Post-Vision Trip

It has been sad to see the vision trips go back to America. It was good in some ways having a ton of Americans here in Italy for two weeks. It was really interesting also to see how both weeks were totally different not just because the trips were from two different places.

UCF was the first week. There was four staff and four students for a total of eight. Five out of the Eight had been to Salerno before. For them it was good to catch up with their friends on campus. The week was very rainy and cold so there were not may Italian students around to share the gospel with. We ended up doing Soularium with blown up 8x10 size pictures for two days on campus inside the buildings. Soularium is a tool that uses pictures to share the gospel. People relate their life, spiritual walk, and God to different pictures and allows them to explain more in depth because the pictures are very well done, depicting certain emotions. Moreover, I was able to meet a few guys through the outreach at the Cube that Thursday.

Mississippi State came this past week. There were 22 of them and campus was booming since it was some of the best weather this year. They were walking up to people and using a gospel tool called the Ransom Principle which focuses on the law and good works at the beginning more than the 4 Spiritual Laws that Crusade normally uses. The gospel was shared so many times this past week. We met a lot of spiritually interested people. The top people that I met and plan to meet up with again that you can pray for is Francesco x 3, Emanuel, Pierre Paolo, and Lello. Please pray for existing relationships with Carlo Alberto, Alfredo, Davide, and Orlando who plays semiprofessional basketball here and came to Christ in 2006. I plan on trying to reach out to all these guys within the the next two weeks.

Soularium
Francesco and I

Playing Soccer

 

UCF Vision Trip

As Rodney mentioned in the last post, we have two different groups coming in for a vision trip over the next two weeks. These weeks have the potential to be very exciting for the ministry here, but they also require quite a bit of work. The group from UCF will be here for the first week.

Monday:

Arrive in Salerno around 12pm

Evangelism/Cultural Training 3pm-5pm

(Please pray for this small team of only 8 Americans to be on fire for how God can use them this week on campus.)

Tuesday-Thursday:

On campus evangelism 10am-3pm

(Please pray for the team to meet English speakers on campus to engage in spiritual conversations. Also, please pray for the weather. It is supposed to be cold and rainy which could mean that there won't be as many students on campus just hanging out)

Thursday Night:

Outreach event at local hang out called the Cube

(Pray that many Italians will come to this event. Pray that the STINT team would connect with any new contacts that the vision trip team makes)

Thanks so much for your prayers. Please also pray that despite the less than perfect weather (40s-50s and heavy rain) that the team would be able to connect with students on campus.

This Week Update

This week has been very busy for us here in Salerno. First, Vision Trip is next week and since Amanda and I are the point people that have been organizing the events, making schedules, delegating tasks that need to get done for our team, and communicating with the vision trip leaders from UCF and Mississippi State respectively. We will put out a schedule on our blog this weekend so you can be praying during the exact time for some of the events. (We are 6 hours ahead of you in Eastern Time, you can see the clock on the right side of our home blog page for the time in Salerno.

The Crawford's also arrived back with their little one, Lila Grace, who today turns two months old. The Crawford's are the other couple on our team other than the Valiquette's. Please pray for them to adjust back to Italian time and culture!

Also this week Jutty and I met up with Nico on campus.

Nico is one of the guys who became a Christian in 2006 during the summer project when almost 40 people indicated decisions for Christ. Nico has been discipled on and off since then with two of his friends Andrea and Paolo. Nico would like to keep studying the Bible so we are going to meet with him on Thursdays!

(Here's Rodney on campus this summer when we bumped into Nico and his friends.

Nico is to the left of Rodney in the blue shirt.)

We re-started the guys Bible study this Wednesday at 3pm where it should continue every week. Marko, Andrea, Gian Luca, and Stefano are going to be a part of this. They are hungry for the word and are interested in being in a community of believers. Please pray that we can start other studies and this one will grow.

The biggest prayer request that I currently have is we are getting about 10 people together who have professed faith in Christ, who are currently growing in their faith with us, and people we see on a regular basis so that we can keep up with what God is doing in their lives. We are going to have a time that they can share about how God is using them and how they are growing in Christ WITH EACH OTHER! Many of them only know us and not each other. We are excited because this could the beginning of people seeing that there are other Italians that are sharing their faith and God is moving in their lives. This event is going to be at 7pm tomorrow, 3/5. Please pray that the Holy Spirit moves in our midst and that God would heal a lot of people of sickness on our team including the Crawford's, the Valiquette's kids, and Evin their nanny. Can't wait to update you guys on how this goes!

Here's a pictures of Amanda and Grant enjoying some sunshine. We haven't seen very much of it since we've been here so we've been trying to take advantage of every chance that we get!

Insieme (Italian for together)

Please sign up for the Agape Italia (remember Campus Crusade is Agape Italia in Italy) quarterly newsletter Insieme. It will give you more scope into the big picture of ministry here in Italy. You can view this months newsletter here. A lot of times we talk about things that are Salerno specific on the blog and our newsletter. I wanted to make a blog post that only talks about this because it is very important

My first language course in Italy

Last summer my wife took a beginning language course to improve her Italian. I met with a tutor, really my friend, Andrea, a language student at the university here. We met for 3 months in person and on skype when I returned to America in August. We want to continue to meet but in addition I am taking a language course at a school here in Salerno to improve my Italian skills. I am way better in writing, reading, and understanding than speaking. In some ways my speaking is one level down compared to the other 3. So I am taking lessons in a higher level this week. I might drop down a level for next week so that my speaking might improve, I do not know I have not decided yet. UCF gave me a great foundation in Italian 3 years ago when I took two semesters my senior year of college. You guys can pray for me as I study and try to figure out where I should be as I feel inbetween two levels right now.

In the midst of learning language, planning for this semester, and getting settled in, I have got to spend some time with some students. Some of the highlights that you can pray for is: I will be meeting with Peppe to discuss John over the next month. We are going to look at 5 chapters every week. Pray that God opens his heart and that through the Holy Spirit I am able to answer his questions. If you know any good online resources about the book of John please shoot me a comment. I have an idea of how I want to do it but I always appreciate help. We arrived at this decision to study John after a long talk about humanity, the Bible, and the person of Jesus. I know God has the capacity to change his life as he has changed mine so please pray for us.

Also pray for Salvatore. He has become more interested in spiritual things over the times I have met with him. He wants to study the Bible in a group setting sometime. Pray that this would come to fruition and as sometimes students want to learn English and not necessarily talk about spiritual things. Pray that our talk of the gospel last week begins to change his life and will happen again.

Lastly I want to leave you with something that we have been experiencing in Salerno. Today is ash Wednesday, which is the beginning of Lent. The period before this is called Carnevale. The word comes from "carne levare" which means to "take away meat". During this period kids dress up like they would for halloween and use silly string and confetti on other kids. Yesterday was the actual day of carnevale equal to that of Fat Tuesday. There are many parties and not just kids dress up. The weather was really bad so it was not as good as normal. I did not take any pictures because I always had my camera when the weather was bad but here are some pictures I found online of carnevale in Salerno.

Random and funny...

Here's a funny little picture sign on a bus that we saw the other day. Some buses are more handicapped accessable than others. So I guess if you were waiting for this bus you would know that it was good for people in wheelchairs, with canes and pregnant people. Yes, the lady of the left with the giant circle is apparently the symbol for being pregnant.

I promise we'll be back with some more posts soon.

We finally feel like we're getting settled in and have a couple of cool things to be blogging about soon :)

We are here (again)!

We arrived in Salerno at 11:30am Rome time on January 14th. That is 5:30 am Eastern time. We were 30 minutes late on our last flight that was an hour and a half from Munich to Naples. It was a total of 17 hours of travel time from when we left the Tampa airport. Grant slept most of the way in my arms making me sweat profusely. I thought I would preempt this problem by wearing shorts and a t-shirt on the plane. Then when we got to Munich and it was 25 degrees Fahrenheit we had to go out into the snow and take a bus to the airplane. All the Germans and Italians in parkas were looking at me like a crazy American. I was not super crazy thinking that I was going to be in climate controlled airplanes and airports all the way to Naples. In a nutshell, Grant did not have any jetlag because he slept a lot but us a combined 1.5 hours of sleep during the whole trip. Grant the first week was sleeping into about 9am here which was awesome for us!

The second week we were here we had to go to a conference in Spain with all the interns across Europe. We flew out of Naples and we got Marko to take us to the airport since he was going to pick the Valiquettes up (our team leaders). So we got to cross paths at the airport which was cool and got to meet their new nanny Evan and her mom also. We flew to Barcelona and had to stay one night because of the flight times. We use Easyjet, Ryanair and Vueling when traveling in Europe because they are cheaper than trains usually. You have to be careful though because Ryanair flies into the Rome airport that is way out of the way and not way easy to get to anything. We stayed an extra night in Barcelona so we could do some sightseeing since we are not really going to get to travel to much with Grant being so young and trying to stay in Salerno this summer. We got a deal on Priceline where you can name your own price.

The conference was awesome. We got to get refreshed and got to get back on the same page with our bosses and our team. One of the highlights for me was the session about all the different things that we need to check up on in the Lord. These ranged from our eyes, ears, tongue to our minds. There are so many things in a new culture that might cause us to check out emotionally, spiritually, and mentally. We have to stay close to the Lord and trust Him and not our own strength.

We just got back to Salerno on Friday evening and are settling in again getting ready to jump into ministry this week part time and full time next week. In the meantime we have taken a few pictures of Grant below.