good Saturday

"Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working." - James 5:16

What a wonderful thing. Knowing that we no longer have to feel guilty or alone or that we have to close ourselves up from others because we're afraid of being judged.

"What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also might consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace." - Romans 6:1-14

Claudelle

Claudelle passed away two Saturdays ago. We celebrated her life this past Friday. It was so awesome seeing how she blessed so many people's lives and to share stories with one another. She was so smart and was so gungho about history and cultures and politics. One of my favorite things about Claudelle was how excited she was to meet college students. She saw so much potential in us, like she genuinely believed we could change the world. I hope she knew how much she's changed the lives of people around her, including mine.

She made it into the front page of the local section for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I thought the article was very well-written.

Dear GFC

For the past two years, God has blessed me with the opportunity to serve the homeless in Pittsburgh. Through this ministry, I learned to love the poor and hate the evils that surround them, from the injustice they face on a daily basis to the addictions that hold them captive. I registered with the Domestic Poverty Track hoping to learn more about serving and reaching out to those in poverty here in the US.

At one point, I had second thoughts about going to Urbana, which led me to think, my money could be better spent on actual missions work, whatever that means. But the church had already agreed to help pay for the registration cost, so now I felt obligated. I also knew that God is a much bigger God than I could ever imagine, so I prayed that despite my attitude, He would convict me in a new way and that I would be sensitive to the Holy Spirit.

The theme for this year’s Urbana came from John 1:14, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The first half of the week was really frustrating because I didn’t yet know what to share with you guys. Every morning, we would study from the book of John in groups of 4. On Wednesday, we studied the passage on Nicodemus’ encounter with Jesus (John 3:1-21). Even though John 3:16 is one of the most well-known Bible verse and also a foundation to our faith, it was the two verses before that gave me a deeper understanding of the gospel. “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up.” As people looked towards the snake and were healed, we are also healed as we look towards the cross. I ended up skipping Wednesday’s morning session to pray and meditate on the cross.

The following morning, God brought up a dark part of my past of which I seeked forgiveness for multiple times, but never healing.During that morning’s bible study, God pushed me to share what I had never shared with anyone before with my family group. I tried ignoring Him, but He pushed harder. “Why do you insist on holding onto it?” Until that moment, God had been silent. I finallysurrendered and shared what had been preventing me from giving up my entire life to God. I was amazed at how easy it was for me to share with my family group and how immediate I felt the burden being lifted. I knew that the Holy Spirit was already beginning to heal me. Through this experience, God showed me that it is through Christ I will always have family to fall back on. It is because of His sacrifice that I already had a bond with two girls in my family group I barely knew. To me, this was a beautiful thing!

To have a community THROUGH the blood that Christ shed for us! THROUGH the God who came down from heaven to earth, from privilege to poverty, from familiar to stranger; in order to be in communion with us. He dwelt among us! God had to incarnate himself in human flesh in order to destroy what was never meant to be part of us, that is, sin.

By the end of the week, I was convinced that this was how God wanted me to demonstrate the gospel; to be in communion with the poor by suffering with them and dwelling amongst them. To obey this call, I’d be going back to the places where my parents worked hard to leave, making this decision completely counter-cultural, but wasn’t Jesus completely counter-cultural? As of now, I am just really excited for what God has for me in the future.