This has got to be the most amusing thing I've seen all day! (well considering i woke up not too long ago heheeh)

According to Wikipedia, "you" is the most popular word in the English language.

Yep... today I'm a QUARTER OF A CENTURY OLD!!!1!!eleventyone!!!

Today was great. I had the Academia de Obreros from 2-4 and then church service from 5-8 then after I went to my friend's house with a group of people (cuz it was her birthday yesterday) and there we had two cakes and cookies and chips with beans... ohh man it was delicious. But the only thing that wasn't good about today is that Daniela forgot to call me... :(

Our friendship has just gone to the crapper these days. I miss her so much, but it's as if she has stopped thinking/caring about me. How easy it is for girls to throw away a 8 year friendship for a boyfriend...

Today in church was the Best Church Service of Ever! And yes, that's gramatically correct. Man, honestly, it was sooo cool. In fact, this entire day was just awesome! It started in the morning with a prayer. Actually, I didn't wake up until 11am because the night before I had like no sleep at all and then I went to bed like at 2am. So anyway, I was in the shower and I was praying and I just said, "Lord, I dedicate this day to you. Give me the strength to make every action today for you and let me learn more of you. Increase my wisdom and knowledge of you." etc. So I finished the morning reading different websites about different topics that I was interested in.

The first topic was about the apostles, because our church is going through a transition to try to become an apostolic church. But one of the things I had difficulty with was that I thought that apostles were only alive in the first century and after the first died that there were no others, but in 2 Corinthians 11 it is talking about false apostles and Paul defines them as being people who consider themselves equal to the original apostles. Obviously there are no people today that go around like the original apostles and perform huge miracles like they did. I still believe that God equips us for the odd miracle here and there, but nothing like in the first century during the time of Christ on earth and the first apostles. This article helped me a lot. The function of modern-day apostles are exactly the same as the first apostles, however God equips them differently. They need to be ones who go into areas where the gospel is not preached, plant churches and then build them up, constantly guiding them and helping them develop correctly. They need to maintain constant contact with them and be in constant contact through prayer with God.Verse 13 even says when there will be no more apostles. This time has not come yet because the situation described is not the situation in the church today.

The next thing that I researched was a topic about something that I had a revelation about the other day while in prayer. I was meditating about what someone said the other day in our church. He said that some prophet came to him and told him that babies went to heaven when they died. I don't even remember the reason that he gave, but I have a tendency not to believe modern day prophets especially if they are talking about something doctrinal that is apparently not in the bible. I will believe a prophet when I start to see some of their prophecies come true, but I'm definitely not going to believe any odd person that claims to be a prophet without putting them first to the test to know their word comes from God. Anyway, I started to think about this prophecy and had a personal revelation from God and he basically said "look, go back to the beginning. Think about Adam and Eve. They were born without sin. When they committed sin, what was the first thing that happened? They realized that they were naked. When you see a young baby, they are in the same first situation. They don't know that they are naked or that there is anything wrong with it. It is after they start to grow up a bit that they start to realize that they are naked and they should be clothed. That is in indicator that they are aware of their sinful nature." It seemed simple enough and sorta made sense to me. So anyway I did a search today about babies going to heaven and I came to this website. Essentially what it says is that a person is in either one of two conditions; they are either spiritually alive or spiritually dead. All of the people who are spiritually alive will go to Heaven and have eternal life and all those who are spiritually dead will have eternal death. When someone accepts Christ, they are said to become spiritually alive. His argument was that for someone to become spiritually dead, they had to once be alive. For example, you can't say a rock is dead because it was never alive to begin with. So if this is the case, we were once alive, then our spirit died when we became aware of our sin. After this point, we are spiritually dead. Then the moment we are saved, we become spiritually alive again. There is also scripture that says that when you are saved/in order to be saved you must become like a child (Matthew 18:3-6, 19:14). I actually recommend reading the whole page in the link that I sent because it is quite interesting.

So... now to the rest of my day. In the afternoon I had my class (Academia de Obreros) and it was actually really cool. It was talking about what we need to do after we bring someone to Christ. Even though they have become a new creation and have received salvation, we need to consolidate them. Consolidation is affirming that they, in deed, accepted Christ, and then providing them with guidance and help in the future. Its purpose is essentially to close the doors behind them so that they never revert back to how they were before they accepted Christ and so that they continually grow and can eventually disciple people on their own. There are 5 steps to consolidating someone.

1. Welcoming them into the family of Christ - This includes getting to know them a bit, praying with them to receive Christ and making sure you take their contact information so that you can get back to them in the future
2. The consolidation reunion - This step I'm a bit confused about, but I think it's talking about the people that are consolidating the people need to get together and discuss everything.
3. A telephone call and a visit - Within the first 48 hours of their conversion, we need to get in contact with the person and make sure they are on the right track. This can be over the phone or we can try to meet with them. We need to give them a bit of advice on what to do (speak with other Christians, pray, read the bible, and attend a church).
4. Assigning to a group - The new convert should be assigned to an outreach group so that they can go and grow in their faith in a small group environment outside of church.
5. An encounter with God - At my church they practice something called an "encuentro" (encounter), where you basically go away for a weekend and essentially they make sure you have done a true repentence and equip you with the tools you need to change your life where necessary.

Honestly, for me this was great, because this is something that I always wondered about when I went out evangelizing; what happens afterwards. Sure, it's great that someone accepts Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, but perhaps they don't understand fully what it means, or perhaps they just don't want to change their life, etc etc. They need the guidance after they convert.

Anyway, after my class, I had an hour of lunch before the regular church service and one of my friends that has hardly talked to me in the past month decided that she was going to start talking with me again, which was really kewl. It's a really stupid reason in my opinion, but anyway, I started to like her and I think she started to like me too (at least it seemed like that to me and my friends). And so obviously we started to become closer and sit beside eachother and talk, etc. y'know, just the small stuff. But then people started to talk about us and she really didn't like that because we were just friends, soooo.... she decided that she would just distance herself from me, and it was something that I noticed right away. I wasn't really sure why she was doing that, but then one of my friends talked to her about two weeks later and she told him why she was doing it. So yeah, she talked to me today and seemed really happy to see me, which was great.

Then the church service started. We had our usual worship at the beginning and then the pastor said that there was a couple people visiting from Colombia and that the wife was going to give the message instead of him. Call me sexist, but I have a hard time accepting that women should teach in church due to 1 Timothy 2:9-15 unless I'm mis-interpreting it. But anyway, there are female pastors and I'm just going to have to accept it. So anyway she got up and she said right from the beginning that she was going to do something completely different. The bible says that we need to evangelize, so she said that she wanted 50 people to come to the front of the church and form 25 pairs and they would go out into the streets and bring people into the church. Meanwhile she would be giving the sermon. In the bible it says that whenever someone accepts Christ, there are great celebrations in Heaven, so what we were going to do was every time that a new person came into the church, she would stop what she was doing and everyone would celebrate with cheers and adoration to God for this person that has been brought into the house of God. After she said that about 100 people went to the front, so she said that it was great that there were more than she asked for. For some reason I decided not to go. I still am not sure why. She then said a prayer for everyone and they all went out into the streets to find people. She then told us that we would look at Luke 4:16-30. She just gave a brief background on the passage and people started pouring in the door. Practically the whole time for the next hour we were cheering at all the people pouring through the doors that these people were bringing in. Every time she started to read, she would get 1 or 2 verses and then someone else would come through the door. It was amazing. I think we finally finished the one passage by the end, but we didn't have time for anything else. When people came in, there were people waiting for them so that they could guide them into accepting Christ and in total there were ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN PEOPLE that accepted Christ!!! There was even an on-duty police officer that was brought in and accepted Christ. Man... It was truly amazing today in Church.

After church I went out with my usual going-out-after-church group and got something to eat, and that girl that I was talking about earlier came with us and she seemed to be close to me again. It was great. I'm glad that we are friends again and I'm going to call her tomorrow (well today cuz it's nearly 2am [holey! it's almost 2am???]). If every day were as amazing as today, I dunno. I can't think of anything witty because I just realized it's 2am and my brain shuts down around this time.

God bless!