We had two former Cal Poly, SLO Crusade staff members, now directors at Cal Berkeley come last week. Dan and Deb Goodson are two people I love very, very much and was so excited to see them come. It was a crazy busy week, but full of encouragement and new perspective on our ministry here.

Being a pioneering team can be really hard, often discouraging work, with few obvious results, so tears almost came to some of our eyes when Dan Goodson told us repeatedly in one meeting "You guys are doing a GREAT job." I'm sometimes prone to falling into a performance-based mentality here, thinking that I'm not doing a good job when I'm not seeing a lot of visible results with ministry, so this encouragement meant worlds to me. Dan and Deb also talked to us a lot about keeping our ministry in perspective here, knowing that the partnership here will be at least 5 years long, probably more like 10 or more. If you have ever helped build a house, the foundation work is always the most grueling and slowest process to yield visible results. So it is with movement-building, but we want to lay a solid foundation centered on Christ, because it will effect the ministries of STINT teams like ourselves for years to come.

Well, after discussing a lot of things having to do with our mission and vision here, we have A LOT to talk about as a team. Starting tomorrow, we will be casting new vision for this year, coming up with clear mission and vision statements for our team specifically and making a lot of constructive changes. I'm excited, but please pray for these things!