Our team's most recent summit was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and we just finished at the church on Sunday night. When we arrived there we heard about how downtown Grand Rapids was having a huge art festival and on that Friday they were setting loose 5,000 lanterns in the city! So of course as soon as we heard about it the team broke out into, "... and at last i see the light"
We sang songs from Tangled all week long, and when we got there 5,000 plus people in the city were singing the same thing.
I promised to upload a video i took of the lanterns and I also put up some pictures from the art festival, big thanks to my friend Joel for letting me use them!
Here's me with the lanterns being set loose behind me!
These are a few of the guys on my team! We lost the rest of our team, as you can see it was kind of crowded!
Me, Joel, Hunter, and Mark!
This dragon is part of the art festival and is completely made out of buttons!
Downtown Grand Rapids
Love the penguins!
Here's the video i promised! Please pardon how fast I talk :)
This is what the church looked like
One of the stories I teach is called, "Max and the Big Fat Lie" it's about a boy named Max who wants to watch a movie he knows his mom won't approve of, so he lies to her about the movie, says he's just going to play with his friend in the park and every time he lies to her all these monsters come up in his life and each monster gets bigger with each new lie. So for the craft we have the kids color the monsters from the story and this is one of them. If you can't tell things are moving pretty fast between the two of us and i'm thinking about a wedding in June ;)
... Just kidding! We're not allowed to date as a first year traveler, and I'm not in love with a monster!
The church building was fairly new and huge! It had plenty of rooms to hide in and a good number of games to play. I got to sit in for testimonies one night and heard about families whose lives were being changed since Life Action arrived. Most of the people who stood up talked about how they realized they had pride and selfishness in their lives and how it was distancing them from God and their family. It was cool to see how the church was growing closer to God and mending relationships that had subconsciously been growing apart.
My host parents were Kurt and Julie Andrews (Yes, she sings).
Julie is mostly blind and runs a daily bible study through a giant skype call with thousands of other blind people. Here's a picture of our host parents when they were young and married!
This summit i roomed with a girl named, Ashlee, on my team and she has had some problems with her eyes so after the summit ended on Sunday night we drove back to the camp and we took her to the eye doctor today. We don't officially leave Michigan until Thursday so for now, we're just hanging out at the camp!
Our next church is in Huntsville, Alabama! The trucks and other vehicles we use to travel in can't handle very long travel days so we have to leave Thursday morning stay the night wherever we are that night and drive the rest on Friday. Then, our new host parents will pick us up and take us home for that summit (about 21 days)!
Thank you all so much for the prayers, they are greatly appreciated and I will be home in hopefully 55 days!
