okay, sorry i don't do more of these.
school started two weeks ago and i am comfortable so far with the material we have learned. the way it looks and works at the elementary stages compare to spanish as expected, but people who know french seem to pick up on the ear side much quicker. there are many nasal sounds that resemble french. the class is a group of 38 students, mostly from europe, but rarely more than one or two from the same country. name a county and see if we have a person in our class from there. (jenny and david excluded i think the class would survive the challenge.) it makes an interesting mix. the professor, when she is not speaking portuguese is speaking english so that makes me feel a little more comfortable, and provides me with understanding where others may struggle. this has created an opportunity to help and serve the others in my class. they all know english, but some are not as fluent as others.
i was sick at the beginning of this week. i was weak, dizzy, and nauseous, but that is gone now. thanks for the prayers even if you didn't know what i was going through.
i am beginning to realize that ministering to students is a very slow process. we were asked to set some measurable goals, weekly and long term, for this internship and they were hard to come up with. i see this ministry as something hard to plan for. you just need to go and build relationships where the people are. then i can do what i love to do: ask the hard questions. i guess that is my goal for ministry, to be more intentional in asking tough questions to know people on the inside. but with this i need wisdom, because to listen is one thing, but to advise or suggest is another.
ron is also pushing us to get involved with a second ministry, kind of like a side job. i've thought about helping with the girls who run Young Life for this area. they have no guys as leaders and it would give me a chance to interact with a different group of minds in a different part of their lives. furthermore, youth give me energy to do stuff, when i would only sit around, talk, and have coffee with college students. these ministries will most likely conflict in their time schedules, so keep me in your prayers as i decide and learn to juggle both activities.
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Hey Thomas. The comments thing is working for me now, so I get to post! What goals have you set, if I may ask? Is there any cafe/coffee shop kind of ministry there? I know many ministries that focus specifically on college-age students use those pretty effectively. I'm praying for you and can't wait to hear more.
i think we are still in the process of determining what we really need and want to do here in lisbon. there are little or no foundations to build on, so we are at the ground floor of developing programs. however, i do have some thought about how i would like to use my opportunities here.
similar to like a coffee shop idea, i would like to have movie nights or dinner nights, where we invite our classmates to join us for a movie and a discussion afterwards or a meal where we become intentional about asking important questions about others and their lives. i see these kinds of options as the ones students would most likely respond to and attend, and it is not an in-your-face christian event. i feel most comfortable with these kinds of ideas as well. my personality and interests generally lead me to discussions at a table, having coffee, or hanging out at the house anyway.
the issue with the ministry setting up in this way, is how do we evaluate (trying to avoid the word measure) our effectiveness to revise and improve what we do for future interns. can we establish credibility with the university to continue to have an internship program connected with this campus for future successes? i feel a great importance and passion for leaving a legasy that can build here.
in some ways they are similar to us. they live in the relativism technological age with a cell phone that rings every ten seconds or a text message to send. i think they are a little more obsessed with the text messaging than we are, but i was on the outside edge of that with that back home.
i think our youth culture is turning universal quite rapidly and i see little difference in the way we tend to seek community and they seek community. actually, it probably was never our culture to begin with. the internet has made the world much smaller and for that this generation seems to move together at a similar rate of rapid change. community however seem intuitive to them. it's not something they realize they need and seek to find it, it is their primary function upon arrival. that is how we have made so many connections i such a short time with students from anywhere and everywhere. that open search in them has definitely made this ministry fun.
We did a case study on several ministries for one of my classes this quarter, which I'll send to you. Along with movie nights, one of the ministries (in an South Asian country) found that students really enjoyed poetry or songs. They shared thoughts on worldview more artistically. Not everyone's into that, but I would think the Lisbon community would enjoy that kind of thing and it always opens the road to talk about things. You can always ask, "what did that mean?" on either side.
true, i think that question is huge and it is an important one for opening hearts.
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