Back To The Beach!

BJ will be heading back to Daytona Beach today to help close out the Beach Project!  The boys and I are not heading back to the beach, because we felt like it would be a little too much to pack us all up for just a week.  This will free BJ up to close out the logistics of the Project and to get some good time in with the students.  The boys and I are looking forward to some adventures together in the upcoming week.  I hope all is well with your summer and that you are enjoying time with your family and friends too!  Also, I hope to have some pictures to share with you from the end of the Summer Beach Project after BJ returns!

SBP Prayer

"Be joyful always; pray continually"

1 Thessalonians 5:16-17

One thing that we want to emphasis on the Beach Project is the value of prayer in a believer's life.  One venue for this is our weekly prayer time on Sunday evenings.  The students gather to pray for an hour as a project.  There are other venues such as team prayer, and prayer within their rooms that are great for the students to learn how to pray.  They also are learning that prayer is an integral part of a our lives as Christians.  This past Sunday they had a great time of worship and prayer on the beach as a project.

Please continue to pray for the growth of these students in becoming lifetime prayer warriors!

SBP Picture

Just to give you a picture of the students that are taking part of the Summer Project this year.  It has been such a joy to be around these young believers as they are STRIVING to know the Lord!

(We are on the right hand side)

Here is a picture of us taken after the

SBP group picture:

Thanks for being a part of investing in the lives of these students. 

Tuesday Project Dinners

One of the aspects of the Summer Beach Project is the community of fellowship and learning from one another.  There are several venues for this built into the Project, the Project Dinner being one of them.  Every Tuesday, all of us disperse to different eating locations to have a great meal and an encouraging dinner.  The different eating locations are: Dustin's Barbeque (similar to Sonny's), CiCi's Pizza, and we cater Moe's to the hotel.

We ate at Dustin's this week with two Georgia Southern students.  It was delicious food and great conversations.  Here are some pictures of our night:

Dinner with the boys, Katie and Mike

Kaitlyn (staff) eating with students

More students and leaders 

Friday Socials: Beach Games at the SBP

Last Friday evening we hosted our first Summer Beach Project Social...BEACH GAMES!!  It was a ton of fun and there was a lot of team bonding going on as the teams competed against each other to be the best.  I am sorry there aren't more pictures.  We attempted to video some of the event but it would never load (Ugh!) However, here are some highlights of the evening:

Getting ready for some "dizzy bat" races

Josiah trying to participate in the "Strong Man" contest

Trey wanting to run the races with everyone

Each week one of the team's will host a Friday Social that is creative and fun.  This is also a great opportunity to get to know other students on the project and to have some down time after a full week of work.

The First Day of the SBP

Wednesday was the first day of the Summer Beach Project (SBP).  There were lots of students moving in with a lot of stuff!  We also hosted our first project dinner and meeting.  BJ spoke to the students on our theme verse for this year:

STRIVE

"We proclaim Him, admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom, so that we may present every man complete in Christ.  For this purpose I labor, striving according to His power, which mightly works within me."

Colossians1:28-29

 

Students checking in to the SBP

 

Helping move in a summer's worth of clothes and necessities. The students will be sharing a room with 3 others for two months!

Our first meeting with 144 college students

BJ speaking and challenging the students to "strive" to know the Lord more!

We are excited to see what the Lord will do in the next couple of months in the lives of these students. Tonight we will be hosting our first social, Beach Games, it will be both fun and messy!

Pool Party with the Project Leaders

The last couple of years a couple from one of our partnering churches has hosted our leaders the night before the disciples arrive.  They have an amazing pool and play area and our leaders took full advantage of them.  The students were swimming, sliding and doing a little rock climbing.  It was a ton of fun, with dinner from Dustin's Barbeque and we ended the night with some Praise and Worship together.

We are looking forward to the first year (disciple) students arrival today. The Summer Beach Project will officially begin as they arrive.  Please pray for safety in driving and a smooth transition into their rooms and into the summer!

Arrival of the Disciple Leaders

We are one day closer to the beginning of the full-blown Summer Beach Project.  Today, our student disciple leaders arrived for a couple of days of training before the first-year students (disciples) arrive.  It was an exciting day as they all arrived to prepare spiritually and personally before the start of the official Project on Wednesday.  Between today and Wednesday there will be several leadership training seminars and at least a couple trips to Walmart to prepare their rooms for the arrival of the 2-3 disciples that will be in their room this summer.

The disciple leaders are students who have been on the Summer Beach Project before and have been asked to return to serve and receive spiritual training in leading others in the Lord.  In each room there will be 2-3 first year students (disciples) that the disciple leader will be leading for the summer.  This is a great opportunity for personal growth for the disciple leaders as well as practical training in discipling others.

Student Leaders checking out what other students will be on their teams for the summer.

Students filling out their paperwork and support information on their arrival to the Summer Beach Project.

Students finding their rooms and who will be in their rooms for the summer.

Please pray that the Lord will grow these students in leadership development this summer and for their own personal growth as well!

SBP Weekly Schedule

Vince Alongi

If you have never been to the Summer Beach Project it is quite an event.  Students work during the day and get training in the relationship with the Lord in the evenings.  You can check out what a normal weekly schedule looks like for our students here. There are a couple of differences from this schedule:

Tuesday: Prayer training is now combined with Bible Study Training on Thursdays, and has been renamed Worship Training.  Also, Project Dinner is now before Discipleship groups.

Wednesday: For the first month of the Project we will have Character Training on Wednesday nights.  The staff men will talk to the men about what it means to be a godly man and the staff women will do the same with the women students. After the first month the students will have this evening free.

Sunday:  We no longer have Life Management meetings. Instead we have filtered many of these talks into Theme meetings or we will have our Disciple leaders cover this information in their discipleship groups.

My goal is to get some pics of each of these meetings to give you more of a feel for what they are like.  If you have any questions about the Project or a certain aspect you would like to see highlighted please let me know.  I would love to share more about them!

Getting Ready For the Leaders

The last few days the staff have been hard at work prepping for the students who will begin arriving today.  Yesterday, they spent a bulk of the day job hunting for potential jobs for our students.  Before they started we only had 80 jobs for 150 students, afterwards it was looking like they had about 30 additional jobs.  Please be praying for the Lord to provide enough job positions for all of our students who need them.  After all the staff's hard work we headed out to be refueled by eating at Aunt Catfish's, a favorite among all of our staff!

While the staff were hard at work during the day, the boys and I enjoyed time together at the playground. There is a firehouse playground nearby that the boys love!!

A small picture after some hard work (playing)!  Thanks for journeying with us this summer!  I am glad we get to share this experience with you all!

SBP Staff Arrival

Last night the staff for Summer Beach Project 2010 arrived in Daytona!  We all went out for a dinner of fellowship and encouragement before everyone gets ready to work for the next few days.  The staff are from the campuses of: Georgia Southern University (GSU), Georgia College and State University (GCSU), USC-Aiken, Valdosta State University (VSU), and Augusta State University (ASU).


For the next few days these brothers and sisters in the Lord will be preparing and getting ready for our student leaders and disciples that will be arriving soon.  The Team Leaders for the Project will be arriving Friday (May 21st), the Disciple/Room Leaders will arrive Monday (May 24th), and the Disciples will arrive Wednesday (May 26th).  In all we will have 150 on the Project this year!  That is a lot of people to think for!

BJ, as the Director of the Summer Beach Project, has the responsibility to organize, delegate, and coordinate with the other staff to host these students for the summer.  Please be in prayer for them over the next few days that the logistics would go smoothly and that all their labor would be in the power of the Holy Spirit.

We Made It!

We made it to Daytona on Friday and had a mini vacation before the staff arrive, so that we could get the boys and ourselves settled in our hotel rooms. We will be in Daytona for the Summer Beach Project from May 14th through June 24th.   Here are a few sweet pics of the boys at the beach on Saturday.  They are loving the sand! Not so much the water.   The water has been really chilly.

The Mays are the only other staff couple with a baby on the Beach Project.  Matt and Eileen are a sweet couple that minister at USC Aiken and they have one daughter, Emma.

The Mays took us out to the Bone Fish Grill on Saturday night.  It was a fun night together and the food was delicious!

Stay tuned, there are many pictures and updates that will be coming in the days ahead!  Please continue to join us in our ministry and family adventures at SBP 2010!

Sorrow and Joy

This past weekend a couple that we are close to had their daughter go home to be with the Lord.  Hannah was born with heart problems and at 3 months had a heart transplant.  For the next 4 years of her life she led a  full and healthy life.  This past December she got very sick and was diagnosed with PTLD.  Since that time she has been in and out of the hospital, getting better and then not doing well.  Hannah as many of you know means "Grace or Gift from the Lord" in Hebrew and that is just what her life was a picture of, the grace of our Lord.  On Friday she went from the arms of her earthly father to the arms of Her Heavenly Father, where she will experience no more sickness, grief, or pain.

As my own dad suffered with cancer his last few years the words from "On the Jordan's Banks" gave me great comfort and even thinking about Hannah they do so again:

"No chilling wind, nor poisonous breath can reach that healthful shore, where sickness, sorrow, pain, and death are felt and feared no more,

I am bound, I am bound
I am bound for the Promised Land
I am bound, I am bound
I am bound for the Promised Land"

There is a mixture of sorrow for the loss of this precious little girl and friend, but also of joy that she is now in the Promised Land with our Heavenly Father forevermore!

Please pray for Glenn and Krissy (parents) and Manny(3) and Abby(1) that the Lord may be gracious to them and they would find comfort in Him!

SBP: Team Leader Retreat

This past weekend we were busy hosting a retreat for our team leaders for this year's Summer Beach Project.  The Summer Beach Project is our annual training event that Campus Outreach hosts during the summer to train students to walk with God for a lifetime and equip them to reproduce their lives.  This year we will have the largest project that we have had in years.  A typical project has 3-4 teams but this year we will have 5 teams as well as guy and girls' Management Team.  It was a great time of fellowship and training times to prepare them for this summer as well as preparing them for the leaders retreat that we will be hosting next month.










Our summer projects are set up into teams and each team is led by a girl and guy leader(students above).  That leader's responsibility is to lead 3-4 student leaders(room leaders) who will be leading a room of 3-4 new students(disciples).  Our desire is to equip these students to grow in leadership and to teach students to walk with the Lord by training them to study the Bible, pray, evangelize and have fellowship.

Please be praying for BJ as he is preparing these students and working on the logistics for the Summer Beach Project.  We are looking forward that all the Lord will do in these students' lives as well as our own!