Begun in Faith

You know how the first pancake never turns out right? The pan’s not hot enough, or you didn’t use enough water or non-stick spray or whatever. Sometimes you have to do something before you learn how to do it well. That’s how this short term team was, except we had three big, new things all planned for the same week. We learned a lot. In the planning for this short term team from Olivet, we decided to plan a “big event” for the end of their time and use the week leading up to publicize through the city. We didn’t have the means to fly in a famous speaker, so we made a crazy plan. Extreme pays to send a pastor from the church in Cali, Colombia where we trained to each church plant to lead an Encounter retreat. We strategically planned an Encounter for the first weekend of the short term trip and kept the pastor (Ferney Oliveros) for the whole week to preach in the big event (not like against his will or anything). So that was it: lead an Encounter retreat, do five days of evangeli

Doing this job sometimes finds us in strange situations. One night a while back, I told myself I would enjoy a quiet evening and then found myself simultaneously counseling a contact through a difficult life decision through text, researching how to set up an iphone without a credit card for Damaris’s brother, and emailing two different women about circus equipment. That’s just the way it goes. So I decided to document a week through selfies. It was a week of preparation for an Encounter Retreat, a short term team from Olivet University, and an evangelistic event called “Hope for Cordoba.” And, well, here’s how it went.  This blog is titled "A Week of Selfies," but it could just as easily be named "Irrefutable Proof that Ashley is Wonderfully Crazy," "How Many Scarves does Brooke Own??," or "How Many Days can Brooke Consistently Take Pictures of Her Activities?" The answer to that last one would be four.  Monday is our day off, and the