A fun little anectdote to kick off marathon training.

I start officially training for my marathon this week so to commemorate such a special occasion I thought you might like this story that happened this past Friday.

Fridays have always been notoriously difficult days to run because my motivation just disappears. After a long hard week the last thing you want to do is wake up early and run AGAIN.
This Friday was especially bad. My alarm went off at 6:45AM and I had no intent to get up. 6 miles in chilly weather had no appeal. I quickly rationalized that I could run later in the afternoon and got back to falling asleep again.

Than I heard a knock.
I ignored it, assuming it wasn't for me.
It knocked again and so I decided to get up and see who it was.
I got up, pulled back the curtain, opened the door and to my surprise it was none other than: JESUS.

Just kidding. That would of been cool though.

It was an intern, Shannon, who wanted to see if Marc was awake to go running. He was out cold and I told her so and than shut the door. And then as I walked back to my bed I made a surprising decision: I decided to go run. I was already up and felt OK so I put on my running gear and went out.

One thing to add is I listened to my Ipod during my run, specifically to worship music. I hate headphones but running by myself can be hard and I wanted some motivation for it. I had managed to turn sleeping in for an hour into a worship session. I felt really good after my run. And I have Shannon, my angel of motivation, to thank.

I’m a Christian, and I’m a runner

Running is a significant part of my life. It’s significant enough that in a blog that is mostly about Christian stuff and working for Jesus I will include this entry all about running and my life. Some people think running is boring. To me it’s a part of my life that won’t go away until my legs do. When you really like something you can talk about it for hours but I’ll try to keep this entry shorter than that. No promises.

I started running the winter of my freshmen year of high school. I was a soccer player who played year-round and wasn’t good at any other team sport. My friends who were in the same boat went out for indoor track and so I followed them. I fell into distance running because nothing else seemed to be like something I would be decent at. My dad ran a lot when he was younger and so getting into the sport appealed to me as well. My second race I got put into the varsity mile for some reason and ran 5:23. Not a great time but for a freshmen I was like wow this is kind of fun and I was hooked.

I didn’t get serious about track till junior year when I finally broke 5 minutes in the mile and my teammates said I should do cross-country(XC) instead of soccer my senior year. I told them if I got cut from varsity soccer I would do XC. I got cut that fall and went out for the team. I had no idea what XC was about but I got 3rd overall in my second race. I was in the top 3 or 4 on my team that season. The 3 captains were all seniors and good friends of mine. It was a blast. I destroyed myself in workouts and we got 3rd in the league. After doing pretty decent in track I decided to run in college.

People always ask how much I run and usually I’m loathe to answer because it’s not a set distance and people generally freak out when I tell them. But for the sake of freaking people out here are some fun stats.
Most miles I ever ran in a month: 322
Most miles I ever ran in a week: over 80
Longest measured run I ever done without stopping: 16.25 miles
Miles I ran in the 2006 calendar year: 2,736

While my stats don’t approach the obsession of Olympians (where 100 miles a week is the norm,) they are a bit crazy. People say “I could never do that!” or “how do you do that?” It’s pretty simple really. I’m an athlete. I like doing athletic things. I’m not blessed with great skill or even talent (I was never close to qualifying for nationals) but I have a work ethic and ability to not get injured (knock on wood) that rivals most. Running is something I'm decent at and it gives me joy when I do it, even when it hurts.

I’m over a year out of college now and I run considerably less. I write this entry because I am running a marathon in January to qualify for Boston next April. I’m doing a plan that is much easier than college, because running here can be hard but I should in good shape by the new year.

Most people hate running as a dreaded obligation to be done to avoid being fat or out of shape. For me it’s simply part of my life whether I do it a lot or a little. I hope that everyone finds something (after they find Jesus) that gives them as much joy as running has for me.

I told you no promises.

Growth Spurt

This week we had our second class of LaunchPad where we handed out curriculum books to the students and taught Lesson 1 about living in Jesus' Name. We had the students break into small groups at the end of the lesson to discuss what they had learned (its a new inititive we are doing semester and a pretty cool one at that). Fun times.

The main thing I want to get across in this entry is growth.

We doubled our class size, having nearly 60 come after having just 30 the previous week. We are expecting growth this term and we are acting in faith about it too.
This week we brought a lot of extra paperwork and supplies for all the extra kids. I expected more but not a growth rate of 100%. We barely had enough books and pencils for everyone. I want 90 kids next week. I have no idea how many will come, but I'll tell you one thing, we'll be ready for them.

My next entry will be about running. I can just see the excitement on your faces. Stay tuned and be blessed.

Starting to Launch...Again

So finally an entry about LaunchPad. Term 2 started this week but there is more to the story.

A goal this year for Thrive is to connect students from Leadership summit,our school AIDS prevention program, with LaunchPads, our after school Bible Discipleship classes.
To reach this end we moved almost all our LaunchPad classes from churches to LS schools if they weren't already in a school. Another thing we did was have LaunchPad assemblies in schools the week before this one.
An assembly was basically a 45 minute presentation that the interns and I prepared for multiple schools to plug LaunchPad. We would go to a school, and if the time and space was available, hundreds of kids would stream out of classrooms to hear us speak. We played some games, did a skit, gave a brief lesson, and told kids all about LaunchPad.
The goal is to see rapid and continued growth in our LaunchPads.
While we were not able to do the full presentation at every school we went too, they were tremendously fun and we saw fruit from our labor this week.

My intro class was on Tuesday at Clubview intermediate school. I'm teaching the curriculum, Ordinary Day with Jesus, with two other interns. It goes over how to experience Jesus in the moments of our ordinary lives.
We had 29 kids this week but it was very encouraging. They seemed to really enjoy it and for many it was their first time at a LaunchPad.One girl even asked if she could bring her mom (its geared toward high schoolers, but all ages are welcome.)

Great things are going to happen over the next 10 weeks in LaunchPad and I look forward to telling you about them.

Surprisingly, another entry about Leadership Summit

I'm going to keep this short because of time but here it is.

So remember those 5000+ books I bound with 4 other interns? The books that I dutifully cut for three weeks, and placed in a box never to see again? The books that I had to have faith would get in the hands of young Basothos and change the course of their lives?

On Monday I had the opportunity to hand out books to school kids in Qwa Qwa.


The smiles, the excitement at holding up a brand-new full color book AND getting their picture taken was incredible. It was such a blessing to get to do this, especially after all the work we had done.

The Leadership Summit term has begun. Get pumped!

Worshipping Jesu Kreste

So I know this entry should be about LaunchPad but great things are happening so bear with me as the blog catches up to my life this week.

This weekend we had the amazing opportunity to go to Passion Johannesburg. Passion is a conference series that Louie Giglio and his Christian movement 268 generation started that is currently on a 17-stop world tour. So basically this was a one-in-a lifetime opportunity. Very briefly, these guys are about doing conferences to get university students around the globe. Louie gave some some amazing talks and we worshiped with 6,000 others in a giant room with Chris Tomlin and the band Fee. Pretty intense.

I want to talk about worship briefly. As most of you know I am not uber-spiritual and that affects my worship. I am very laid-back compared to most people when I worship. I rarely lift my arms, I don't like jumping, and dancing is not much my style either. I like a fast paced song as much as anyone, but I really like just quietly standing and absorbing the words of a good hymn. Be thou my vision is a personal favorite.

As you can imagine this conference was not that kind of worship. It was 6,000 mostly young, mostly crazy, young South African people wigging out for Jesus. And at first it was hard to get into it. I often feel like I need to get into a super spiritual state to enjoy worship. I over think it and get distracted and suddenly I'm just standing there saying words.

Hardly worship.

But yesterday I managed to in some small way let that go. Louie said a verse from Corinthians about being out of your mind for Jesus and thats what I had to do. I had to stop thinking. I had to stop thinking about the people around me. I had to stop trying to get spiritual and just shut my eyes and sing the words as loud as I possibly could. And soon the tears flowed.
I can't tell you if the tears came from God or if I'm just a weepy emotional person when worship happens, but frankly I don't care. I had stopped thinking and had started worshiping God.


I worshiped God.





HOLLA!

Speaking Up

Preach the gospel at all times, if necessary use words.

Forget that, its crap.

The first quote above you've probably heard a lot if your a Christian. Its from St. Francis of Assisi and is very memorable in terms of its depth and simplicity. The second quote is a very loose paraphrase from Niel, the guy who co-founded the ministry Thrive Africa (i.e. the one I'm with) with his now wife 10 years ago.

If he sees this and doesn't like it I'll take it down but I write those quotes because I really liked what he said. You know when you hear something that totally changes the way you think about something and you love it? That was what happened when I heard Niel speak. (For the record he said the above at Mabula when we were on safari.)

Let me be honest. All appearances to the contrary I am not the nicest guy in the world. I'm cynical, sarcastic and often overly-logical for most people. I'm often too honest with people and I tend to offend people a lot. I like people but I often forget that I'm friends with them in the heat of a good debate or argument. When I say a compliment or when I am just genuinely nice to someone that isn't me, its Jesus working through me. I say this to make the point, no matter how hard I try my actions will never be sufficient enough, by themselves, to share the gospel with someone.

On the other hand I have had a interest in apologetics since middle school when I found out that not everyone grew up in church and that many people thought what I believed was crap. I love discussing religious and controversial things. I've read the Bible 2.3 times at the moment. I pride myself on having some sort of answer for every question a skeptic can think of. I say all this to make the point, speaking about God and Christianity is the way that I share the gospel best.

I think too often Christians get blinded by this false idea that Christianity is about being really, really nice. Now disregarding the fact that one doesn't get to heaven by being super good, Christians are obsessed with always being perfect. While Jesus was turning over the tables in the temple, we live so as not to offend anyone. We do a bunch of token actions like go to church, give some money, buy Christian music, do a short-term trip and then tell no one about Jesus. Ever.

Now I'm not saying stop doing good things. Strong relationships are the key to effective evangelism and I'm learning and I'm growing in being nicer and less offensive while I'm here. What I am saying is we have to stop worrying about making sure everyone is happy when we are around and start telling them about the truth that is in us.

Is the Bible really the Word of God?
Is Christianity really the best way to live?
Is Jesus really the only way to heaven?


If so we better start preaching it.

Fueling an economy

So today I returned to Qwa Qwa for the first time in over two months. I want to talk about the assemblies we are doing but I'll wait till the end of week so I can give a broader picture. Now I want to discuss something about Leadership Summit that came to mind.

One of the distinctive things in my mind about Leadership Summit is that we use native Basothos from Qwa Qwa to teach the classes. We call them coaches and we recruit them, train them and grow them to be strong Christian teachers for the students. One of the things that hit me today though is that we also pay them. This may not seem like a big deal but in an area with over 80% unemployment and chronic poverty, job creation is huge.

Today during lunch we went to a coaches' house (named Alfred) for lunch (we had our own lunch he just offered us his home to enjoy for the hour). His house was very impressive if not for its size but for its niceness. A kitchen, living room, and 3 bedrooms. A bathroom and a sink with clean, running water. A refrigerator, freezer, TV and stereo. Not American but everything one needs. He lives with his two cousins, one of which has an incredibly cute baby. You could see that while they weren't excessively rich, they were doing far more than just scrapping by.

By paying its coaches, Leadership Summit is creating strong, local, Christian leaders who are economically independent. That is, Thrive Africa is fulfilling its vision.

Pretty inspiring stuff, if you ask me.