Starting New

Man, seeing my post in the beginning of summer, I feel like I just wrote that post couple weeks ago. But two months have passed already. I just remember how excited I was to enter summer in Berkeley with a lot of training and a lot of fun. And my expectations were right!

So many things have happened. To quickly recap what happened over summer, I had Middle School Retreat for a weekend when I came back to Berkeley. The weekend after that, our life group had a Sierra Lodge day trip, and also a class day trip to Monterey Beach. On July 4th weekend, Junior Brothers had a Yosemite camping trip....(to Yosemite). It was pretty in-tents. And right after, I got to serve in Joy Camp, a camp for 2nd-3rd graders at Sierra Lodge. The weekend after that was our hosting of the World View Camp. And then the week after junior class went to Gualala for couple days.

During Middle School Retreat, which was only two days, we were pretty busy. We didn't have much time to prepare, but we had to play for praise, give an apologetics talk, a seminar on heroes of faith, and a panel. A lot to do, but not much time. I got to be part of praise and one of the apologetics topic, Relativism. As I was preparing for that talk, it went through a lot of revisions and a lot of tough times, EVEN getting it discarded completely the night before I was supposed to give the presentation. That night, I couldn't sleep that much because of nervousness and oh yea, I was sick too. I just remember praying that God will give me knowledge and guidance to speak about this topic well. What I realized was that I wasn't thinking about my audience when I was preparing for this talk. Because relativism is such a hard concept to understand even for college students, I had to be extra careful of how I presented it for middle school students. I realized how dependent I was of myself, and thinking too much about how I can present this topic well that I forgot what the true purpose of this talk was: to educate Middle School students. As it was getting discarded completely because of how convoluted it was, I prayed and realized that God needs to speak through me not me speaking out of my own strength. In the car ride up, Irene helped me make my presentation a little more simple and more digestible for the middle schoolers, and when we got up the Sierra Lodge, although it was finished, I wasn't prepared to present it that night. And I REALLY have a hard time speaking in front of a large crowd of people even though I'm passionate about that topic. My voice gets trembly and I get nervous. When I went up though, that fear just disappeared, and I was speaking very smoothly. I'm not sure what happened, but even though I didn't practice that much, everything was flowing well through my mouth, and I knew that God was speaking through me. Apparently, according to the audience, it was digestible. So it was a success for God. Another exciting thing about Middle School Retreat is the praise of course. The students are so excited for praise that it's a whole another experience for the praise team. As I said in the previous post, I got to play the electric guitar, and it was pretty fun. Even though I was horrible, just the fact that it was loud and powerful made it sound ok. One thing I regret about this trip is not being able to spend time with the students as much. Because we were in a time crunch all the time for lack of preparation days, their play time had to be our prep time. It was necessary, and the results came out to be powerful, but I just wished we had started earlier and got to spread the love to the students by interacting with them. But I mean the timing of the retreat wasn't too optimal for us to do that, but I'm still glad to be able to serve in this area.

Another area that I got to serve in was Joy Camp. It is basically a retreat for 2nd and 3rd graders. Some of the students from SFSU and Berkeley received the opportunity to serve. Luckily, for this camp, we had two weeks to prepare, and we had a lot of time to play with the kids and show some love. Especially because they are 2nd and 3rd graders, they have short attention spans. So basically, a lot of the day was spent playing games or just going somewhere for the whole day, such as Sand Harbor, which is a beautiful place by the way. There were three student messages and skits to go along with each message for a more interactive and engaging message. I was in charge of one of the day's scripts for the skit and also the campfire. My script-writing was eventually refined and modified by the staff, but it was an interesting experience to write a script. It is pretty hard though. Also, like I said, I was in charge of the campfire, basically preparing different songs and practicing so that I can lead the time of campfire. I am naturally not an energetic person who doesn't really get excited about a lot of things. Well, let me rephrase that, I don't show my excitement that much, but for campfire, I had to be especially excited and lead the time of excitement so that the students have a memorable night with fun and songs. I was a little scared because I'm not that great at guitar playing and I am not really good at singing and I can't even sing loudly, but the time turned out ok. It turns out kids just like singing really loudly and shouting, so they couldn't even hear my guitar playing and I didn't have to sing that loudly either. I thought that was good. It was just amazing to see how just having fun with them and spending a lot of time with them is a way to show God's love to them. They experienced a lot of joy and a lot of attention. Although I still don't like teaching little kids (I think they won't retain anything), I still grew a heart for them. They are young and innocent, and they need a lot of guidance to go in the right direction. I'm glad for what I got to experience because I got close to a lot of the SFSU Koinonia ministry and a lot of the Joyland teachers. I truly experienced the power of the gospel, bringing people together.

Along with all the fun trips, the thing that was most exciting for me probably was Advanced Course 101. I got to be trained to teach Course101. This is what I have been wanting to do for a long time. Even though I am inadequate and I have a lot more knowledge to gain, I love teaching. I love teaching about what I love. There are few things that I get excited about, and this is one of them. Each week, we got together after making an outline of the weeks, and got in small groups to teach each section of the topic for that week. And then, the staff would give us feed back or ask us some challenging questions that might arise from that week. There's a lot that I have to prepare before I can lead one, but I am still excited.

Summer was filled with a lot of fun and a lot of training, which is what I prayed for in the beginning.  I am so excited for the new semester. It's like starting new again after some stormy sophomore year, learning a lot about myself. I'm excited for what God has in store for me and all of my peers.