The tears have started...they're good though

Couple of highlights from this week...

On Wednesday we had our first Bible class. Boy, did I feel lost. Dann Farrelly is one of our Bible teachers and he is absolutely hilarious. (He also does video announcements that are fantastic. You can watch them on the web for free at welovethebulletin.com.) Anyway, he created this super fun-fun quiz as he called it to see what we knew about the Bible. Yep, next to nothing. Good thing it wasn't graded. This should be an excellent class though. I should learn a ton.

Wednesday afternoon, we met our revival groups. I have two leaders, John and Laura, and our intern is Candice (she's a third year student). There's about 40 people in our group I guess, maybe a little less. Most of them are young, but there's a few older people that I haven't met yet. Anyway, they made us pair up and tell three things about each other to the whole group. The best one was about this man who had formerly been a drug dealer and was sentenced to life in prison. While in prison he found Jesus and Jesus set him free from all of his addictions and prison!

Spanish is awesome. Our teacher is very energetic and really knows her stuff. She's been going to Bethel since the 60 when Bill's dad was the head guy. It's strange being in a language class where the teacher busts into prayer and we sing worship songs, but it's great.

Onto Thursday. Thursday was a good day. Tracy Cooper was our first speaker and she was great. (I'm running out of cool adjectives for these people.) First of all, she had an amazing testimony of growing up in the church, which was encouraging for me. So many of these powerful preachers have come from really negative backgrounds and I rarely hear of people who come from fairly normal, church backgrounds. I was way encouraged that God does use people who grew up in the church. I mean, I know He does, but sometimes it just seems like the ones who have been delivered from serious stuff are used more. Her best line, was that God delivered her and protected her from experiencing the horrible things of life like abuse, drugs, etc.

Later on on Thursday we had some prayer time. I don't remember who led it, but it was good. People were laughing everywhere, shaking under His glory. Not me. I just cry. I was good until the second year students started trolling the room to pray for people. I had so many students touch me. Someone even hugged me. It was like being hugged by Jesus himself. I can't explain it. That's when the tears started. (And for those of you wondering if I love hugs now, No, that hasn't happened yet.) :)

Chris Overstreet, the outreach guy, was one of our last speakers on Thursday. He's an energetic speaker, very cool. We'll be doing outreaches every Thursday afternoon, so he was there to explain our options. There are a couple of opportunities with kids so I hope I get one of those.

We closed out Thursday with a fire tunnel, which is where a bunch of people make a tunnel and they pray for you as you go through it. They get really hot because the presence of God comes, hence the name fire tunnel.

Friday was a long day. I had Spanish, then class, a revival group dinner, and then Friday night service which ended up being 3 hours. I was good until about 9:15 then I was getting really sleepy. They were doing prophecy in the service which was awesome. No words for me, but other people from our class were getting blasted. I had already cried again during worship so it's probably good they didn't have a word for me. :) Holly and I were hanging out with this guy, Josh, from Manchester, England. He's really cool and of course the accent is awesome. I was telling Josh that Holly isn't a true representative of the Cincinnati accent because she's really from Indiana and she lived in Wisconsin too long and she picked up their accent. He just kind of looked at us like we were crazy, but Holly and I were having a good time. Holly was asking him how far away Scotland is from his home and he said, "Pretty far, it's about 4 hours." We were like "What! That's nothing." We then preceded to tell him we drove 34 hours to get to Redding and he just couldn't wrap his mind around it. Apparently, in England, they don't like to drive. Then in church, there was another guy from England who's actually in my revival group. He's a Steelers fan though, so we only talked to him for a little bit. :)

And lastly, Missions is going to be my first elective so I'm super, super excited about that. Job hunting and a Feast of Tabernacles dinner today. More to post about later I'm sure...