Back in LA!

Wow! It has been a whirlwind since I have gotten to LA! I got in last Thursday night around midnight LA time, and I am still trying to catch up on sleep. However, that does not mean by any measure that I have not had an awesome time so far!


Right now, the only people here are the staff. Our team consists of two couples (one from LA and one from Minneapolis), two other married staff members (both from the LA area), and me. It has been a great time of bonding as a staff team as well as preparing for our students' arrivals on Friday. Already, God has taught me so much! As a team, we have walked through Fresh Encounters by Daniel Henderson which deals with our need for prayer and how often we don't understand how to pray. It walks through a biblical basis for corporate prayer and gives some practical advice for what it should look like. (For all of you MCF readers, we need to get a prayer night going. This study would be awesome to do together as a body or a small group!) God is so worthy to be sought, and yet, we come to him with other motives. We so often seek His hand without stopping to seek His face first. More and more, God is showing me how my delight is to be in Him, and the even cooler thing is that His delight is in me. Through my justification by Jesus Christ, I do not have to work to earn righteousness, but it is accredited to me. That means that the extent of my commitment or righteousness is not based upon how much I surrender or how much I don't sin, but those acts flow out of the joy in knowing the God sees me as righteous before Him. What a beautiful truth! I am still trying to apply this to my heart and understand fully what this means, but I know that there is so much freedom in that. Not freedom in the sense that I am only free from sin because justification is not exclusively about freedom. It is about God looking on us and saying, "You are good because of my Son." Just bask in that for a while. Tell God how grateful you are for the joy that He supplies.


I look forward to the rest of my time in LA, and I am excited for the students to come on Friday. I am so expectant for God to work in their lives because I have seen Him do the same revelation in me. Already the memories and revelations that God gave me two years ago are flooding back into my life. God is enlarging my heart for this city, and right now, I do not know what He will do with it. However, I wait eagerly serving Him with joy until He decides to show me His plan. He is good!


Forever His,
Courtney


Pray for:
-adjusting to the time change
-staff team unity
-students' arrivals
-support for students that has yet to be raised