New year, new people, new job

I have officially been in the DC area for two and a half weeks!  Some parts of me think that it has flown by, but other parts of me feel like it has been much longer.  It's strange to me that school is starting, and I'm not going back.  Is it weird that I miss being a student?  It's all I've known for the past 17 years.  Establishing a routine without it just seems foreign to me.

We are all settled into our new apartment, and we love it!  We also just got our cable and internet hooked up (that is a whole different story that I won't even get into!)  Our neighbor baked us cupcakes and children play in our backyard every night!  We have a game stash, and they love to knock on our back door to borrow them.

We've had great times on American University's campus this week.  We contacted the people who signed up saying they were interested and met with them just to chat and get to know them a little better.  All of our meetings went so well, and we actually have more tomorrow!  We have invited the students we met with over to our director's house to have dinner tomorrow night.  We want to share our vision for the movement and also see what they want to see happen.  We are so excited to meet new people interested in making Cru happen in DC!  

I had the chance to meet with a girl on campus Monday.  She was so enthusiastic about getting things started on campus.  We actually found out that she has a good friend who is interning with Cru at Pitt.  She told me she had been talking to her about wanting to get involved in something like Cru in college, but she didn't know what organizations would be on her campus.  Little did she know that we would be there starting things for the very organization she wanted to get involved with!  Sometimes it's funny how God works.  Just hearing her excitement and the connection we had made me certain we were in the right place, and I was doing what the Lord had called me to do.

Our plan as of now is to take the students interested in leading the ministry to the University of Maryland's Cru meeting next Thursday.  We want them to gain a better understanding of what it looks like to have a movement on campus.  We're all very excited about that!

As for me, I'm looking for a church to get plugged into.  I would love to start going to a Bible study and meeting people.  It's strange being in a city with lots of people but not knowing many of them!  I guess that's just the extrovert in me.

Please be praying for the students and the campuses.  Pray God would make it clear what He wants us to do, and we would be obedient to that calling.  I realize this post is a little all over the place, but that's just been the story of my life for the past few weeks!

You're the God of this city

I have finally made the big move to northern Virginia, and wow is it different than West Virginia!  I'm experiencing a little bit of culture shock, but I feel like God prepared my heart for it.  Everything is so different, and I'm going to have to learn to drive differently! Haha!

God provided us with an apartment! Praises!  It was last minute, buy hey God is rarely early, but He's always on time!  We actually filled out the paper work Monday before training and were told it would take 3-5 days to hear back because they would have to run a credit check.  We told the group at training the housing issues we were experiencing (and that's a whole different story!), and they prayed for us multiple times.  We heard back that we got the apartment the next day!  What a relief!  I moved in on Saturday, and the other girls moved in Sunday.  Our apartment is in a great location, and we're already feeling at home in it.  God has truly blessed us.

As for ministry, we have had two full days of meetings with our team.  School hasn't started yet, so we're doing a lot of planning and prayer for direction.  Our team is great, and we have a very clear vision of what we would like to see happen this semester.  Our team consists of six people, five women and one man.  We are praying that God would raise up student leaders on two campuses, and we would be a recognized student organization.  Since these universities are private, there are different rules, and we're experiencing some struggles trying to get on campus at the beginning of the school year since it is the most crucial time.

A lot is unknown at this point, and we're being forced to rely on the Lord which is great!  Please pray for direction and the ability to get on campus to start gathering Christians and sharing the Gospel!