Last days at the Dream Center :(

So I have an airport shuttle picking me up in a half hour and then I will be flying to Denver, Co where my cousin Bill is getting married in Saturday!!! Yay!

So Tuesday I got to get a tour of the Dream Center and hear a little bit of history on the building and some of the awesome stuff God has done hear... I wish I could remember all of it, but I can't... If I remember as I go along I'll pop it in here, but I doubt it! One thing though is that the campus here is an old hospital building that used to be a Roman Catholic Hospital that had been abandoned because the convent that ran it could no longer afford to keep it open so it was left vacant for years and different movie companies apparently would rent it while it was vacant for filming movies... there were a few famous ones that they mentioned but the only one I can remember was APOLLO 13.. which is actually really cool!!! and the building had originally been for sale for 10 million dollars, which is a deal for a space this big in its location and the Dream Center was able to purchase it in 1994 for 4 million dollars!!! wowee!! Jesus is good!

Then on Tuesday I got to go on a Food Truck with the Foster Care outreach... this outreach helps mothers with food and clothes and furniture and anything they can and feel led to help with to help these single mothers be able to keep their kids... otherwise these moms couldn't afford to provide for them and they would lose their kids to the governments foster care programs... so we went to 5 different mothers homes and gave them lots of food, hang out with them for a while and got to pray with them!!

Wednesday I got to go with the Skid Row/ Under the Bridge outreach!! Skid Row is an area of downtown LA where all the homelss people in the greater LA area are dropped off at... When the homeless hang out in the nice, rich, fancy areas of So. Cal. complaints are usually filed and so they are all pretty much picked up and dropped off in Skid Row... and so the whole neighborhood-ish place is full of homless people and they all just live right there and do drugs and live life and beg and there is some pretty sick stuff out there, sometimes there isn't always an actual place to go to the restroom but there is plenty of street and sidewalk to go on... so they usually do... SO... at the Dream Center they go out in the morning an we hand out invitations to church with the bus pick up times listed and we tell them about the meal we are going to be serving at 1:30 at one of the drop-in centers in skid row... so we spent all morning walking around the area inviting people to the meal and talking with them and praying with some of them. I met a guy who writes music and he was homeless and he gave me one of his lyric sheets that he hand wrote... I'll see if I can't post a picture of it on here later or write down some of the verses for you... it was really cool! Then in the afternoon we bring back pre-prepared food from the Dream Center ad we serve food to 300 homeless people! There was this awesome girl named Holli from Ireland that is on Short Term too from the Dream Center and she is a sweetie let me tell you!!! Fearless! And me and her went around while they were serving and mingled and talked and prayed with the people eating! It was so much fun! Those people are amazing! We met a girl who is 5 months pregnant and homeless and 18 and she has Koolaid red hair! We got to pray with her, find out what some of her needs are and we got her connected with the people to talk with at the Dream CEnter to see if she can start living there. Her name was Kristin, and she was absolutely precious!

Then last night I went on a Hope For Homeless Youth outreach to Santa Monica... to the beach and Pier there... I was able to go with some friends I made that had all just arrived for Short Term Missions and a lot of them were from Australia (2 girls I met Stef and Sarah were just amazing!!) and then a girl from Canada named Nicole and a guy from Pennsylvania named Jon... we all went and invited the homeless hanging out on the pier and in the park and stuff to come listen to some testimonies and get a free sack lunch! It was so cool, because I am finally getting into my groove down here and I had the best tine talking with the people down here... and awesome man named "Teddy Bear" and a gal named Gina, and couple other guys named Albert and Saheid... each one had the most interesting story of how they got there and why they are homeless... it really started to break my heart! ..... and some how I was coerced into to sharing my testimony in front of everyone... I wasn't really sure what to say, what can I a 20o year old girl who has never been drunk or done drugs share about loving Jesus to a bunch of down and out homeless people. So I just prayed that God would speak through me, and the Holy spirit would show up... and I spoke on how I grew up being your average Sunday Morning Christian and God broke my heart showing me that being a christina doesn't make you a good person! Being a christian means starting a relationship with God and asking everyday to show us his love and show us how to love the world and out of that we slowly become "good people" by his grace... being a christian is simply allowing god to love us and letting him rule and reign in our lives it has nothing to do with pretending to be a good person... it is about living for the love of god and seeking to love the world more and more each day!

I got to catch my flight now, my ride is here!! Love you guys I'll post more later!!

happy blogging!