twenty-three

Morning #2 at Blenz coffee. Different location though. They have these places all over. Starbucks definitely has a strong Canadian competitor, at least in the center cent(res). As I’m walking around, I see just about an equal amount of each, so that tells me they must be competing; also it tells me I pay too much attention to coffee shops; and there are too many corporate logos around to look at.

Today we begin our first full day of work. I just walked with the first group who will work with Salvation Army. We’ll be serving breakfast with them in the mornings all week at one of the locations on the edge of the East side. It was a good morning for a walk and I enjoyed seeing off the first team.

I’ll be headed back to the church now to pick up the rest of the teams, make lunch, and drive the vans back to pick up the Salvation Army group to go to our next location, Urban Promise. We’ll be working with Urban Promise all week as well, in the afternoons. This program works with kids who are in and around the city. I’m not quite sure their situations, whether it’s an after school thing only or what not, but we’ll find out today. Our group is pretty excited about the chance to work with kids, so I think this will be fun.

Finally, my group will wrap up the day by going back down to E. Hastings, into the tough areas I mentioned yesterday, and work with a ministry called Agape. We’ll be working as a team on the street, doing a variety of services, so I’ll have to talk about it more once we’ve been able to experience it.

Yesterday was great. We went to two church services: First Baptist of Vancouver, where we are staying and The Rock Garden, a college-aged gathering out in Burnaby. I enjoyed both, but they were very different experiences. I’m not entirely familiar with a Baptist service, but we got to see a very full service, including two baptisms and member inductions. It was nice to be hosted by the church we’re staying at and get to experience church with them. The Rock Garden, on the other hand, was a lot like the INN. About 150 college-aged people from around the greater Vancouver area join together to worship, hang out, and listen to a great speaker every couple of weeks during the school year. They have been around for 6 years now. Rikk Watts, a Regent College professor is the speaker at each gathering. Rikk is known around the world for his biblical scholarship and is a very well respected professor at Regent, so I was really excited about hearing him speak. The talk lasted about an hour, but it was so rich that even though we were tired, most everyone in our group seemed to be very engaged. He spoke on the end of 1 Corinthians 6, a great text about all things being "permissible, but not beneficial." I really enjoyed his words and the encouragement of this community. It reminded me of the INN in many ways, so I appreciated the fact that we could go and have the students be able to experience some thing similar while we are up here.

Everything is going well and we’re going to get into something of a routine today. Most of us are getting pretty tired, but everyone is generally upbeat and seems excited about the work ahead. Please continue your prayers for health, rest, and safety for our group this week.

Well, got to finish this cup of coffee and head back.

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