Building Relationships

For our 2 month mission here in the Phil, we set out to build relationships with God, each other, the university, the ministers here, and students. Relationships are extremely important in this culture, and are valued over tasks. Spending time talking about what's going on in your life with friends and family is EXTREMELY important. In the business world, I have found business meetings to be longer than the US because more emphasis is placed on relationships. Perhaps this is why it's taking a while for our proposal for how we can help the university to go through. God knows I would want to get it done quick and do it the American way, and I wouldn't be spending as much time with staff members here and helping to build a good reputation for the ministry. At any rate, each day we get one step closer to having the proposal approved. Monday Cris and I talked with the lawyer for about the legal agreement we need. He needed a letter of recommendation from a professor. We should be delivering the letter tomorrow.

Thankfully, the proposal has turned out to be mostly a formality we need to do to help build a good relationship with the university, and not having it approved yet has not held us up in doing ministry. Please keep praying for it though, as I am constantly meeting new faculty in regards to this. We are teaching in college classrooms everyday and have the opportunity to teach about the Bible and promote events:)

Now that we have some small group Bible studies going and our first large group event tomorrow night, we've been inviting people from the classes we're teaching in and getting everything set up. We rented a large room and can't wait to see what God is going to do!

A ministry highlight for me was playing basketball with one of my guy teammates who wanted me to play with him and the Filipinos. I really hadn't played in a while but was up for the challenge. My teammate is awesome, I hung in there, and after I got tired, I went to start up some vball and got to meet some new girls. I was also thrilled to find they now have a vball net on the courts, so we can start up games.