No, today is not when I finally post about my trip to Asia. Instead...
Today I went to my first funeral since my grandfather's when I was in third grade. I remember my grandfather's very vaguely but am assuming that it was very different since he was in his 70s, white, and a non-believer. JD was 20, black, and a believer. My earliest memories of JD was in second grade, Ms. Snead's class, when I had short hair and big glasses. He sat next to me and was always tipping me out of my chair or pushing the cover of my cigar-box style pencil case into the case so I'd have to work to get it out. Because of this, my mom never really liked him. I never told her about in middle school or high school when I regarded him as one of the most real, genuine people I knew. I didn't talk to him much but I was always guaranteed a smile and a "hi!" when we would greet each other during school. Last semester I was walking to a friend's apartment. I was walking with my head down and I saw people coming in front of me. One said hello, I looked up and it was JD. He had transferred to VT because he always loved it, and his girlfriend, who I had played basketball against since we were 10, was on the basketball team there.
My friend JD died last Thursday in a freak car accident. A truck getting off I-95 didn't stop at the stop sign at the end of the exit ramp and hit the drivers side of JD's Accord. I decided yesterday that I would go to his funeral to support Lindsay (though we rarely talk) and JD's family who I never knew and never knew me.
I am really glad I went and looking back I wish I went to another one of my elementary school friends' last semester - but I was at school and decided not to make the drive back. It was really happy and really sad at the same time. Everyone who spoke was so certain of his salvation that it was exciting. It was sad because he was 20 and our lives were so alike for 10 years.
With all this talk of heaven and such, I hope my past classmates will think of such things so that God will work good out of this tragedy.

        This past weekend was one of the best weekends I have had in a while. I went home Thursday night after my classes were over. I got home a little later than I had hoped, but when I finally did arrive, my mom brought home Extra Billy’s (arguably the best BBQ in Richmond) pork and potato skins. After dinner we had a chocolate cake celebrating my little brother Thomas’ achievement of cum laude on the National Latin Exam.

        Friday I woke up and I went to a doctor’s appointment in the West End. It was almost 80 degrees so I wore my Chacos which made me almost forget that the doctor’s appointment was going to be unpleasant. Then I went to Ukrop’s because a trip home is not complete without going grocery shopping. When I got home I was going to go out to the river with my sister Elise and one of her friends but that fell through. We decided to rent a movie instead. She and I went to Blockbuster but didn’t find anything that we wanted to see. When we got home it was 9:30, the perfect time to go batting. I drove my family’s convertible to Windy Hill near Powhatan. When I got there and found they were closed, I found myself with a convertible on a warm night with nowhere to go. I decided to get gas for the car and took a country road to get there.

        Saturday morning I woke Thom up to go for a run around the neighborhood with me. A few hours later, a strong thunderstorm hit Richmond. Even though it was for only 10 minutes it was really strong. I sat in my kitchen with my parents looking out at the wall of windows that face my backyard and North and watched the lightning.  After it cleared, I still wanted to go to the batting cages, so I took my brother. He is a lacrosse player and he often tells me that all lacrosse players hate baseball and most baseball players. This was the reason he always used to say no when I would ask him to go batting with me. This time was different. I took him and he wasn’t so bad. He forgot his glasses so it took him a while, but he learned that he could get by if he squinted his eyes. After we left, we took the convertible around town to run a few errands. When we got home mom had nothing planned for dinner so Thom and I asked if we could go to NachoMama in Carytown. Eventually, parents decided that was a good idea. Thomas and I shared chicken nachos and my parents had 3 margaritas between the two of them. When we got home, parents and I watched a foreign movie before going to sleep.

        Sunday morning we went to church as usual. Afterwards I went shopping with my mom to look for shoes for Asia. I had pretty specific criteria, but I found some that worked well at the first place we stopped. When I got back home, I had two hours before Bryan was going to come visit for a while. This was the first time I was going to spend a good amount of time with him in the last four months. The first hour I played Rockband and watched TV with Thomas and just as I was going to start on some homework, he showed up. An hour early! We sat on my bed and just talked all about our lives, our schools, our friends. We talked about each other and ourselves. It was good just to spend time with him because for the last 6 years he has been such a big part of my life and I really missed him a lot. After he left it was too late for me to go back to school so I had dinner with my family, played Ticket to Ride with my mom (she beat me by one point), and then for the fourth night in a row, fell asleep in my bed.

        Now I’m back at school watching The Hills and all I can think about is how God gave me this weekend enjoying my family, my home, and my best friend, because he knows how hard this week will be. But I have been comforted recently with the idea that God is sovereign:

"It was as if, in the midst of terrible loss, dark curtains began to pull away momentarily, revealing a deeper story, an unseen script that had been in the making for months. It was a story not of death and tragedy, but of a Sovereign God who, knowing the trials we will face, providentially prepares us to face them." - A Table in the Presence

        If you're reading this and you don’t go to Tech, please pray for me and my friends and my campus this week. The healing is not yet complete.

Soon after I got back from the ASP trip (see below post), Lauren and I went to a Leadership Seminar put on by a Cru Intern.  The seminar wasn’t really about learning about leading within Cru but instead about Missional Leadership: Leading with a mission, and that mission is to win people to Christ. Basically, it was about learning how to initiate conversations with people about their beliefs and values. It was about living in a way where telling people about Christ is the main concern and they can see it obviously in you.  It was a very convicting and worthwhile seminar and it made me think about some of the things that ASP brought to my mind, especially concerning the devotions:

“But I can easily see how people can be led to believing that Christianity is a nice idea but that it has little substantial value if all they hear are things like the Johnny Appleseed prayer and the idea of God being thrown around.”

If most of the prayers somebody hears are those like Johnny Appleseed then I can easily see why they would not be attracted to Christianity. “It’s a nice idea” or “it’s a childish idea” are two things I would think of if I were in their position. There is no substance, value, or worth to this religion if they are not told of the saving power of our God, and see His love through Christians.

            "I like your Christ. It's your  Christians I don't like. They are nothing like your Christ"--Ghandi

If we Christians say we are Christians but are just the same as the world, then nonbelievers have no reason to believe that our God is of any worth or value. That was the most convicting part. To live with morals is fine if your motive is just to have morals. If you’re living with morals because you are modeling your life after Christ, then that’s what makes the difference. I have friends who have morals which were simply taught to them by their parents, which is fine, but their reason for living a moral life is different than mine, and that motive makes all the difference.

“The greatest single cause of atheism in the world is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips but walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable."

    One of the points of the seminar was illustrated by the story in Acts when Paul was invited into the meeting of the Roman scholars because they had heard his ideas and they interested him:

            "Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you."The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands."  Acts 17:22-24

             I've always loved this story because it is a classic example of how God gives us opportunities to tell others about him. The point of bringing up this story was to show how Paul changed how he related the Gospel, but he didn't change the Gospel itself. He wasn't abrasive or intense.

                For one part of the seminar, two students who are involved with Crusade, both guys, were brought to the front and asked questions by the intern. One was in a frat and the other played on the club lacrosse team, two groups of people within which God was rarely present. They spoke of their desires to share Christ with their teammates and brothers and their successes and frustrations in doing so. It was very convicting: I am a part of the evangelism team through Cru and by “a part of” I mean I go to the meetings when I am available (which hasn’t been the case recently). This team is planning on taking Soulariums (Cru’s evangelism tool) to different parts of the campus and sharing Christ with students who pass by. I have little desire to do this. Why? Because I have little confidence in my speaking abilities? Because I would be uncomfortable? Ultimately, I would be sharing the one part of my life that gives me hope, joy, strength, and peace with kids who need those things. I should be ecstatic to share my faith with others, even strangers.

                Towards the end, the two guys were asked their stance on drinking at the parties where their teammates and brothers (and other nonbelievers) are also. This is a question I have been pondering for a while. Though I don’t really have to worry about this for another year and a half, one of them gave a really good answer that I am probably going to apply to my own life.  He spoke of how Paul said “do not do something that will make your brother stumble”, how the bible speaks of drunkenness, but that alcoholic drinks in and of themselves are fine. He spoke of how after spending a lot of time in the word trying to find an answer to his question he finally did. He decided that at small gatherings with his friends it would be fine to drink because they know his values, but he still would not drink to excess. In large parties he wouldn’t drink at all because somebody might see him from across the room and have no idea if that was his 2^nd drink or is 12^th.  This shows that Christianity is not a list of rules but it also doesn’t mess up his witness.

                Maybe one of the main purposes of the seminar was to try to get the Cru kids out of their Cru bubble, which I see many of them in.  For the rest of us, it was a very convicting time. I heard of how I need to show God more in my everyday life and how my main purpose should be winning people to Christ.  That idea should be at the foreground of my mind everyday.

1 Thes 2:8
We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well, because you had become so dear to us.

2 Cor 4:5-6
For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ...”