There is a lot of exciting things that God is doing in Harrisburg. This friday we were able to take a man named Ron out to eat for his birthday. His favorite type of food is chinese food so we took him out to a local chinese restaurant where we all ate Lo Mein and shared a great time. In our conversation with Ron, he brought up that he would like to start a bible study with us! We plan on meeting next friday night at 8:00 to meet with him and grow as a body of believers together. We have been building a friendship with Ron for a couple months now and it is exciting to see God working in him. Ron told us that his favorite passage of scripture is Psalms 51. I have read through the past two days now and I'm moved by the words that it possesses. Verses 10-12 read:
"Create in me a pure heart, O God,
and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
Do not cast me from your presence
or take your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me a joy of your salvation
and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me."
I'm just amazed by God and how he is working in the lives of the homeless in Harrisburg and how he is moving hearts of students here at Messiah College. My prayer is similar to that of Psalms that says 'restore to me a joy of your salvation.' It's easy to lose a passion and a joy for God's salvation and it was a great reminder to me of how much God has done for me and others around me. I ask that you pray for us as we venture into leading a bible study with Ron. I believe that Ron probably has more to teach us that we have to teach him and it's an exciting time to learn and grow from each other. This may also be a stepping stone of reaching out to helping more homeless people in streets of Harrisburg. It's an exciting opportunity that God has given to us.
Another person we met this friday night was a Brazilian college student. He is on his summer break and decided to work through an agency to come to the states and work for the summer. He doesn't have many warm clothes and this led him to come down to the Bethesda Mobile Mission van to seek out some warm clothes. He doesn't have much money at this point because he just started working and if he is like most college students here he is probably short on cash from paying tuition. His name was Mikel and his English is not that good. But he knew enough that we could communicate with him. He mostly talked to us about coming to the states and life in Brazil. We asked him if he wanted to come along with for Chinese and he agreed. We gave him our contact information and hopefully we can build a relationship with him while he is in Harrisburg.
It's exiting to see everything that God is doing now but we are still trying to learn how God can use more effectively. There was a group of us that came together and talked yesterday to discuss the direction that our ministry is going. 1 Corinthians 9:26 says, "Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air." As a group of believers we wanted to build a system of accountability and build a clear vision of we want to serve. We also wanted to make sure that our number one priority is the wellbeing of those we are serving. Serving and loving the homeless in name of Jesus Christ is what we want to keep as our motivation for what we do. We talked about this and we also discussed how we want to deal with more people wanting to join us. In these cold winter months there are not that many homeless people still sleeping on the streets and hanging around where we normally go. We have been bring around ten or so people every week and there are only about ten homeless people out.
So after discussing these two things we decided that we should have different groups going on different nights and spread ourselves out throughout the week. We have three of us at the moment in charge of a different day to try and get people to go and serve. We also want to remain just a group of guys serving God and not seek recognition as a club or organization. We feel that this is going to take away from the purpose of serving out of our own love and care for the people of Harrisburg. We were also able to talk to a director of dining services and we may be able to get left over food from the cafeteria and student union to take in with us. We were expecting it to be a struggle to talk with the directors of dinning services but they were very willing to help as long as the chefs and head director are willing to help. I ask that you pray that this works out for us to be able to serve in this new way. I know that God will continue to provide for us and we seek His name only.
Luke 17:10 "...We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty."
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