Some people this weekend got to do something extra fun.  As a fundraiser for our Israel trip, Joshua sells pizza and pazooki to campers and/or staff.  The Joshua students and staff make it here at Joshua, and then deliver it.  The delivery is unlike any other delivery.  Someone might all-of-a-sudden have the lights go off in their room, only to find their pizza and drink sitting on the floor when the lights come back on; they might have some crazy people from the 80’s arrive at their door with their pizza; or they might have some Joshua kids in flannel.  Whatever happens to be the theme for the night, it is sure to provide some laughs with the highly nutritious food.

As of now, we are letting our minds recover after reciting the first TWO chapters (60 verses!!!) of Philippians by memory.  We are also enjoying our second group of preview students.   Well, here’s Chris again to add some spice to this rice, so that’s been our week so far in a nutshell, so hope you parents out there enjoy this!!!! Bye!!!!!!!!!

Happiest of New Years to you all. We are all very glad to be back at Joshua after break safe and sound. After a weekend of work and still no snow (PTL) 19 preview students showed up to test the Joshua waters. They are living in the building with us and just living the Joshua dream this week—they’re great!

On New Years Eve the Joshua students were all working for family camp. The most exciting part of the weekend was definitely the New Years Eve party, complete with pizza trains, illusionists, and lots of confetti. That is right, we said pizza train. That consists of the Joshua students exiting the kitchen with upbeat music and pizzas in each hand and delivered them while dancing.

With the preview students here this week, we only thought it would be fair if they had a word or two in the blog as well! Preview student #29038 (Sal) said, “Joshua is fun.” When asked her thoughts on Joshua, Rachel and Jenna’s previe, Olivia Buller said, “Oh gosh, I feel like I have to say something profound. This was so much easier in my interview. I love observing the community here, and it seems like an awesome program!”

This is the last week before our second Philippians test, so we’re all trying to find time to study for that. Just a couple more weeks and one more preview before we all leave for the Dominican!

Grace and peace to you,

Justin, Jimmy, Jenna and Jrachel

I hope that this Christmas season finds you well and enjoying being together with your loved ones.   We count it a privilege and a blessing to be able to journey with your students through their time at the Joshua Wilderness Institute and have enjoyed getting to know each of them personally.  We hope that you continue to see growth and will pray for their time at JWI as it is definitely an amazing yet tough place to be.  Students coming out of the program time and time again say that it was the most rewarding yet hardest thing they have ever done.  For me it is simply amazing each year at just how fast time goes by as we are almost 4 months into this class year and have already been on three Joshua trips.  Just the other day we enjoyed the annual Joshua Christmas party filled with a formal dress up dinner and ending with a ugly sweater contest as well as the 12^th annual gingerbread house build off (Click here to see photos from the night).  It was a great evening and was such a blessing as we were able to enjoy time with all the Joshua Pause families as well as sing songs, read a few Christmas stories and hear our very own Joshua Bell Choir perform.

Joshua Bell Choir

Joshua Students singing

As a Christmas present I wanted to inform everyone of some exciting new features to come;

One of the new features that we are adding to the site is a weekly blog that will be written by myself (Rich the Director) or one of the other Joshua staff. Our desire is to let you in on some of the fun behind the scenes things that are going on here at Joshua as well as help paint a picture to where we have been and where we are heading.  We know many of you are faithful followers of the blog so our hope is to engage you with some new content.   With that said be looking for the launch of a new website in the next month.   We are in the process of redesigning the Joshua logo as well as making the site more user friendly.  You will also see that with this release we will begin podcasting not only the speakers (click here to go to the current speaker archive) but a weekly radio show that will discuss the books we are reading, interview Joshua speakers and chat about current Joshua life in the building.

Click to hear the intro to the podcasts

Last but not least we will be releasing a free Joshua App for your IPhone, IPad’s or Droid interfaces.  This should be fun as you will have Joshua at your fingertips and will be connected to all the latest info, blogs, webcams and podcasts.

Final thought is a reminder to follow the Joshua twitter feed.  For those of you unfamiliar with Twitter it is a great way to keep up with the daily fun things happening at Joshua.  We try and update our twitter a few times a day with interesting facts as well as little pieces of Joshua life.  You can subscribe to the Joshua Twitter by going to http://twitter.com/joshuahumelake

Again on behalf of myself, my family and the Joshua staff, have a very merry Christmas!

Rich Ferreira

Hey all! This week has been good to us so far and there have been no major difficulties. This last weekend we had a small conference for The Well, which is our sister church from Fresno. Since it was a small conference there were only seven of us working so a lot of us went down the hill at various points in time to visit places off the hill.

While the few students working this weekend slaved away, the rest enjoyed a relaxed weekend. Up at the building, many laid low, stayed up late and slept in. One gathering traveled to the grand city of San Francisco! The small assemblage of eleven people hung out with some homeless personalities, explored the shops and ate some excellent food.  On Saturday, another group migrated to the bustling metropolis of Fresno, California.

On Monday we were given our instructions for the Dominican Republic and learned what our jobs would be. I think all of us were pleased with what jobs we got, but more importantly we are excited to be able to serve God in another country.

Tuesday was a great day for service by the Joshua family, while most of the full-time staff was at the staff Christmas party, we (Joshua students) watched all their children while they were gone. It was a great time to give back to the community who has given a great deal to us, and also to work on our relations with children. Terrible thing was staying up to midnight (For most of us).

Starting off on Friday, we found out that most of us had a surprise weekend off! They only needed 5 people to work, so the rest of us enjoyed some much-appreciated time off.  About half the class went off the mountain and enjoyed the benefits of living in the Golden state. Some went to the beach for the weekend; others went to one of our former Catalyst couple’s home.

This is Chase Silver writing on behalf of the group that went down to Ventura this weekend. We went and hung out at the beach all day Saturday and that evening we went to down town Ventura to pass out sandwiches to homeless people. We broke up into three groups, and my group A.K.A. the A TEAM met some really cool people, on ecouple that we met have been evicted from their home and have ben on the street for a little under a week. The wife has cancer but is starting to get better which is good. The couple has this epic puppy named Lucky! James was the husband and he is from Jackson Alabama and talked really fast. All in all we had a blast this weekend getting to know one another on an epic road trip.

This is Tristan-Charles Cameron Green writing at this point. I stayed and worked in Support Services, along with three others: Austin Bailey, Kelsey Smith, and Galo Sandoval. Kenneth Clark worked in Ponderosa. We worked extra hard, so for to make up for the shenanigans of the others, gallivanting across sunny California, bending and shifting to any and every whim they felt tugging at the strings of their free will. We sweated; our whole hearts invested in the work we were given by God to do this weekend. It was gr8.

Jenna Lathrop here! I represent the group that stayed here at Hume with almost nothing to do. Although it could have been boring, it actually ended up to a blessing. I spent some time with my Pause Family on Saturday. I finished the two papers that were due today (Tuesday), along with my WIR and other such writing stuff. It was a blessed, relaxing weekend, despite being cold.

Also, on Monday, some of us had the opportunity to be in a broom hockey music video for the broom hockey rules for winter camp! It was awesome! Stay tune to Hume website for the video.

Toodles!

Jenna, Rachel, Chase, and Tristan J

On Sunday we all arrived safely back at Joshua.

On Monday we started off our festivities with our last day of 5AM chores, that was fun. After lunch we decked the halls—literally. Decorations galore! Christmas season has officially begun in the Joshua building. Lights falling from the ceiling, giant wreaths hanging on the walls, and multiple Christmas trees scattered throughout the building. In the afternoon 6 Forge students and our speaker greeted us for the week, Matt Lantz. Since the Forgers are Texas natives, obviously they know how to dance. Our Western Wednesday got so much more legitimate when we were taught how to 2 step, pretzel, and several other dances. The Forge students left on Thursday and we miss them already!

All but 5 of us had the weekend off. A large group of us went down to Ventura for the weekend, while the lucky few planned ahead and already was packed to head down to Anna and Chris Ferree’s house in Atascadero! They were our first catalyst couple and we love them so much.

Our weekend with the Ferree’s consisted of ice cream, the beach, midnight In-N-Out runs, shopping in SLO, Starbucks, a photo with the real Santa, and fellowship at Ryan Millar’s home church. Our afternoon in SLO was a ton of fun. Allan really loved the Gum Alley, while most of us thought it was kind of gross. It was so great to be back at the sunny beaches of California.

Loved this week and are looking forward to next week!

Over and out,

Jimmy, Rachel, Megan, and Benji

Click Here to see photos from the last couple of days.

Hello or should we say Hola from Mexico this is Austin Bailey and Jacob Sanchez! Thursday had finally arrived and that meant it was our last day of work and we were all happy that it was almost done because we were all tired, wore out and sore from all of our work that we had completed.  Whether is was digging dirt and moving rocks or moving wood we all had a great attitude about it well for the most part.

Our job this week was to dig a trench around the Amphitheatre that they are building. This is to keep the building from flooding. The thing is though, that digging around the amphitheater 6 feet deep wasn’t too bad, but the fact that we had to dig through solid dirt/rock.  Not exaggerating though, we had to use Jackhammers and picks to manage our way down to the destined spot. This job, came with blisters, bloody knuckles, dragon ball-z hair, Mexico water, and soo much fun. The crazy thing that I kept asking my self was, “ how are we still having fun?” because we were working at 150 percent, even Sergio (the Boss man), told us that we could take it easy sometimes. We just responded by saying, “No Sergio were not horses, were Stallions!” The thing was though God allowed us to work hard and have fun because we weren’t working for our selves but for him. He gave us the strength to wake up every morning and fight the cramps away to work again at 150%.

After our short and kind of relaxing work day 15 of our ladies decided to run with a couple of the deaf girls who were training to complete a 5k which is 3.2 miles.  And all of our girls did a great job and completed it and to encourage them all the guys dressed up in funny outfits and to cheer them on, we were all placed throughout the course so that they always had some one cheering for them.   All the guys really enjoyed dressing up it made for a great time.

Finally the time had come for us to play the Rancho kids in soccer. Us Americans can in with our heads held high attitude thinking we were going to win but little did with know that the Rancho kids were undefeated and they pretty much kicked our butts and made us look like we didn’t even know what soccer was but towards the end we scored a couple goals but we lost.

Finally the day had come when we got to go to Ensenada and have a free day there everyone had a blast we ate lots of tacos, bought Back packs, blankets, and ponchos were a favorite of the class.  Austin and I stopped at EVERY taco place we saw to try out Ensenada’s Finest. We might have been in Ensenada at the same time as the Baja 1000 was starting off. Talk about cool! They had the coolest looking cars that I have ever seen. Trophy trucks to dune buggies, to even motorcycles. We even got to touch some of them! The “cool thing” to do in Mexico though was to get as close to death, aka the cars, as they can without actually dying. We weren’t allowed to get to close, because, well… we could die. Then we got a great boat ride, which 6 of us took for less than 10 dollars. It was really cool to see Ensenada from a different point of view. We ended the day with a family dinner at Mango Mangos, which was rather delicious, and also the students all put in and got a Mariachi band for our dinner and danced the rest of the night away!

Jacob and Austin Bailey

Yesterday was our first day of work here at Rancho Sordo Mudo.  Nick and I were assigned to help build the missionary training center. Mostly our job was to haul fat chunks of wood from one place to another. We were staining these pieces of wood as part of the roof of the building. As you can imagine, all of this manual labor requires a great deal of strength. Throughout the day, our team encouraged each other and accomplished the task at hand. This whole week, some of our class have been playing soccer with the deaf children here, who have shown some high class skill, I must say. Today I thought, as did everyone else I’m sure, that this would be just another day of the same work that we had yesterday, little did we know that there was some hard work for us in store including restacking all of the wood that we had moved yesterday and helping the cement crew refilling in all the dirt that they had excavated yesterday. But our team leaders helped us to see that all of the seemingly small tasks we were performing were actually helping to advance the kingdom of God. After dinner tonight, we had book discussion, where we broke up into small groups and discussed chapters six through ten of Ragamuffin Gospel. Once again, the discussion became slightly controversial, thanks to Grace George. The staff had a little, yet amazing surprise for the whole class after book discussion; we got to go to a real life, authentic, side of the road, hole in the wall, dirty, genuine, and all around glorious TACO STAND!!!!! Nick and I had been waiting basically this whole trip for this! We made a couple of videos before hand building up to the tacos, including a rave in the van. Then, when we arrived, Chris ordered four tacos, but nick ordered TEN! He slammed them all down on camera with random wild cats and a guy on a horse hanging around the taco stand. We also saw a guy with a decal on his car that said “the furious”, which it wasn’t…. but all in all we’re having a great week, so we’ll see you back after break!!

Nick and Chris

As darkness settles upon the Valley of Guadalupe, we pause… and reflect on our first full day of work at Rancho Sordo Mudo. Wow. Click Here to see photos from our day!

07:00- The rooster crows. Our eyes open. The day has begun. We all walk the dusty quarter mile to the dining hall and have pancakes and things- most of which is to provide nutrition and sustenance for the long day ahead. We are told that we will have the next half hour to devote ourselves to the Holy Scriptures- and that we do.

09:00- Work assignments have been given. Wow. A select few have been chosen to do the work that most would fear. We are that few: The Lion. We are ordered to clear brush, fill in pot holes and brave the unknown for the upcoming 5k Ladies Walk/Run, which will be taking place on the Ranch this Thursday.

11:00- We are tired and take a break. Candy!

11:30- The work is tireless and the rewards are few. “Dig!” shouts Ruben, our cruel taskmaster (who is actually incredible). Suddenly, as we crest a large mountain pass, the ruins of an Ancient Mayan temple come into view. Completely lame- we move on.

13:15- Lunch. Wow!

14:00- The Lion returns to work. Again. We paint signs, which will navigate and guide racers along the correct route come Thursday. Extreme. Much more driving around. Much more adventure and thrills. We save a child.

18:00- The work is finished- for now. Dinner has started. Our ravaged and depleted bodies eagerly consume energy in the form of pasta and cheese. Yum!

In all seriousness, today was incredible. We got to see each other serving and working alongside the Rancho Sordo Mudo staff. We are excited for the rest of our time here- stay tuned for more updates!

With love and honor,

The Lion.

(A.K.A. Jordan Mooney, David Beeghly, Andy Schmidt, Tristan-Charles Cameron Green and Ryan Millar.)