INTERN TEAM 2006 JUST ARRIVED!
We have six amazing young adults who are going to be serving as interns with us this summer, and they just arrived in Prague yesterday morning. Pictured above are, from left to right, Garrett or “G” (I couldn’t find a face on picture of him), Laura, Robby, Sarah O, Sarah B, and Jonathan. The moment they stepped off the plane yesterday morning, they were given a few minutes to get the necessary items out of their checked baggage and transfer them into their backpacks, and they were off and running in the first ever Josiah Venture Summer Intern GREAT RACE! They are competing against the other JV intern teams (serving in Poland, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Estonia) to see who will make it through all of the check points across Czech Republic and arrive at the training center first tomorrow evening! I’ll be joining the Slovakia team this afternoon at a city in Czech Republic because I felt like I just needed a couple more days recovery before joining the craziness (and for those of you who worry about me, don’t worry…I’m recovering just great from the surgery)! My teammates, Amy, Kenric, and Gavin have been with them so far. Tomorrow evening, the race will end, as stated earlier, at the Josiah Venture training center in Malenovice, Czech Republic, and then we will have a week of training and preparing these interns for the summer ahead of them. After that, it all begins!
If you check out the calendar, you will see that the summer will involve lots of traveling because this intern team will be helping us train and encourage leadership teams in Lucenec and Bratislava to have camp this summer. We will spend time in each city before camp, equiping the leaders to know and perform their different roles at camp, helping the team promote camp throughout the city, and working on teambuilding. During the first week of July, we will all be at camp. Some will go to the Bratislava camp, and others will go to the Lucenec camp. We have two American teams who will be coming to help with these two camps: one from Shandon Baptist in Columbia, SC and one from North Star Church in Kennessaw, GA. We also have another camp in the east of Slovakia, but these interns will not be focused on that camp (even though our Kompas staff team will be helping them…which means that I will be traveling to three different cities during this time and not just two). After camp, the interns will then spend time in each city helping the church leadership teams follow up with the kids who came to their camps. It will be a full summer!
In addition to the interns being here for the next two months, I’m also planning and implementing some events in July for college girls, and I’ve invited a super girl from America to come over and help with that. Her name is Jessica Johnson, and she was very involved in the Passion Project this past January (more on her in a later entry). It was during that time that she developed relationships with the girls in my university class, so we planned some reunion time this summer. For the middle weeks of July, we’ll be doing some fun things, and I’m really excited about it.
Finally, the last week of July, ANOTHER American team from North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, GA will be coming to help with a high school/college camp for our church here in Zilina!
I’ll be writing more about each of these events and the people involved as they happen. For now, I just wanted to give everyone an overview of what will be going on over the next two months! PRAY for our stamina and that we will be sensitive to what GOD is doing through all of this activity and be able to join HIM in HIS work this summer. It’s so easy in times like this to make all kinds of plans and just start running full speed. I really want us to spend time each day asking God what He is planning for that particular day and how He wants us to plug into THAT. I want THAT agenda to supercede all other agendas on a daily (and even hourly) basis this whole summer. We haven’t invited all of these incredible people to come over to Slovakia to bang young people over the head with Christianity, but to join us in SERVING AND LOVING them in whatever way God tells us to. Pray for us that we will be faithful to this calling this summer, over and above all else.
Meanwhile, stay tuned for stories from the GREAT RACE and more information about our interns! :-)
