Monterey Trip

Our day started with breakfast at Chris and Judy's, and then we drove out from sunny Alameda to ... cold and cloudy Monterey. :) But, undaunted by the dreary weather, we spent the rest of the day biking and doing some light hiking. Jenn, Joy, Barbara and I rode on the 4-man surrey which was quite an endeavor, especially after having eaten lunch... The trip was especially memorable for Sardor, one of our international students from Uzbekistan; it was his first time seeing the ocean!
Our day ended with some sweet fellowship around a bonfire, complete with a bbq dinner, roasted marshmallows and smores, a frisbee lost to the waves of the Pacific Ocean, and ... what's a bonfire without Steve singing our country's national anthem? Yabin and Cherry wow-ed us, too, with their heart-pumping rendition of China's national anthem. But the musical entertainment didn't stop there, because Steve and Joel (Leeanne chimed in, too) sang every song from every Disney movie ever released as we were driving back home (listen closely for Steve's defense of having memorized all the lyrics)...
Anyway, we had a really great time. Thanks to Chris, Judy, Barbara, Jenn and Joel for organizing our trip!

Announcing: Gracepoint Forum

We are almost done with our SET (Summer Evangelism Training) where we covered questions regarding the validity of the Bible.

For those of you who have more questions or follow-up questions, you are free to ask them at our http://gracepointforum.blogspot.com site. It's a site where you can ask Christian apologetics questions. And you can ask them anonymously, or even impersonating your friend =) All questions are welcome. You can just comment on a post and ask a question.

Announcing: Dish-Gracepoint!

Tom Kim has started a great site for all small groups and would-be cooks - it's called Dish-Gracepoint, accessible at: http://dishgracepoint.blogspot.com

Take a look at that site before cooking anything! It also has the weekly special deals on where to go to buy meat that week.

Tom's motto has always been: "I can feed the multitude for $2 per person." And with this new site, that personal dream is fast becoming a church-wide vision.

Thank you, Tom!

A sharing from Kelly Kang

As you know, recently, hundreds of wild fires have been raging throughout California. Here is a link to a sharing from Kelly Kang (Gracepoint Fellowship Church) on June 30 that I would like to let you know about. I hope you will be blessed by this.

http://acts2fellowship.wordpress.com

The Final Session of Gracepoint Training School

This past Monday was the final session of Gracepoint Training School. I took Soul Care with Kelly Kang, and the class was a real blessing to me. I think the best thing for me is that I walked away with the sense that I need to take the main lessons and start to live them out daily. The text book was great too. There were some memorable and inspiring quotes from Richard Foster's Celebrations of Discipline. For example,

Real prayer is life creating and life changing. “Prayer – secret,
fervent, believing prayer – lies at the root of all personal godliness,” writes William Carey. [Celebration of Discipline, p.33]

Often I am inclined to think that joy is the motor, the thing that keeps everything going. Without joyous celebration to infuse the other Disciplines, we will sooner or later abandon them. Joy produces energy. Joy makes us strong. [Celebration of Discipline, p.191]

During the final session, Kelly Kang shared with the class some of the ways in which she personally worships. A couple of them really struck me as something I can apply immediately:

• Before dt, expect to hear from God by silencing myself for 1 minute and asking him to speak to me.
• Do things to honor God even when no one is looking.

If you were blessed in any way through your GTS class, please feel free to share.