I think it could be fun to share a few of those lessons that I’ve learned through my 14 Let’s Start Talking mission projects.
When I first heard about LST in 1993 as a freshman at Pepperdine I thought “I’d love to do that, but no way, I have to go home and work and see my family, I couldn’t spend half the summer overseas.” It sounded like a neat idea, but just not right for me at the time. Then, a couple years later one of the guys in my small group Bible study asked our group to pray for their project, they needed 1 more person to join them as the church there had requested 4 and at that time they only had 3. After a couple of weeks of this, I thought “maybe I can be that 4th person.” We talked about it and worked it out! We did a special weekend of training together to get me caught up on what I’d missed and we kept on going with the training to get ready to go. I wasn’t sure how the whole fundraising thing would work, especially since I started late. One part of that first experience really sticks out; a family at church asked how my fundraising was going and when they heard I was about half way there and coming up to a deadline they stepped in and helped finish it up. What a great blessing to me and reminder that God really does provide when we ask!
There are so many different things I’ve learned, I think instead of cramming it all in here I’ll try & do a quick summary about each project in a separate post. Maybe I’ll wait till we get our pictures out of storage so I can scan and include a picture with them, we’ll see.
For today, here’s a list of all the projects, just so I can keep them straight…
1996 Montevideo, Uruguay (team of 4 from Pepperdine University)
1998 Lomonosov, Russia (team of 4 from Pepperdine University)
1999 San Miguelito, Panama City, Panama (team of 6 from Crowley’s Ridge College + me)
2000 Cuernavaca, Mexico (4 person team 2 from Oklahoma Christian University and 2 from Louisiana)
2000 Singapore Friends Camp in December
2001 Kampala, Uganda (me and Dyann)
2002 Eindhoven, Holland (4 person team; 2 from CVCC in San Diego and 2 from Pepperdine)
2003 Cologne, Germany (4 person team from CVCC in San Diego)
2004 Vitoria, Brazil (5 person team from CVCC in San Diego)
2005 Lausanne, Switzerland (me and Morgan)
2006 Ghent, Belgium (me and Kristy)
2007 Xian, China (me and Morgan)
2008 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (me and Morgan)
2009 Panama City, Panama (me and Morgan)
Jessica