I thought. But I didn't pay much attention to it. About twenty minutes later we were asked to pray with the Spectrum staff team for the ministry. Because I was sitting close to that woman I asked her and the woman next to her if they wanted to pray. They said yes and we walked outside and formed a circle to pray. Before we started praying I asked them a little about themselves and how I can pray and be praying for them. When it was her turn to share Hortensia, the woman who was looking at me funny told me that from the moment I came in the room the Holy Spirit was on her. She said that I look strikingly similar to her son Mauricio. But Mauricio died three years ago as a gun was pulled on him and he was shot in the head. Hortensia began to get emotional, but hold in most of her tears. She told me that I look nearly exactly what he looked like, even my thick build and chubby cheeks.
As she told me this I was flooded with emotion and had to hold back extremely hard to keep from crying. I couldn't help but to think of my mother being in the same position as Hortensia. How would my mom handle that? Her son that she loves more than herself dies before her...parents aren't supposed to see their kids' funerals...how that must have hurt deeply.
Hortensia cried as she told me about her son and how September used to be the best month for her because that was when she got to take vacation. But ever since her son was killed September has been the worst month for her because she misses him so much.
Hortensia is an amazing woman of God. She has been working as a social worker in Spectrum Ministries for 15 years now. And a year ago she adopted a seven year old boy who is HIV positive when both of his parents died of AIDS. Somehow, in the midst of everything going on in TJ, God wanted to love Hortensia and encourage her by sending a guy who looked strikingly similar to her son that she lost three years ago. Somehow, God used me to encourage her to the point of crying. I'm amazed at the ways God uses us when we actually show up. I couldn't have scripted a better way to comfort Hortensia or encourage her to stay faithful to the Lord, but Jesus could and he did. Jesus knew exactly what he was doing today when he woke me up and had me drive out to Mexico to serve at an orphanage. This was a great reminder to me how sovereign God is and how it's him at work using sinners like you and me.
Please join me and pray for Hortensia and the Christian Oprhanages in Mexico. " The harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few. Therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest." Luke 10:2 | | |
| I just got done watching Joy Luck Club (like 5 minutes ago) and I can definitely say that I understand Asian women...better anyway. So here are some of the take aways that I got:
1. they're a lot more sweet and sensitive that you can ever imagine
2. Asian women are all passive aggressive
3. the stereotype that they're good in math and chess is true
4. do not pour soy sauce over the main dish at a party
5. they'll do all the "stuff" for people hoping to be loved by their acts of service
6. they're very superstitious
7. they love to be affirmed because they haven't been appreciated enough
For more words of wisdom on Asian women just ask me or watch the movie | | |
| I had a great time with my parents this past weekend. It's always great to see them and hang out and get some free meals!
It turned out to be great timing for my parents to come and visit because there was a work day that we had at the family center. And the main thing we wanted to get done was to have the fence fixed. The fence, which we painted bright lime green has been swaying like a reed in the wind for some time now. And before my dad came, the gameplan was to take the fence down, get some new fenceposts, and make a new fence. That plan would've taken a day or two easily.
When my dad got there, he recognized that he could stabilize the fence without taking anything down. He had a great idea. Because he was in construction for so many years, he saw that all we had to do was get some steel fence posts and put them in between the current fence posts and plant them in concrete. What would've taken two days or so turned out to be a two and a half hour project. And what would've cost a couple hundred dollars cost only $50 or so. Mad props to my dad! Thanks for giving me sermon material to work smarter and not harder. | | |
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