Not a bad view

Hello Readers, Amy and Brian here. Last night was the first night of street evangelism in Vegas. We started at about 5 pm to see our territory, which consisted of the section of the strip from the Bellagio to the Casino Royale. From about 5 to 7 we spent walking up to people and as soon as we were about to get to them they would walk away. When 7 came we decided it was time to get some dinner and then start back up again afterwards. We met some Joshua staff and Students at Chipotle and decided to join them. After getting some encouraging words we went back to the strip and soon found a Band from Canada outside the Bellagio Fountain Show. As soon as we took their group picture we talked about Sports, Christianity and about where they were from for about 20 min. After a second group meeting with encouraging words we went back out to the Bellagio Fountain to see if we could find some other people to talk to about Christ. We found Tyrell who was here for a photo-shoot. We talked to him between the shows and found out his take on Christianity and his view of how people should “Do Life”. Overall, we’d say it was a great start to just get into conversations and trying to keep our eyes focused on God in Sin City! Click here to see some photos from the trip. Oh and by the way some of us got a chance to go to the Hoover Dam and that was really cool as well.
Stay tuned for more….

Thoughts from Raya and Sean

View from breakfast

What a day.   Last night we all arrived at Ironwood camps in Barstow after traveling most of the day and found ourselves in the old west.  Once we located our lodging we went out into the night to play some human foosball.   That’s right human foosball!  Click here to see pictures from Ironwood.  After a good nights sleep we were all treated to an amazing sunrise in the desert as well as a great breakfast.  The leadership of the camp lead us in a morning devo and then took us all for a tour of this amazing camp.   Then the fun really started as we were allowed to go shoot shot guns, attempt sand boarding on a local dune or ride horses.  Needles to say we all had a great time and were sad to leave after lunch but knew that the real reason we were on the trip was for the evangelism in Vegas.  Two hours more of driving and we arrived at the Tropicana hotel and unloaded our stuff as Rich said to meet back in the parking lot at 5 and to be ready to get started.  Well that time has come so stay tuned for more.

Until the next blog

Las Vegas

Hey everyone just wanted to let you know that we are leaving tomorrow for our Evangelism trip to Las Vegas.  Over the past month the students have been learning how to share their faith and starting Monday we will let them put it into practice for a few days on the streets of Las Vegas.   Be praying for the crew as sharing your faith is difficult, especially in a city that is all about people living and doing whatever they want.   Should be a great learning experience and we have been praying that God opens some really cool doors.  On our way there we are going to stop and spend some time at IronWood camp in Barstow to let the students experience a different facility and their philosophy on camping ministry.  All and all it should be a fun trip so keep following or check out the twitter updates that we post a few times a day while on trips.

Take care

-Joshua Staff

Photo of us with the Forge Students

Dear family members and followers of the Joshua Blog,
We just wanted to update you on what a few of us have been up to the past week. Rich, Paul, Tim, Dan, Jessie, Elizabeth, and Karissa have been in Texas. Every year Rich goes and teaches at a few different places and when he goes he allows some of us to tag a long. We left for our trip to the Forge (a program like Joshua) on Saturday and we arrived home Wednesday night. The trip was a good experience and it was a nice break that I won’t forget. We started Saturday night with hanging out with the Forge students in their awesome apartments. We talked about our programs and what we were learning late into the night.
Rich talked this week on the Sh’ma and how we should live it. It is really cool that the Forge students are also learning the Sh’ma and lots of other things that we are learning as well. Some of the Forge students came in December while their director, Matt Lantz, spoke to us. Being able to talk with them again and ask them how they were doing with things that we had talked about a couple months ago was also a really neat experience. Though the programs are not exactly the same and in some ways are very different, it is nice to be able to talk to people a few states away that are going through similar things. All in all it was an amazingly fun trip, even though I went to Texas hoping for warm weather and it snowed most of the time. Who knew it snowed in Texas!
A favorite time was having late nights with Paul & Rich and getting to know them and hear funny stories of past classes. Another treat was gas station breakfast, who’d think you could order an omelet at a gas station? What’s better then Frostie’s root beer first thing in the morning with breakfast?
Well back to the fun here at Joshua

Take care

Rich

Food Bank in LA

Well if you have been following the blog you know that we have finished our trip to LA and are all safe and sound back at Hume. For me as the director the LA trip is one of my favorites as it not only opens the eyes of our students to the needs around them but also gives them a chance to put into practice all the things they have been learning. We had the opportunity to work along side organizations that reach out to the homeless and poor like: Midnight Mission, Union Rescue Mission, LA Food Bank, Metro Kids, Food Trucks, and many others. This trip is also a lot of fun as it allows us to take advantage of the religious and cultural diversity of LA. During the trip we eat out at many ethnic restaurants (Indian, Salvadorian, Italian just to name a few)as well as had the chance to sit and discus religious views with representatives from various religions (Church of Scientology, Buddhism, Self Realization Fellowship and Christian Science). All in all it was a great trip and I am very grateful to Jeff Bell from Reign Ministries for all his help every year making this trip possible for the Joshua students. If you or your church are ever interested in a trip like this I would highly recommend you get in touch with Jeff at jbell@reignministries.org. Hope you enjoyed the posts from what the students were learning on the trip. Take care
Rich

Ice Cream at Diddy Riese

Greetings to all the blog readers from the dynamic duo of Sam Salerno and Samantha Littlefield. What an eventful day it has been!
Our morning started off with showers at the Echo park pool, it was epic, and the guys destroyed the girls in the fastest shower time contest. Although it is true, I (Samantha) believe that we are allowed to shower longer because we have long hairs on our head to wash. Michael Stolz. After everyone was squeaky clean, we went on an adventure to the International House of Pancakes where we were extremely blessed with all you can eat pancakes!!! Sammy and Robin chose to consume nine whole pancakes and Jacob ate thirteen. It was a bad decision later for them because of upset stomachs, but it was really entertaining for all of us to watch them battle down. Click here to see some pictures from today.
After we had our fill at IHOP we went to the Museum of Tolerance, aka The Holocaust Museum (the Tolerance name confused me for a bit, but once I discovered that they were one in the same, it all made sense). The museum was amazing. Normally, whenever an idea of a ‘Museum’ comes to mind, I think of some dusty books and glass cases, but after visiting The Museum of Tolerance, I will never view a museum the same way. It felt like it went on forever (not in a bad way, mind you), but it was just room after room of information and…emotions. Yeah, crazy. Museums with emotions? How can that be? However, after viewing the faces of people who were persecuted by the Nazis, and even the faces of people that are being persecuted today, the whole class was exposed to a mix of emotions. From anger to sorrow to compassion to understanding, each room we visited blew us away. It was truly an amazing experience and one that I/we will never forget.
We had dinner at Nizam Indian Cuisine around 4 o’clock and had an amazingly authentic Indian meal. We left the restaurant at 5:25 and walked back to the parking lot where we left the cars. We arrived at the cars with a surprise of three car windows busted in. Sadly, three cars that were in our caravan were broken into and about eight of us had belongings stolen. I (Samantha) was the only one in my van who had stuff stolen. I made the mistake of leaving my backpack in between the two front seats in full view of anyone walking by. The ironic part about our cars being broken into was that we were in a relatively nice area of town compared to the areas that we had been to earlier in the week. I was pretty shocked at first, but God definitely reminded me of how lucky I am to be blessed with all I have compared to all those we have served earlier in the week. Things come and go in life, but as believers we know that we need not worry about the things we have in this world, for we have far greater things waiting for us beyond this life. God is bigger than everything that was stolen from us and it will be really cool to see how he continues to work through this crummy situation. The best part is, whoever stole our backpacks now has a few Bibles on their hands to read if they so desire.
So that was our day. I don’t think it can get any crazier…
Farewell,

The Sams

Hanging out in Hollywood

Lights! Camera! Action! Hey everyone! Right now we are in Hollywood after a long and interesting day to say the least. We have been working along side Rich’s friend Jeff Bell who works for Reign Ministries who specialize in missions experiences all over the world. Today we were a little nervous when Jeff us that we would be getting lunch for a homeless person. We rallied into our groups from the previous day, and after praying, we were off looking for the person God wanted us to spend some time with. We were given a map of the boundaries to stay into; some of us found our new friend right away while others were rejected multiple times until the right person came along. Morgan was in one of those latter groups and would loved to tell you all about her great experience. Click here to see pictures from today.
When I finally found the man that God had destined our group to find he accepted our offer and told us he wanted to go to Carl’s Jr. for lunch. When we were in line to order food, we found out his name was Bruce and he said he believed in God. Then he asked us if he could get his food to go, because he had things to do. We prayed with him while we waited for his food to be ready, and soon after that he was gone. We sat there and ate our lunch, and we were starting to get a little upset that our lunch didn’t turn out as well as we had hoped or planned it would. Lindsay made a statement that we should just spend some time praying for him, because even if we spent the whole two hours talking to him, nothing we said could make a difference without the work of God. We were still a little bummed that we didn’t get a chance to talk to anyone, but less than five minutes later a man walked by and handed me a paper that said “Pardon me, I am a deaf person selling this card to make a living. Your cooperation is greatly appreciated. Thank you- may God bless you.” I turned around and got his attention and asked him if he knew sign language. Ashley and then kind of half interpreted what he was saying. His name was Roberto, and he was homeless. He was handing out these cards on the way to Wall-mart to go buy some cheap clothing. We asked him if he knew Jesus, and he said yes. When we asked him what we could pray for, he told us that his 3-year-old sister died last year, his mom has an addiction to crack, he needs a job, and he is really worried lately. When we went to pray for him, we realized there was a language issue. Ashley wrote down what Brian was saying as we prayed, and when we were done praying he took the notebook, and he signed the whole prayer and said Amen. He was really open with us and it was awesome to see God bring us someone after we thought we weren’t going to be able to have a good experience, and we all ended up learning a lot from it. It was so evident to us how little control we have in situations, and how much control God has. If Bruce hadn’t been busy, if he had wanted to eat somewhere else, if we had found a homeless person sooner, we never would have met Roberto. He was really an awesome and friendly guy and it was so cool getting to know him. We all prayed again for Bruce and Roberto before we left, and its safe to say the day was not a loss.

On the other side of things, I, Amy, had a vastly different day. As soon as we ventured away from the vans my group quickly went on the hunt for someone to treat for lunch. Only a few minutes went by when a short, extremely talkative man approached us. He was showing off his new cologne and tried to get our attention talking a mile a minute and then he was off. This man looked the spitting image of Shmee from the movie Hook. Keeley, Christy and I wanted him to spend the rest of the day with us and when Matt and Michael approved we ran down the street to get him. Shmee didn’t want to go to lunch with us but had great ideas of where we should go for food. A larger woman approached him with excitement and wanted to help suggest lunch destinations. We found out her name was Sarah and that she more or less just wanted to get to know Shmee but we got her to go to lunch with us instead. It was literally as if God had a flashing green light above her head. We took her to El Polo Loco and tried to show her Christ’s love to the best of our ability. We noticed that Sarah was taking mental illness medication and her behavior confirmed our observation. The more we showed Sarah love the more she withdrew with hesitation. It was heart breaking to see how people refuse love and ultimately Christ’s grace because they can’t understand a free gift with any strings attached. We were lucky enough to spend the whole time we had for lunch with Sarah and share the gospel with her not only with scripture but also with our actions. 2 and half hours flew by and before we knew it and then it was time for our next destination. The vans took us to a church like building entitled The Self Realization Center. I personally, could not wait to realize my self, but then we realized that’s not quite what they do there. A man who called himself a monk of sorts explained to us this merge of; I guess one could say, religion. The idea behind it was that through meditation and gurus, one could figure out how to realize God. Confusing? Yes. The monk was patient as our group grilled him with questions comparing ad contrasting our faith in Jesus with his faith in many prophets, saints, and gurus. (By the way a guru is your spiritual teacher or example used as a crutch to get to God.) I’d say that Morgan and I didn’t realize too much about our selves, but in the end our faith became stronger and more evident in comparison to what the monk believed. It’s overwhelming seeing how much the city is in need of Jesus. It seems like everyone is searching for God in all the wrong places, or intensely running away from Him. This trip is opening up our eyes to the ways we can continue to serve his kingdom even after Joshua. And now, as we roam the streets of Hollywood, our minds consuming what the day has brought, we get ready for another great day tomorrow.

End Scene.

Take care

Rich