It’s a Miracle!

We are so glad to be back home. After a month on the road, and it feels so nice to sleep in our own bed, to read the mail the day it comes and, yes, even to look at the brick wall of the condos next door as I work at the dining room table.

The past month was wonderful though, as it was spent with family and with friends from around our region. We visited our families all over Pennsylvania, spent a week in Baltimore staffing a student conference (“RADIATE” – more details to come on our website) and trekked to Mississippi for an abnormally cold week with Carrie’s family and newborn niece. That’s a total of about 2,725 miles and 43 driving hours, and despite it all Carrie and I still love each other and life – it’s a miracle!

Families – I Like ‘em

I feel like I live life with two families. I’m not talking about mine and Carrie’s, but our biological-legal family and our Campus Crusade staff-family. I feel like each one teaches me how to live with and appreciate the other better.

Last week my step-sister wrote on her blog about a rabbi who spoke of God using our families to teach us how to live with people that we may or may not like but to whom we’re bound. (The irony is not lost on me that she and I didn’t get along very well when we were younger; we do now.) This holiday season was strange – I enjoyed our bio-legal family even more than usual, but due to some miscommunications had a harder time with our staff family which has almost always been easy and fun for me. Of course, no truly close family becomes so without some hard conversations, right?

Home Away From Home

As I write, it strikes me that my first evening back on campus included catching up with four students about their breaks only to hear of four uniquely difficult home stories revolving around fathers who have been various combinations of selfish, abusive, absent, withholding and unpredictable.

Given that talk of community and family metaphors find their way quite often into our conversations of faith, would you pray with us that this movement of students, staff and volunteers here in Washington, DC would be one that feels like a healthy family – full of those committed to be gracious and truthful to one another even as affections and annoyances come and go?  One of the students above has yet to publicly confess faith in Christ, but recently mentioned feeling more real community at Cru than any of the other groups he frequents, and that something “clicked” at our last dinner.

Pray that God uses this “family” not as an alternative or escape from realities at home, but as a glimpse of the restorative power of God that revives hope and trust where it’s been wounded, and as a practice ground that turns us all into family men and women for decades to come!

Pray for:

• Good follow-up to decisions made at RADIATE – of the ~900 attendees, 30 students around the region decided to make it official with following Jesus, and 149 wanted to dedicate at least one year of their lives to full-time mission work. Go ahead & say it. Wow.
• Upcoming spring break conference for students and our summer placement – our destination is currently uncertain, as we are waiting on a decision from our leadership.
• The 2 staff families in Haiti, as well as several “JESUS” film teams in Port Au Prince.

[View with PicLens]

RADIATE08 has come and gone. Here are a few images from the week.

Click on the individual images to read an explanation of the picture.

If you are reading this via email and the images are not displaying properly, click here to come to our actual webpage… it will look better there.

One of the things that I look forward to as I take the DC Metro System (buses and subway) to get to campus is the time to learn, both from reading and by listening to “podcasts”. For those who don’t know, podcasts are syndicated shows that you can download and listen to on an MP3 player… they’re like radio shows that you can listen to any time. There are a lot of them that I like to listen to from news and politics to sermons and Christian radio shows… even talks from conferences!

Today, as I was listening to a podcast that Campus Crusade for Christ puts out to encourage and empower people to share their faith with their friends and neighbors, I decided that I would share how to take advantage of this with all of you!

First off, you’re going to need a music player on your computer that can download podcasts… my suggestion is a program from Apple called iTunes (don’t worry, it works with a Windows computer). You can get it from iTunes.com.

After you download it and install it, open up iTunes and click on the “iTunes Store” link.

After the page loads you’ll have a lot of options in front of you, let’s start by searching for Cru’s podcast on reaching out to your friends, called the “Overflow Show”. To do that, go to the top right and type in “Campus Crusade for Christ” in the Search iTunes Store box and hit Enter.

It should bring up a page with a number of different options, including “Campus Crusade Today” as well as the “Overflow Show”, click the subscribe button next to the Overflow Show (or you can click on the logo for more information).

When you click the button it may or may not take you to your “Podcast” screen, if it does not click on Podcasts on the main menu underneath Music. It should now look something like this:

If it’s just showing the title Overflow Show click the gray arrow next to it to show all of the episodes. If you want to download all of them, click the Get All button. Notice the orange circling arrow, that means that it’s already downloading the newest episode! It should be ready listen to pretty soon (depending on your internet connection speed)! If you notice, there’s now also something on the menu to the right that says Downloads and has a similar spinning arrow from now on when you start iTunes up it will check to see if there are new episodes of your podcast and try to download them, this will let you know how many new episodes of podcasts it is currently downloading.

Now, if you want to try other podcasts that are listed in the iTunes program click on the iTunes Store button again and it will take you back to the last page you were at. You have a few options…

You can click the See All button and see other podcasts that were found under the “Campus Crusade for Christ” category (or you could look at the list on the bottom – for those of you in Central PA area, there are even some of the talks from Penn State’s Cru movement).

You could go back to the main page and browse through the podcasts and look for other ones you might like.

Sometimes you might run across a link for a podcast on a webpage, often when you click on it your iTunes will start up automatically and it will subscribe you to the podcast. Such is the case with the talks from our recent RADIATE07 (formerly known as Christmas Conference), I took the audio from the talks and uploaded them as a podcast and you can subscribe to them using this link:

RADIATE07 Podcast

If you have an iPod or another MP3 player you can now load them onto it (follow the instructions that came with your MP3 player) and listen to them wherever you go. You can also listen to them on your computer or burn them onto CDs to take with you in the car. Have fun with your new podcasts, and let me suggest some of the ones that encourage me (just for the record, I don’t necessarily agree with everything in the podcasts, but I find myself encouraged to seek God’s face because of them often); search for them in iTunes:

Campus Crusade Today
Grove City Alliance Church
Mars Hill Bible Church
McLane Church – Edinboro
National Community Church Audio Podcast
Overflow Show
SermonIndex.net Classics Podcast
Veritas Media

I hope this encourages you and gives you a new way to learn and grow in your walk with Christ!

Grace & Peace,
Jayson

It really feels like it’s been a long time since we’ve updated… I guess it has been since Christmas.

Christmas conference was great this year (as usual). If you want to get an idea of how great it was, check out the website for it (link), we’ve uploaded most of the seminars from the it on the “media” page, check a few of them out. Also, if you want to see pictures from it go to gallery.ChristmasConference.com.

This year I was running the light-board for the main sessions (there’s a picture in the “stage” photos section), which is kind of cool since my brother is a professional sound-guy. Carrie was working in the conference office guarding the computers and the information hub for everything.

The semester has started out… crazy. This week we are working about 6 days straight, and the same for next week. We love to see our students excel, but that tends to mean more work for us when they do. Pray for energy from the Lord that we can continue at this pace.

We’ve put out our newest prayer letter about what has been going on.

Also, keep us in your prayers as we look to move north to focus on the Erie-area schools. We are meeting with a bank tomorrow to see what sort of assistance we qualify for.