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Big Break 2017!!

Dear Friends and Family,

       Big Break 2k17 was a success! 

Last Friday, the University of Minnesota filled up a charter bus with 44 students to embark on a 26 hour bus ride down to Panama City Beach. 

About midway through our trip we drove through Tennessee: 

As you can see, it was snowing in Nashville. I had no idea that it snowed in Tennessee!

Saturday 3.11 - 10:30 PM 

After the 26 hour drive we finally arrive at the Edgewater Resort in PCB at 10:30PM on Saturday. We’re all super excited to finally get off the bus and explore. Right when we get off the bus, we head to registration. Even though we were all exhausted from the drive, everybody is excited to have finally arrived: 

There are a couple things left to do before the night is over - we need to check in, receive our roommate assignments and make our campus run to Waffle House. 

Inside Waffle House: https://goo.gl/photos/4GBJi5zZVQUd7nQR7

Of course, before we tuck in for the night, we need to make our to the beach first!

https://goo.gl/photos/YU6BqqVutwv92bN3A

Sunday 3.12

The official conference doesn’t actually start until 7PM, so we have essentially have a free day. I woke up this morning at 6:30AM to watch the sunrise and spend time in the word on the beach. 

After that, we go meet up in the parking lot to go shopping for groceries for the week. 

Then as a campus, because we didn’t have church that morning, we got together as a campus for “campus time” and had the chance to worship together.

One really cool thing about our Sunday morning worship was that people voluntarily stepped up to help lead and organize the worship music. (And yes, we used a plastic trashcan because we didn’t have a cajon). After that, we the rest of the day off until the conference started, so naturally I did some exploring!

One really cool thing about Big Break this year was that they had a room dedicated for prayer and quiet time with the Lord. In past years, often times there would be designated prayer spots, but never a room devoted to it. The prayer room multiple sections to it - there was an area to sit before the cross, prayer tents for individual prayer, a section for people to come in and play worship music, and a confession wall. 

At 7:00PM, we rushed the ballroom. At most big Cru conferences, students from different campuses will crowd the entrance to the ballroom waiting for the doors to open. Once the doors open, a stampede of students will rush into the ballroom to claim seats for for their campusmates by waving their school flag!

Monday 3.13:

 The weather is absolutely awful today. It’s low 40′s (which you’d expect for me to be used to because I’ve just been in Minnesota for the last couple months of winter) and raining. It’s not just raining, it’s POURING. Today is our first day of outreach, so going out into the city would mean that we would get drenched. Not to mention the fact that nobody would be outside because of the weather. Consequently, our original plans for outreach were canceled and replaced with plans to do “digital outreach”. For digital outreach, we stay inside and try to reach out to people we know through means of social media, text message, etc. This is a very hard thing for some people because instead of having to have conversations with people on the beach that they’d never see again, they would have to have conversations with people they’d likely see again (and in the near future as well). A large concern in the room is that bridges might be burned today because of a conversation gone wrong. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. The main means of starting the conversation today is sending out a video called “Falling Plates” and asking people their opinions on it. This hopefully will lead into a more gospel centered conversation and possibly the opportunity to share the gospel through further conversation or future appointment. Personally, I used posted something to my Instagram story and shared the link that way. Unfortunately, because of a lack of time allotted to do Digital Outreach, this time was not particularly fruitful. I was not able to talk to anybody except for my roommate :( (my roommate is a Christian and was just messing with me). 

Here’s the Falling Plates video: 

Tuesday 3.14 Pi Day

Today the weather is better than yesterday. The clouds are rolling back and revealing the sun, but it’s still a little cold. We’re excited to finally go out and share today. The location that we’ll be sharing at today is about a 10 minutes drive from the Edgewater Resort, where we’re staying at, so we all get on the bus and receive our sharing partners. I get paired up with Chaz, one of the people in Cru that i’ve never really had a deep relationship with. We’ve exchanged words, but we’ve never had any conversations deeper than the level of “Hello” or “Goodbye”. He’s super nervous. Chaz is a guy that I know for a fact understands the gospel. He’s shared his faith before and has done overseas travel with Cru. Nonetheless, he is nervous. Before we go out onto the beach, I share my words of encouragement with him. I remind him that we can’t take rejection from people personally and also that we aren’t responsible for whether somebody receives Christ that day- that’s all in the hands of the Lord. 

As we walk onto the beach, we can tell that nobody is really out on the beach. The classic demographic of “drunk college students on vacation” isn’t present. A couple years ago Panama City Beach banned drinking on the beach, so the beaches aren’t as packed as they used to be. There are people nonetheless on the beach, so we go. We walk for a couple minutes just to gather our wits and confidence. I look up and I see a group of college students and I say, “Let’s talk to them”. 

Carissa, Madison, Haley, and Quincy are all students at Mizzou (University of Missouri, pronounced Mi-zoo). They say they are all believers, but we go through the “Spring Break Questionnaire” with them. The Spring Break Questionnaire is a list of several questions that help shepherd a conversation into a more spiritual conversation by asking questions such as “What do you believe happens after death?” or “How much would you desire to know God on a scale of 1-10?” or “How much do you think God desires to know you?”. It turns out, Carissa went down to Destin, Florida for a 9 week discipleship program. One thing we learned from this conversation is that most people in the South grow up in the Church and believe it. For many college students, however, it is a matter of whether they practice it or not. By now, it seems that these people have a pretty good understanding of the gospel, so we ask them whether we can pray for anything for them and we go our separate ways. 

In our two hour period to share with people on the beach, Chaz and I have difficulty trying to engage in another conversation  with people. By now, it seems that there are more Cru students on the beach than vacationers and Cru students from other sections of the beach are spilling into our section because they’ve run out of people to talk to in their sections! While continuing to walk down the beach, we search for people who are not engaged in conversation, but there is no one. I take advantage of this opportunity to ask Chaz questions to get to know him better. 

As our time is running out, we being to walk back to the bus. We run into two middle schoolers standing around a Spikeball net and we begin to talk to them. They just bought Spikeball, so they were trying to learn how to play. We volunteer to teach them and play with them for a little bit. After a while, we realize we have 5 minutes to get back to the bus, so we part ways. 

Tonight is the night for our creative date, where the guys in our villa (which is the housing that we are staying in at the resort) make a meal for a group girls in another villa. In a couple hours of scrambling and cleaning, we’ve finished our dishes. In an hour and thirty minutes, we’ve cooked pasta, bacon wrapped chicken, and garlic bread. 

Wednesday 3.15

Today, because of scheduling conflict and being rained out on Monday, we have a free day. It’s a bummer that we don’t get to go out and share, but we’re also glad to finally be able to enjoy the nice weather. After the morning session, we take a campus pictures and then head to the beach to have our free day.

At 4PM, we have organized class dinners, so the entire junior class at the University of Minnesota is to meet on the beachfront to walk to Pineapple Willy’s, a restaurant a mile along the beach. 

As we’re walking back back along the beach, we run into one of the groups that someone in our class shared with on the beach on Tuesday. After further conversation, we discovered that they were very devout lovers of Jesus! As we walk back to the resort, we witness the gorgeous sunset, so naturally everybody pulled out their cameras. 

It takes almost thirty minutes to walk back, but we make it just in time for our respective Men’s and Women’s times (both are on the cold beach at night, and let me tell you, the beach is COLD at night). For Men’s time, we played a team game. In competitive spirit, feelings were hurt, and some of us were physically injured (one of my villa-mates ran his knee into one of the wooden beach chairs). However, afterwards, we debriefed as one of our fellow mates led us in a conversation about encouragement. 

Thursday 3.16

It’s our last day to go sharing, but we’re all pretty excited to go out because of the lack of opportunities to share before today. Today we’ll be driving to Miramar Beach, Florida to share the gospel. The beach is an hour’s drive away and the biggest difference between this beach and Panama City Beach is that alcohol isn’t banned on this beach. We will be expecting to speak with mostly college aged students today, whether sober or drunk. As we pull up to the beach, we can tell that the scene here is already very different from that of Panama City Beach. Every square foot of the beach is littered with college students, beer cans, and red solo cups -- people are definitely here to party. As we get off the bus, I receive my sharing partner for the day. Jenna, is a freshman who went out to share her faith, but ended up speaking very little. Her goal for today was to initiate a conversation, share the KGP (Knowing God Personally booklet), and share the gospel. We’re all nervous to initiate conversations today; everybody seems to be here only for one reason: to party. As we walk onto the beach, we sit down to pray and encourage each other. I share a piece of scripture that I read earlier that morning.

Paul, in a letter to the church in Corinth:

“For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel- not with wisdom and eloquence, lest the cross of Christ to be emptied of its power.” 

- 1 Corinthians 1:17

Jenna wants to be the one to engage the conversation, so I allow her to pick who we should talk to. We walk for a bit on the beach to get rid of the jitters, but then we walk up to a family on the beach, a college aged woman and her mother. Jenna is extremely tense and rigid, and she asks them whether they’d like to do a survey. They politely decline, and we walk further down the beach. She is slightly discouraged at being turned down, but we talk about it a little more. She asks me what she should be saying when she initiates, and I tell her that she shouldn’t be thinking of ways to appease or glitter up her presentation. She instead should be asking things like, “How can I get to know this person better?” or “How can I love on this person?”. Jenna doesn’t really know who to engage a conversation with, so I point in a random direction and I say, “Let’s talk to them”. The group is a group of 7 ish college students, so we walk over and Jenna initiates the conversation. This time, however, Jenna is much more personal and relational. Most of the college students leave to do other things, but one guy sitting on a beach chair is willing to have a conversation with us, so we take the opportunity.

Mike is a junior at The Ohio State University studying Aerospace Engineering. Immediately, I see that there’s an opportunity to relate to him as a fellow junior AND engineering student. Our conversation kicks off, but quickly Mike reveals that he’s drunk. Unhindered, we continue the conversation. He claims that he’s a Christian but repeatedly says that he can’t reconcile the fact that he can be saved by Jesus because of the fact that so many innocent people have died in wars and such. We continue to converse with him, and eventually Jenna asks him whether he’d like to share the Knowing God Personally booklet with him, and he cheerfully accepts. 

Funny enough, throughout the conversation, Mike’s attention would drift in and out of the conversation and he would ask us whether we were Mormon’s trying to convert him. Also, Mike forgot who we were in the middle of the conversation. Towards the end of the conversation, Mike didn’t accept Christ into his life, but we left him with the KGP and a bracelet with “everystudent.com” embedded on it. We have no way of knowing how engaged Mike really was in that conversation, but we hoped that even if he forgot that he talked with us that we would find the KGP or the bracelet. It’s all the Lord’s hands now!

It was incredible to see how Jenna’s mindset changed between the first initiation to the second. She was able to learn so much about sharing her faith by trusting that the Lord was in control of that conversation. One of the coolest things of the trip was seeing her grow in this way. 

We only get to share for an hour because of how far the beach is from our resort, but that’s fine. We’re really hoping that God works in Mike’s life. We head back to the resort for our second creative date with the girls from the other villa. This time, they’re cooking the men a meal!

They cooked us chicken cheese spaghetti, salad, and sliced apples! 

Friday 3.17

Friday is a free day, so I spend most of the catching up with people I don’t get to see very often. At night, our entire campus heads out to dinner together. 

I woke up this morning at 6:30 to watch the sunrise. I want to say it was worth it, but I honestly was so tired after that, so I went back to bed after I got to look at the sunrise. 

After campus dinner, we all ran back to the beach to take more campus photos:

Congratulations if you made it this far! People frequently ask me what my favorite part of my spring break was, and it’s pretty hard to say. The entire week was a week full of really good moments with God and a lot of really cool people. I came into this trip wanting to be very intentional with building relationships with people, encouraging underclassmen, and sharing my faith with people on the beach, but I think God changed my plans for this week. By taking away certain opportunities, he invited me into a lot of other opportunities that taught me so much about my relationship with the Lord and also about His character. He taught me about the power of prayer and leaning on Him to do things that I think are impossible. He taught me that He is so much stronger and mightier than anything I could ever think of, and that He invites me into using his strength as my crutch. 

Thank you so much for being my support team for this week! The main reason why this letter is so long is that I wanted to “take you with me” on this trip. For obvious reasons, that’s not very feasible, so I hope these pictures and these words may help you experience what I experienced God doing down in PCB. If you would like to continue this conversation with me, you know where to reach me! Thanks again so much for being on this journey with me.

In Christ, 

 Everett 

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9.8.16

Today, sin took the final blow against my grandmother. The world lost a beautiful, strong, woman- but heaven gained one. Little did sin know, its final blow on her physical body would cause her to rise in Spirit to be seated at the right hand of the Ruler of Heaven, the One who created Heaven and Earth. This woman lived her entire life fighting trials after trials of hardship, but today, she gets to live for eternity in Heaven with the One who promises to deliver His children from their sorrow and suffering. Today she was a mother and a grandmother, but she now is a daughter of God. Thank you 婆婆 for blessing me, my family, and the world with your presence, but nothing makes me happier than to think of the endless joy you get to feel now that you are with God. We love and miss you so much down here!

Cheers from Earth, and hope to see you soon!

❤️BB

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something from fb.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.

Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

-Marianne Williamson

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servitude.

1/12/2016

I really haven’t been writing as much as I really should be. I also wanted to give myself some time after TCX so I could write from a perspective where I wasn’t experiencing post-TCX syndrome. So here come the multitude of TCX posts describing TCX as I experienced it.

If you had asked me what TCX was 6 months ago, I would not have been able to tell you what it was. 6 months ago, I wouldn’t be able to tell you that I was going to spend New Years on a stage in front of a thousand Jesus loving college students dancing and celebrating in the joy of the creator Himself... so how did I end up here? 

I asked the Lord where He wanted me. And in that moment I trusted the Lord to lead me to where he wanted me to serve him. 

I want to kinda pick apart what it meant for me to be a part of the worship team at TCX. There were times where I felt like I was placed on a pedestal; and I physically was, on a stage and under a spotlight in front of A TON of people. Walking around the hotel when I was on stage, I got to meet a lot of really great people. I would get greeted with a lot of: “You’re in the band!” or “How does it feel like being in the band?”. I don’t know if people actually regarded me in this way, but regardless, I felt like a celebrity from the outwards in because of the attention I was receiving (which is obviously unavoidable when you’re on stage). I’m not writing this to cast judgement, but to give you perspective on what it meant TO ME to be a part of the band. 

Being part of the band is something you don’t get to experience everyday, and it was an extreme honor for me to have God call me into that specific way to serve Him. It was incredible serving with thirteen other incredible God-loving human beings and making music for Him. But it was also an honor to serve alongside the other hundreds of servants of God comprised of college students, Cru staff, stage crew, tech crew, fireseeds, daytrippers,..(I’m sorry if I left something out, but know you’re included!). At TCX, we were all executing God’s will in some way, whether we liked it or not. For me, I believe He called me to serve Him during the conference by being a part of the band. Some were called to serve Him by going out into Minneapolis to spread his love. Regardless of the purpose God gave you, we all served in some way that, in the end, showed glory to God. Placing worship team for TCX on a pedestal above other methods of serving God would make absolutely no sense because you’re placing “God’s will” above ”God’s will”. It’s the same thing. God’s will is God’s will, and His will shall be done. 

Guys, I guarantee it. If you choose to serve the Lord, and center yourself in his will, you will enjoy it. He’s not going to call you into serving Him by doing something you’re going to absolutely hate. He loves you too much :)

//Romans 8:28

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 I’ll share more about my experience in some other posts some other time. I’m actually getting pretty sick and tired of how bad I am at writing and communicating my thoughts and feelings. 

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See the Book of 2 Corinthians 5 to read and learn more about The Temporal and Eternal.

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God is good

9/20/15 Tonight a guy introduced himself to me at the Treehouse party and told me that he was extremely touched by the Holy Spirit during worship at shift last week. He told me about how he had graduated last year and had recently become sober. He got plugged in when his boss asked him whether he wanted to go to the kegger, and how he realized that he needed more of Christ in his life and how Shift / Cru was exactly what he needed. Last week before Shift I was so nervous to get on that stage, but Alyssa told me that all I had to do was pray a ton before and connect with Jesus, and so I prayed that God would use me as a broken vessel to reach out to people that wanted to seek Him tonight and that he would use me to connect and bridge the gap between Him and us through worship- and he answered my prayer. During the entire worship set, I felt as if there were only two entities in the church, us and God. I didn't feel a trace of fear or anxiety that I had been feeling that day. In that way, I am so grateful that we get to be a part of this, being able to form a bridge between us and God through worship and stand in his presence. With that said, I just wanted to give you guys a freaking huge high five cus you guys are so freaking awesome

tldr; God is good

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“Spirit of the Living God

come fall afresh on me

come awake me from my sleep

Blow through the caverns of my soul

pour in me to overflow” 

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Post 30

Day 45 : July 2, 2015 

I really haven’t written anything in the past couple weeks, or since I started summer school really. It’s been a really busy three weeks, and I’ve missed a ton of things such as the 30th day on this blog. In addition to slacking on the blog posts, I’ve fallen way behind on reading my bible along with my devotional. 

      I don’t think it’s very realistic that I write a page’s worth of writing per day for the entire summer. It will probably vary with my schedule, but I do intend to continue writing. It may be a possibility that I write shorter anecdotes.

 Our college fellowship / bible study at my church finally started last week, and I have to say that it’s spectacular. The youth pastor who leads it is extremely intelligent and has a lot of offer pertaining to how read His word. He referred to these techniques as hermeneutics. Spending time with some of my Christian peers has really made me think about the rest of my summer in terms of my faith. I’m really looking forward to finding out more and more about God’s character little by little. 

In our bible study session we had prayer time after, and I found it really nice to have God listen to my thoughts on how everything’s going with my peers, myself, and the world. Saying it aloud to God was just a really great way to recognize the tad of his character that we understand. I dunno. Just a thought. 

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Let's get something very clear:

I don’t love because I want to be the “cool Christian” that has gained the acceptance of the surrounding culture. I don’t love because of pressure or fear of being misunderstood. I don’t even love to show the world what “true Christianity” looks like, whatever that means. I love because I am loved. I’m left void of any other response. I was desperate and alone, then love came to save me. I give love and acceptance freely because I intend to change the world with the one thing that changed my world. You leak who you are. I am love because I am loved.

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No one alive has the ability to out-sin the grace of God.

Matt Chandler  (via littlethingsaboutgod)

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President Obama on the tragic shooting in Charleston, South Carolina.

Good afternoon, everybody. This morning, I spoke with, and Vice President Biden spoke with, Mayor Joe Riley and other leaders of Charleston to express our deep sorrow over the senseless murders that took place last night.

Michelle and I know several members of Emanuel AME Church. We knew their pastor, Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who, along with eight others, gathered in prayer and fellowship and was murdered last night. And to say our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families, and their community doesn’t say enough to convey the heartache and the sadness and the anger that we feel.

Any death of this sort is a tragedy. Any shooting involving multiple victims is a tragedy. There is something particularly heartbreaking about the death happening in a place in which we seek solace and we seek peace, in a place of worship.

Mother Emanuel is, in fact, more than a church. This is a place of worship that was founded by African Americans seeking liberty. This is a church that was burned to the ground because its worshipers worked to end slavery. When there were laws banning all-black church gatherings, they conducted services in secret. When there was a nonviolent movement to bring our country closer in line with our highest ideals, some of our brightest leaders spoke and led marches from this church’s steps. This is a sacred place in the history of Charleston and in the history of America.

The FBI is now on the scene with local police, and more of the Bureau’s best are on the way to join them. The Attorney General has announced plans for the FBI to open a hate crime investigation. We understand that the suspect is in custody. And I’ll let the best of law enforcement do its work to make sure that justice is served.

Until the investigation is complete, I’m necessarily constrained in terms of talking about the details of the case. But I don’t need to be constrained about the emotions that tragedies like this raise. I’ve had to make statements like this too many times. Communities like this have had to endure tragedies like this too many times. We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun. Now is the time for mourning and for healing.

Keep reading

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Job 19:25

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The joy of the LORD is your strength.

Nehemiah 8:10 (NIV)

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and so i bet my life.

Day 29 ø June 16th, 2015

I started summer school yesterday. I’m taking one class for 4 credits, Intro to Computer Programming C++. This class is extremely similar to AP CompSci A, which I took in high school, and I can say, none of this is really new to me, other than the fact that it’s a new language. I love it, but I hate it. I love programming, but what we’re doing is such a drag. It’s stuff I already know. And on top of that, the class is 4 days a week for 5 hours each day. I come home everyday exhausted because the class is so long. I also feel like I lose a significant chunk of my day because I come home and sleep because of how exhausted I am. I came home yesterday half asleep and came home today with a massive headache. As a result, I’ve been reading my bible less, probably because I’m using my fatigue as an excuse. I’m sure if I managed my time better, I would have time to, but I just don’t. 

During the school year, one of my Christian sisters and I were talking about the new Imagine Dragons album (at the time), and she said that she felt like the album had some underlying Christian tones to it. I never really thought about it until today, and I have noticed a couple things that definitely are applicable to my relationship with Christ, this song in particular. In a relationship, each party has to be committed to each other. Jesus died on the cross for me, so the only commitment in the relationship has to come from me. It definitely is a challenge, however, to maintain a full fledged relationship, because I get distracted by the world. By school, by media, by people. Being in a relationship with the ultimate most supreme being of existence also entails other things for my own life. Being able to recognize that someone who had no reason to start a relationship with you did so because he loved you is amazing. This recognition leads to outwards and inwards change of the heart to live life for Christ. To live life in the light and walk in the trail of Christ. For the people who don’t understand Christianity, the first part is to recognize God’s love for you, because it is by grace that we are saved. Then comes the change. Change happens as a result of grace. Of accepting the grace that God has given us. I will admit I don’t completely understand the grace of God yet, but I’ve felt it. I’ve seen it work in people’s hearts, and I’ve heard it move mountains. This is why I choose to follow Christ. Because of grace. And this is why I bet my life on Him.

Ephesians 2:8 ‘ For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God’