No More Staff

We've entered the last month of our service here in Juneau, and things are really starting to pick up. The native american outreach was a success on several levels. I went to Angoon on Admiralty Island. It's very different from the last native area I visited (Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island, BC) in several ways. It's not a reservation at all. Years ago, the locals were given the option of taking land or money. Most took the money, and lost it, the ones who took land fared better. The community was overall in better condition than Port Renfrew in my opinion. There was a lot less litter, and a lot more family structure (the residential schools happened here too.). Spiritually, there wasn't much difference. There were two churches here, a presbyterian church and an assemblies of god church.
The people were friendly, but talking about spiritual things was difficult. They were very hesitant to even tell us what they believed, and had almost no interest in our faith. You may recall in the support letter that I sent out, I said I believed the native american community was neglected by the christian community. I was wrong. The Native people group is the most ministered to people group ever. It's simply a difficult missions field, owing somewhat to the culture, but also because missionaries tend to attempt to "make them white" instead of figuring out how to fit their cultural traditions in with Jesus.
In Juneau, a lot of contacts were made to be used to find service projects in future years. Mostly, our project was put on the radar screen of the Native American community.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I feel like God is teaching me to be more intentional with my faith. As much as divine appointments are nice, sometimes it's just looking out into the community of unbelievers and seeing where we need to minister, or looking into the community of followers and seeing who is hurting that we are called to do. I feel, more than anything, this project is providing me with a pattern of Christian living to continue when I come home, forming habbits and finding ideas for growing and helping others grow as Christians at Mines, and in Conifer.