Are we ready?

August finds us putting the finishing touches on our Awana calendar for fall, training our leaders and student leaders, sending out newsletters and calendar to families, and most importantly preparing our hearts and minds to teach and train our kids.  Our office has been slowly getting re-organized as we pull out out dated material and get a good filing system in place.  The books and supplies have been ordered and many have come in already.  Many of us are going through the book, "Relational Children's Ministry", and meeting on Wednesday evenings to share what we have learned from it and what do we plan on doing within our ministries with what we have learned.

Our key passage within our training this year is
2 Timothy 4:2-5 "Preach the word!  Be ready in season and out of season.  Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching.  For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables.  But you be watchful in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry." NKJV
This is applicable for each of us as we should always be prepared to share God's love to all we come in contact with and be prepared to share the gospel.  There is not really a season "off" a given ministry as the time not serving is a time for personal growth and refresh to serve again.

We are also preparing for our next short term missions trip to the Dominican Republic, last week we had the first class diving into why short term missions and what is poverty.  Over the next couple of weeks we will go over how we partner with Solid Rock and the different roles we maybe filling.  We will also be going over things we can be doing now to prepare for our missions trip, such as starting to gather school supplies, vitamins, ibuprofen, tylenol, cake and brownie mixes, nuts, dry cereals, granola bars, etc that have a long expiration date.  By picking these items up little by little it eases the expense of doing it all at once and creates more opportunities to share what we are doing.

Scott, Matthew, and I have been working on increasing our Spanish vocabulary through our Rosetta Stone program and a textbook.  Knowing Spanish is not a requirement to be on the mission team as we work alongside translators but we feel it maybe beneficial as we have many within our own community who only speak Spanish and we would love to be able to share the gospel with them.  

So are we ready?  We are.  We have continued to learn more and more about each of the ministries God has blessed us with given us a passion to serve within.  We are also beginning to raise prayer and financial support for our ministries while continuing with our own training.