Keep Austin Weird!

Once again, I have waited too long to blog so I'll try to remember as much as I can.
So we left off at Good Friday....that night we went to a turntable fellowship type thing. There were a few people from the young adult group who get together every other Friday and just kinda jam on the turntables then have a study. Afterwards, we went to Rick's house with everyone where we had pizza & played "Bible Baffle" (I think) shortly. It was funny because everyone there said they stopped wanting to play with this guy, Mike, because he was too good. Well, you know me, this sounded like a challenge so we had Marc read the questions while him and I went head to head. Man oh man, I felt like I had never read the Bible! I don't know if I've ever been so humbled so quickly! He knew the answer off the top of his head to questions like, "Who was the king of Babylon when so and so died?" as if I was asking him, "how many commandments are there?" But it was really cool, you could tell that he doesn't let all of that knowledge go to his head. He always has a smile on his face & has a warm, loving heart. We will definitely miss him! Later that night, we had a bonfire & Marc did worship. It has been such a blessing to see my husband being so used on this trip, not only in talking to non-believers but in being able to use his gift of worship to fellowship & bless others.
Saturday we just kinda relaxed & took a recoop day. We had gone to the University and done a ton of walking everyday that week, so we decided to just hang out & watch tv at the home of our gracious, awesome hosts, Lindsey & Jesse. Later that night, we said bye to them then went to Walmart that was closest to where sunrise service would be & knocked out. Funny sidenote, Calvary of Albuquerque's sunrise service starts at 7:30 in the morning.....when the day has already dawned. Before we went to sleep, we set an alarm on Marc's watch for 5:50 a.m., but that dumb thing almost never works so when I woke up and it was light out, I started freaking out! The only reason we had stayed as long as we had in New Mexico was so we could go to sunrise service! I looked at the clock & luckily it was only 6:45. phew, we were gonna make it! So we get there & meet up with Rick & co, and enjoyed awesome worship from Phil Wickham & a great message by Skip Heitzig.

(Phil Wickham-obviously the one with the guitar-try to look past the large head in the picture)

(Pastor Skip giving the message)

(2 pictures of the 24,000 people who showed up!)

After service, we headed back to Rick's house where we had breakfast. What a blessing! I was just telling Marc a couple of days before that I was a little bit sad that we were going to spend all of Easter driving and not able to hang out with any family or friends but Rick & his wife (who's name unfortunately has escaped me) had a bunch of people over for breakfast so we went along. Eggs, potatoes, waffles, fruit, pastries, candy! What a perfect breakfast :) We hung out for a bit, Marc played some bones, I ate a ton of food :) then we went to take off. Rick & everyone prayed for us and we said bye. As we were getting ready to leave, we were checking the levels (since we have leaks) and this guy who was previously there, had just gotten back. He asked us about what we were doing & we got to talking. Come to find out, he grew up in Moreno Valley for a little while! Crazy! If you have a second, check out his clothing/skate company/ministry "unrvld" aka unrivaled. He has a pretty cool story.
Moving on, we began the SUPER long drive to Texas. Heading south, we went through Roswell, NM which was definitely weird. There were alien statues EVERYWHERE. No joke. Outside of KFC there was like an 8 foot, green alien. They were all over the place! They seriously embrace the tourism of aliens there.....even one of the hotels at the entrance said "Aliens Welcome".

(see what I mean?)
Continuing south, we got into Texas around maybe 5 or 6:00 and stayed the night in Fort Stockton, a small town where the 285 & I-10 meet. So small in fact, that there was no internet data reception but not too small that there wasn't a McDonald's & Wal-Mart. It's so funny where we find ourselves, especially at night. Wal-mart has proven to be pretty much the best spot to sleep, (ironic if you know me because I refuse to shop there or support it). Most of them are 24 hours & there are always big rigs & RVs staying there and there is security! Wonderful.
We drove for about 8.5 hours that day. It's exhausting doing nothing for so long lol. The next day we woke up and continued the drive. Five and a half more hours and we were finally in San Antonio! Our first stop was to look for a church but all of the Calvary's we found in the area were either closed, not in a permanent location, or super in the ghetto where I was not comfortable so we decided to wait till the next day and just go sight seeing. Next stop: the Alamo! Haha it was so funny, I told Marc, "we can go see the alamo!" and he says, "I forgot about the alamo!" Get it? "Remember the alamo!" haha anyways.
So we saw the Alamo:

Then continued walking around the area, where we stumbled upon the San Antonio Riverwalk:

(also known as "stinking gorgeous!")

and then we stumbled upon a family of ducks! One of the cutest things in the world :)

After a gorgeous (but long) walk, we headed back to the car & found our favorite place to sleep. Thus ends day 1 in San Antonio! Waking up, we headed to Calvary Chapel San Antonio, which is actually in Universal City. We got a few church flyers & they gave us a couple boxes of Bibles to hand out, which is super sweet :) We headed out! I wasn't feeling well so while I took a nap in the van, Marc went to go play soccer with this guy. They got to talking & he already went to church. He actually used to go to the church we just came from & informed Marc that the school they run out of there would be coming soon to have P.E. with them. So they came & this guy recognized Marc so he told him his story & what he was doing. The guy ended up telling the pastor, who wanted to talk to Marc to make sure he was legit (since we were promoting his church), and somewhere in this process someone gave our number to this guy named Robert who does a lot of evangelism. So Robert called us & invited us to breakfast the next day & then to go out evangelizing. So the next day (Wednesday) he treated us to breakfast (thank you Jesus! and Robert lol) and then we headed over to the University of Texas, San Antonio. We got to have about 4 or 5 really good conversations with everyone from jocks, to frat boys, to science "nerds", to the average joe, and even with a Christian club. We were there for a couple hours but because we drove with Robert & he had to leave for work, we left too.
That night we went to church where we met Pastor Ron Arbaugh who said he used to t.a. for Pastor John Milhouse! (my pastor back home) What a small world! Robert & Olivia (his wife) invited us over to hang out that night so we went & talked for a bit then they said we were welcome to stay at their house & eat their food. I do love eating people's food! haha so we slept there & in the morning had waffles. Oh, delicious waffles.
The next day we headed back to the University by ourselves. I started to feel really weird that day (Thursday). It was like I was starting to get sick but I felt something beyond the physical, almost like an oppression. I was just not feeling being there, but I knew that was where we should be so we went. It seemed like everyone we met that day was a believer! When we first got there, the first guy we met was actually with a Christian club (Chi Alpha) and was about to open air preach! So we watched him for a while....him and this other guy traded off & it was really cool to hear him share his heart. He had a very appealing presence about him, like you wanted to listen to what he had to say....I guess Charles Manson did too, but that's another story haha. Most of the time he was talking, Marc was talking to this guy who ended up being a Messianic Jew. One of the girls from the club (also a missionary) approached me and we talked a lot about witnessing and serving God. Moving on from there, the next couple people we talked to were Christians.
One thing that we always wanted to do but never really knew how to ask, was to record our convo's with people so you folks can see what we do. So we just asked this girl, "Hey, we're kinda documenting our trip around the country, would you like to be in our video?" And she was down! Turns out she was a believer and was able to answer all of our questions. Because so many people we meet say they believe in God, one thing that Marc likes to ask people is "if you died today would you go to heaven or hell?" The people who are really honest mostly say, "I don't know, most likely hell" but we get a lot of people who also think they are going to heaven but when you ask them why, the overwhelming majority say something to the effect of "because I'm a good person". This girl however, gave the right response" it's all because of Jesus! Either we met a lot of legit Christians that day, or people in the Bible belt pay attention during church and know all of the right answers. When it comes to that, we've done our part. It isn't for us to judge who is really saved or not, just to share truth as much as we can. So we moved on.
Originally we were planning on leaving San Antonio on Thursday morning but Wednesday night after church Robert had hooked us up with a mechanic who was willing to look at our van & fix it if he could, for the cost of parts.(Amazing, because the last mechanic told us that it would cost $1,100 & only $200 of that was for parts!) The only catch was that he couldn't see us until Friday afternoon, so we stayed. So Friday morning came & we waited for a call from the mechanic, Scott. His meeting that morning ran longer than he thought & he was going out of town that weekend so he was going to look at the van but wouldn't be able to actually fix it until Tuesday. Weeeeell, it had already been 5 days in San Antonio when we were only planning to stay for 2 or 3 so we said it's ok, and got ready to leave. The next day, Saturday, we left for Austin. We said goodbye to Robert & Olivia & their 4 awesome kids with awesome names (Athena-15, Acacia-7, Apollos-4, & Alexander-2). Funny side story, one day when we were there, Apollos came up to Marc out of the blue, put both hands on Marc's belly, and started shaking it. Funniest thing to happen so far!
On to Austin!! It only took about an hour to get here, THANK THE LORD! :) We stopped by the church & said hi, got some info & headed out! Our second stop was the capital!

We went to the visitor's center then over to the capital building.

Funny story, we actually ran into the girl who we recorded!
Moving on, we chilled at Starbucks for a few hours. Usually by the end of the night, we have nothing to do & nowhere to go but it is way too early to go to sleep so a lot of times we'll go use our Starbucks gift card and take care of business. (blog, make videos, read, write, etc.) Then the usual, off to Walmart to sleep.
Sunday morning was church at Calvary South Austin where the head pastor is named Bungee. Cool right?! After we walked up & down Congress St. where there are shops & vendors & all of that cool stuff. It's funny, a lot of the shops you go in have memorabilia that says "Keep Austin Weird" which is so stinkin fitting. There are a bunch of characters here, but it is really cool. I suppose the nice way to say it is that people here are really "unique". Here is a good example of something weird in Austin:

One cool thing we noticed is that all of the graffiti that we saw has a positive message. None of it is just throwing up your name but a lot of it is stencils or has a purpose or something interesting. For example:

We saw these in the river area, where we walked around for a couple of hours. It was super beautiful!

Pray for us because the past few days have been pretty wearisome. I don't know if maybe we have been too "on the go" and not had enough rest time, but we just have been kind of struggling the past couple of days. We don't have a lot of push to go out but even in that, God keeps bringing people to us. Yesterday we helped this guy get his car out of the road then gave him a ride to his house. While he was parking, these 2 girls came up and asked us for a ride to the grocery store. The guy was a believer but the girls, who were 17, didn't really feel like talking. I was trying to get them to open up a little bit because I think they were living on the streets, but they seemed almost afraid to talk to us, which just gave me a bad feeling about what was going on in their lives. Please pray for them, they wouldn't talk, but I feel like they have some serious issues.
Here, also, is a big issue that we need prayer for. We were planning on staying in the south and knocking out the southern part of the country then heading up the east coast but now we are not so sure. As terrible as it would be to be in the summer in the south, it would be nearly impossible to weather the north in the winter so we are praying about going north to Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, and on eastward. This is a huge deviation from our plans and we really need to make sure we are in God's will. Please pray that God would confirm & show us clearly where He wants us to go. :)
That's all for now. We should be leaving Austin on Tuesday or Wednesday and heading to our friends' house in Dallas, where we plan on resting & recooping.
Until next time :)