Hanging out!

Hey everyone! This last week has been pretty uneventful. I've worked quite a bit, and just done some hanging out. Last night I had the night off and got the chance to go to another Padres baseball game....it was pretty incredible...they were playing the Braves and Maddux was pitching for the Padres, so it was sweet to see that. The whole game was a the 10 year anniversary celebration of 1998 Padres team that went to the World Series, so there were fireworks afterwards that were amazing. They had them coordinated with music and everything, so it was an awesome show. Today I went to church(which I haven't talked much about before - it's called Clairement Emmanuel Baptist Church) which was pretty cool because the pastor's sermon was on Romans 8, the topic of the message that I'm going to deliver at FNL this week. I realize as I'm writing this that I haven't talked about alot of the stuff that is pretty regular.

First with the church - it's pretty casual - some people come in jeans and just normal clothes. They have an awesome praise band that plays before the service, then a time of prayer, then the sermon, and it's over. The whole thing is about an hour or so in length but it seems much quicker since everything seems to have a pretty important part in the service. The pastor is probably in his 50s and seems to be really knowledgeable about the Bible and makes all of his messages very life-applicable. One of the best parts is the Starbucks coffee and homemade treats that we get each Sunday...sometimes it's cookies, sometimes pastries, sometimes muffins - always homemade.

The next big thing is FNL - which stands for Friday Night Live. It's basically like our regular weekly meeting that we have back at Tech. There is music, prayer, sometimes a game or ice breaker, and then a message is delivered. When the staff left, they chose different people to speak at all the FNLs for the rest of the year, like Joe(the project director), and a few other guys. I was selected to speak this week and assigned to speak on Romans 8...I'm really excited about that. I've just started to plan my talk and I've got lots of ideas, so I'm pumped to see where it goes. Last week we had FNL on the beach(instead of in the rec center which is kind of out of the way) and it attracted alot of people, so it's exciting to have the opportunity to possibly minister to random people walking by. Also, one of the main goals of the FNL team(it's one of the ministry teams), is to have just as many other non-project people(co-workers, people we meet on campus, people from the beach, etc.) as we do project people by the end of the summer, and we've seen increasing numbers so far this year...it's been awesome.

Other than these big events coming up, not much else is happening...other than the debut of Helen and Glenn Bowman to San Diego Summer Project - that's right, Mom and Dad will be in San Diego visiting for a few days. It should be alot of fun...I'm excited to take them to SeaWorld and whatever else we decide to do...it should also be nice to check out some of the nicer restaurants that are a little out of my standard price range.

After church this morning we all headed over to Belmont park just down the street for the employee party in the park. Basically we all invited our co-workers and people we had met to this big cook out at the park and we had alot of games and things going on...free food...lots of stuff. It was alot of fun and some of the workers from SeaWorld showed up so hopefully that will help us build better relationships with them as the summer goes on.

Well, it's getting pretty late and I'm ready for bed so I'm going to hit the sack for tonight. Have a good one!