Soooooooo. Florida.
Well, I guess I never finished Atlanta, huh? Here’s what happened during the rest of ATL.
After the Passion Conference, we stayed a couple more days with our old friends and our new friends so we could go to Passion City Church, the home church of the people who hosted the Passion Conference. (Hence the similarities in their names.) Church was good. I feel slightly conflicted in that I don’t usually like large churches and yet, nearly every time something came up that I didn’t really care for, the pastor would say something to address it and make me feel better. It was odd, but definitely reaffirming. I still wouldn’t go to that church if I lived there, but I did like it for the most part.
After service, we went to lunch with the Rogers family and our new friend Russell that they brought with them. It was delicious! And then came one of the worst parts of the trip: saying goodbye to our friends, hoping we’ll get to see them again this side of heaven. And then we kinda chilled out the rest of the day, read our Bibles & books, studied some, cleaned the van a tad.
At this point we were still praying about possibly going home but we still hadn’t heard clearly from the Lord. We prayed fervently, and yet we still heard nothing, Good advice came from our pastor back home-don’t move. Until you hear from Him, don’t move. So we didn’t take off for home right away, but we really wanted to. Things went from crappy to more crappy. My Mom called & told me she was in the hospital and I got other bad news from 2 other people who I care about, all in the span of 4 days. It was rough, so when we didn’t hear anything, that just made it worse. I prayed and prayed and asked God, saying that if He wanted us to go home, could He please make it crystal clear. That isn’t really one of those decisions that you just wing, you know? Anyways, He still never said anything.
After a little while I realized something that I didn’t want to admit to myself-God didn’t give us the idea to go home and then say pray about it. We came up with the idea and, like so many people do, asked God to bless what we wanted to do, rather than being blessed by doing what He wanted us to do. So (obviously) we didn’t go home but then we came up against another obstacle. Neither of us wanted to do this anymore. We had both gotten it in our minds that we were going to be going home soon and because of everything that was going on back home, we believed it and we longed to be there. Now we were in a place where we knew what God was calling us to, but we just didn’t have a heart to do it. What else could we do but pray and pray we did. Our friend, Ralph, reminded us of our theme verse and also to look at it in perspective: when we were at home, we couldn’t wait to leave. Now that we’re gone, we can’t wait to go back. Everyone wants what they don’t/can’t have, it’s our sinful nature. That helped Marc a little bit to remember our love for this trip but I was still sad. For a long time, I’ve missed home and always said I would be happy if the Lord told us to go home early, but now it was different. I wanted to be home, I had no desire to do this anymore and I was ready to be done and yet I knew it wasn’t time. I had two choices-one, I could spend everyday hating my life or two, I could get over it and learn to love it again. Again, all I could do was pray-I definitely couldn’t will myself to want to be there.
After a couple of days in Atlanta, we weren’t really finding our groove. I usually rely heavily on Marc to start the conversations and I pray and sometimes join them, depending on how the conversation is going, but nothing was happening. Marc was beginning to feel like his conversations were all the same and he didn’t want to have a “forced conversation” where you ask the same leading questions and go down the same path, so this was another struggle added on top of our desire to go home.
The capitol building we visited.
It looks like every other one.
this sweet jungle gym in a park
the cheese tortellini from my MRE
(side view of MRE)
Atlanta, GA
Our first night in Florida we spent in Jacksonville. We got in on a Thursday and went to CC Jacksonville for their midweek study. We didn’t really make friends like we usually do so after study we got up and on our way out the door, a man named Nelson stopped us to say hi. How sweet! We ended up talking for a couple of minutes. We told him what we were doing so he went and talked to his wife, Lisa, and they invited us over for the night.
I’m always astonished at God’s goodness that He shows to us through His people. There are often times when we least expect it that God opens doors and a lot of times from the people we least expect but it always works out better that way. God’s ways are above ours and His thoughts above ours. I think I’ll leave the planning to Him.
So we went to the Ortega’s house (nice last name!) and their son, Elias, was nice enough to let us sleep in his bed. We did laundry and in the morning, Lisa had made muffins! How sweet! And man oh man, they were delicious! They also told us about the Pastor’s Conference that was coming up on January 21-23rd in Merritt Island, FL, but I had hoped we’d be in Alabama by then.
So we said our goodbyes, thanked them for their hospitality, and spent a large portion of the day driving down to Orlando. We took the US-1 a lot of the way so we could drive by the beach. After about an hour we pulled over and found a beautiful spot to sit and read our Bibles and marvel at God’s beauty. It was really strange because we went from 30 degrees in Jersey to 50 degrees in Georgia and now 70 degrees in Florida! For the first time in MONTHS, we drove with our windows down, saw people walking around in shorts and tank tops, and got to wear sandals. In California, we REALLY don’t understand seasons-for the most part it’s either extra hot, manageable, or just cold enough for a light sweater so we really appreciated the climate change.
Driving through most of the places we’ve been in Florida reminds me a lot of California & gives me a sweet sense of nostalgia. I thank God for that, too, that even though I’m not there, I can still feel like it.
So inevitably we got to Orlando. For Christmas, my dad and his wife gave us money to be able to go to Disneyworld with so that’s how we spent our Saturday! It’s a lot like Disneyland, it’s a very strange feeling walking in. You are on Main Street and it has the same feel to it. What I really loved was Cinderella’s Castle, as opposed to Snow White’s castle that we have. Space Mountain was a bit faster and they don’t have the Matterhorn or Toon Town, but a lot of it is basically the same.
So the next morning we woke up and planned to go to CC Orlando but when we looked up the directions, it was about 30 minutes north. Well, we would eventually be heading south so instead of back tracking, I looked up another Calvary. An hour away directly west was CC Merritt Island. Coincidentally enough, they had sent a team up to Jersey for hurricane relief several weeks earlier, so we knew a few people from there. After church, we looked for familiar faces but we didn’t have to look too far, most of them found us rather quickly! We chatted for a bit and caught up. They, too, encouraged us to go to the Pastor’s conference but when we found out it was $100, it was pretty much out of the question so they suggested that instead of attending, we volunteer so then we still get to see everything! So we signed up to volunteer and I told the lady they could put us wherever they need us. Turns out the biggest need was where it always is-childcare! So we tried to cheat the system, but God had other plans.
One of the relief team workers, Kate, invited us to her house for lunch so we followed Jameson over there . Funny story about Jameson-he also came up for relief work and when Marc saw him, he immediately knew that he knew him from somewhere, but just couldn’t peg it. They eventually figured it out-he had done worship at our church before! Small world! So here he was in Florida, his new home, and the 4 of us hanging out. God is good! And then it was back to church for evening service.
Monday morning rolled around and our first task was the house of hope. HOH is a ministry run by the local Baptist church where they give out food and clothing to people in need every week. Nearly all of the food is donated and as far as I know, everyone there is a volunteer. We arrived at 6am (when they are officially open) and our job was to be “mules”. We waited at the end of the line with wheelbarrows and when people were done walking through, we put their box in our wheelbarrow and carted it to their cars for them. It was one of the most blessed times I’ve ever had. Marc is just great at starting conversations with strangers, but for me, I do so much better at things like this. Working with a ministry that has open doors into people’s lives like that is just wonderful because so many people just need someone to talk to and to listen to them and treat them like they matter. One of the first ladies that I talked to had to catch the bus so I carted her stuff a couple of blocks down to the bus stop and I prayed for her before I left. As I finished up, she was crying a little bit so I sat with her and we talked and she spilled the beans about her son and her situation and just life in general. There was another time where I didn’t really know what to say to this guy-he seemed a little bit intimidating so I just started with small talk and before I knew it, he was telling me things about his life that he was probably too ashamed to tell his friends. It was nothing inappropriate, just things about work and not having a job and moving to find work and his wife, etc. He talked to me for probably close to 25 minutes. At first I would try to respond, but then I knew he just needed to talk, and talk he did.
There were so many stories like that, one lady I just waited at her car with her until the rest of her party came. She was so touched by that and it’s crazy because I totally misjudged her but after talking with her, she shared her story and was really encouraged simply because I waited with her. That’s all people want-to know that someone cares. And how can we ever tell people that God loves them if we don’t show them first? People will never believe that God is good if Christians don’t show them first.
Around 10:30, Kate and her friend took us out to lunch (delicious!) and then we hit the road! We were headed for Miami but our first stop was Fort Lauderdale. The day we arrived in New Jersey, a group of 40 people from a discipleship group called Patmos, also arrived. Over the course of the next week, I got to know a few of the girls pretty well. At least one of them, Elyssa, still lives in Ft. L. so we stopped in on the way down and had dinner with her.
The next morning, we were sitting in the van reading when this guy came up to the window. He said, “Jesus Saves” (the sign on our van window), and then started talking about how he was homeless and needed money for his kidney medication. Marc told him that we don’t hand out money but we’ll take him to pick it up so he climbed in and we drove about 15 minutes to his clinic. It was a weird encounter to say the least. He knew his Bible, but didn’t believe in God because of the way other Christians have treated him. We gave him food and water and some extra clothes Marc had. I hope that something we said sticks with him, but I’m not sure if it will. You could tell he was trying to guilt us because he kept saying things like, “a worldly person would do this or that for me and you’re supposed to be better than that”. So we dropped him back off and then left for the 30 minute drive to Miami. We went to the beach and walked around for a bit but the meter was expensive so we only spent an hour there. The first free parking we found was by a park so we parked, ate lunch, and walked around. As we sat in the bleachers, we talked about the trip, how things were going, how we were feeling, and different things like that. Marc got up to use the restroom and on the way back, stopped to talk to these two guys who were just kicking it. One was a Christian who wasn’t really walking and one was a Mormon who wasn’t really walking. After a couple of minutes, the one who was a Christian got up and came over to talk to us. He started telling us all about his life and how many crazy things have happened to him. He asked questions like, “how do I keep myself pure from this world” and practical questions about how to walk with God. It was incredible! Marc invited him to the Men’s study that night at CC Miami so he agreed to go.
A couple hours later, we were off! His friend agreed to come as well so the 4 of us headed off to CC Miami. I, of course, stayed in the car while the 3 of them went in. Then we took them back to the beach and that was it for Tuesday!
On Wednesday we chilled at Starbucks for a bit and took care of business-emails and things of that nature and then off to another park. I cleaned the van & did some dishes while Marc practiced his guitar and then all of a sudden, “like a lightswitch” he said, he didn’t feel like practicing anymore. So he put his guitar away and then walked over to a guy sitting by himself. As he walked, he prayed and God told him that it didn’t have to be forced, just ask him if he needed prayer for anything. They were out of earshot so I couldn’t hear very much, but in his synopsis Marc said he was just a lonely guy who needed a friend. Marc would try to bring up the gospel or would ask him a question about heaven/hell and he would say something like, “Look at that cloud over there,” or “what is that squirrel doing?” and eventually got to the point where he said to Marc, “Is that all we’re going to talk about today?”
After chilling at the park for a while, we made it back to CC Miami for their midweek study. Coincidentally enough, we had seen the pastor before. He spoke at the Pastor’s conference we went to in Western NY. He was the guy who gave the message that said, “Don’t give up” over and over and over again. He’s also good friends with Pastor Luis from New Jersey, where we spent 3 ½ weeks in our first stint there. After service we met and became friends with a lady named Sylvia, who we had breakfast the next morning with. She shared her testimony and we all talked over some delicious café con leche and breakfast.
Then it was off to the Keys!
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a sweet beach we found
A Florida Christmas tree.
my castle!
;) what a hottie
my castle....again.
one of MANY pictures I took :)
Marc & I
The 2nd day we were there, we walked around downtown a bit and then spent a good amount of time on the beach. We had lunch and walked around for a bit. As I collected shells, I was praying that God would lead us into a good conversation and when I looked up, Marc was talking to this dude, so I prayed for him and he said that it went awesomely! After a bit of a walk, we ran into this other guy who was sitting on a bench making birds, flowers, and hats out of palm tree leaves. We asked his expertise on how to get a coconut out of the tree, but he said the only way is to climb the tree. There went that idea.
It’s funny because we always feel like we’ve heard everything, but then every time we say that we have, there comes another guy with another crazy story. This guy has been alive for 2 billion years and traveled to 290 planets. Iiiiiiiinteresting. Needless to say, I don't really see a lot of fruit coming from that conversation, but you never know what God will do.
As it got into evening, we headed into downtown to get postcards & check out the scene. Every evening they have a little street fair in Mallory Square as the sun sets. There are street vendors and street performers and everyone just kind of gathers around. It's a varied crowd of people and crowds gather all around the different performers. As we walked down there, there was a man with an easel and he was giving an evangelistic message. We were so encouraged that someone was down there doing that! We stayed for the entirety of his message. At points, it was really hard to focus. All around there were people on 10 ft. unicycles, people juggling fire & knives, everyone yelling and trying to get the audience's attention, but we did our best to focus and stayed in hopes that having a little bit of a crowd would encourage others to stick around. We got to talking to them afterwards and found out that the street preacher is a pastor of a church in the area and has been witnessing 3 nights a week down there for 26 years!!!!! No wonder he was such a pro at keeping his focus! We hung around for a few minutes after they finished and talked to them and then headed off back to the van.
The next day we got up & headed back to the mainland! Man oh man, what a drive! It took forever! By the time we got to Key Largo (a hundred or so miles) I was over driving. We pulled up to a stoplight and this old man (maybe about 65) runs up to the window and asks if he could hop in because he missed his Greyhound and he needed to be at the airport. He looked harmless and fairly normal so we let him in. He was headed to the Miami Airport but he only needed us to catch him up to the Greyhound (even though that never happened). As we drove, he started telling Marc about his books that he has written-a 3 part series on how the soul is connected to the body so that emotional things affect our physical health and things like that. It was all about vibrations and soul/body/stress/emotions/etc, and how to overcome these negative emotions in order to keep them from affecting your health. He gave five ways to go about that and one of them he said something along these lines, "I don't know if you're religious, but evangelical Christians seem to have a much easier time with it. Not other religions like Catholicism or baptists or anything, but real, Jesus following evangelical Christians." Awesome! So we got to talking and although he always tried to bring in his book, we always tried to bring it back to theology. A lot of things that he said were kiiiiiiiind of round aboutly right, but the way he pitched it was wrong. Finally, just before we got to the airport, we found the major difference in what we believe-heaven. According to him, everyone goes to heaven and you advance from a lower level of heaven to a higher level of heaven. As quickly as possible, we told him what the Bible says about heaven, but the traffic cop was telling us to move so he had to get out of the car. It did make the drive from Key Largo to Miami go really quickly and quite more interesting.
From there, we stopped in again in Fort Lauderdale and this time met up with Arlene, another girl from Patmos, at the restaurant. That's right, CC Ft. Lauderdale has a restaurant on their property. And it's huge!
Anywho, from there we continued back up and FINALLY made it back to Merritt Island.
Sunday was church and afterwards we just hung out at Amy's house. (Amy is the lady we met while doing hurricane relief who lives in Florida.) That night was church and Ken Graves was teaching. It was really funny because we hung out with him in Maine, then we hung out with him in New Jersey, and here we were are again, stalking him. Haha just kidding, but it was fun catching up with him & his wife.
Monday began the Southeast Pastor's Conference and we were placed in the children's ministry. Their children's ministry is really amazing because instead of doing Sunday School all day, they take the kids to a camp nearby called Teen Missions, which is basically a boot camp where teens spend a couple of weeks getting ready to go on foreign missions. So 150 kids came and rotated to all kinds of different stations doing different things from food to praise & worship to games. Marc and I were placed in the canoe station with a few other people where we canoed from about 11:30-4:30. It was pretty non eventful.....until the gator showed up. So there we are, canoeing. The kids had just left and we were standing up on the shore waiting for the next group, when Marc saw something floating on the opposite side of the lake. Was it a gator? Were we overreacting because we were in Florida? So the kids came and we got in the boats and couldn't see it anymore. And when we were done, we got out of the water and there it was again. Floating. Lurking. Watching us. It was a gator alright, and it was creeeeepy! (Aside-we spent about a week in New Jersey with a team of guys from all over the south. Gator hunting was one of our favorite topics so since then, I noticed one day that I had dropped the "alli" and just started calling them gators.)
At this point in the day, we only had one more team coming and since we had a confirmed gator that kept appearing, I was just waiting for the announcement that the rest of the day was cancelled. Lou, our leader, gathered us around for the announcement, and here it was. "The next team will be here soon. Try to stay awake from the side of the lake where the gator is. If it attacks you and pulls you under, it's just trying to drown you. it won't eat you until it thinks you're dead so just try to stay still and go with it. If you can, poke it in its eyes and hit it's nose and pray it lets you go." I'm dead serious. Instead of calling it a day, we got lessons on what to do if the gator attacks us. SERIOUSLY! I'm not from Florida, I'm not used to gators! Of course, nobody got eaten or even attacked, but it was still a cool story! The only noteworthy part about the next day was that it was ridiculously windy. I don't know if you've ever canoed, but canoeing in the wind is really hard. From 10-5, it was really hard! But so it goes.
Wednesday, the last day, there was no canoeing since it was a half day so Marc was put with the 12-14 year olds and I was in the kitchen helping to make cotton candy and clean up. It was a great time of getting to know the girls and afterwards a couple of them took us to Red Lobster for lunch. Mmmmmm mmmmmmm mmmmm. Can you say delicious biscuits?! Later that night, Marc and I met up with Dave & Jen for dinner at their house. (She was up in New Jersey for hurricane relief and she and her husband canoed with us.) I know, small world right?
Thursday morning we walked Amy's dog, Toby, down to the dock nearby her house, had our studies, and then headed off to Alabama!
Alabama, coming up.
(Prepare for another story about another hitchhiker.)
the Florida sky
Marc doing work at House of Hope
Welcome to Miami!
and on south to Key West!
dat's right! chocolate covered key lime pie!
90 miles away from Cuba.....
and 154 miles away from Miami!
bomb beach we went to in Key West!
I found a crab!
Marc was throwing a rock trying to get me a coconut :)
it alluded us
that's the guy who was 2 billion years old & has been on 290 planets
the coolest store ever!
hammocks! the most comfy hammocks ever!
the street preacher
some dude I met
