funny group pic

speeding their boat through the mangroves

launching each other off the dock:)

singing with the kids

house demo

cute kids!

more craziness off the dock

playing with kids is hard work:)

awesome beach in one of the towns where we worked

On the way to work!

Some of our students working

Our amazing artist Kat painting one of many murals at the school in town

Repainting a school

Playing with the precious kids!

Check out the incredible promotional video for the Freedom Summit that one of our students made!! You can read more about the Freedom Summit in the post right below this. Go to our website at www.freedom-summit.org to learn more and register now!


Freedom Summit from Freedom Summit on Vimeo.

We are more than excited about the upcoming Freedom Summit, a conference on slavery and human trafficking! We have an incredible team of our students and Abundant Life members working hard to put this together. It has been so fun to see our students take ownership and come alive in planning this conference. We have incredible speakers coming, including pastor Francis Chan from Cornerstone church near LA, David Batstone with Not for Sale, and Bethany Hoang from International Justice Mission. Not for Sale and IJM are two of the biggest and best organizations in the country fighting human trafficking! In putting this conference together, we have learned so much and met so many incredible people who are working full time to fight this massive injustice in this world.

One example of someone we have met who is working hard to fight this injustice and will join us at the conference is Nathan George (and his small team of employees) who started a for profit business called Trade as One a few years ago. Nathan worked in the UK in business for 20 years before he felt led to start this business in the United States. He started by spending a lot of time travelling around the world to places where there is a lot of poverty, AIDS, and/or human trafficking. He found large and small businesses who were employing people living with AIDS, in dire poverty, or coming out of forced prostitution or labor. He said the one main thing that all of these people wanted was help in marketing and selling their products. So he set up Trade as One to buy products from these businesses and sell them in the States. Last year, they sold $700,000 worth of products and it was only their second year in operation! They are not only running an eithical business in which ALL of the products they sell are 100% slave free, but the very existence of their business is responsible for sustaining and creating jobs for many thousands of people living with AIDS, in dire poverty, or coming out of human trafficking. Now that to me is an example of creative Kingdom business that delights God's heart!!

Roatan Missions Trip Update

We are extremely excited about our upcoming trip to the island of Roatan, located 27 miles off the Caribbean coast of Honduras. We will be making the trip with 31 students from Stanford, spending our time rebuilding homes, cleaning up communities, and caring for the sick and marginalized that inhabit the island's east end.

We can't wait to see how God moves in and through our group during this time! If you would join us in praying for the trip, please pray for:

• hearts that are prepared for whatever we encounter on the island
• God's working in the hearts of the people we are to meet on the island
• this trip to bless those we meet on the island, while also growing each of us more in love with Him
• seamless preparation, both on our end and on the island
• safe and smooth travel
  
• health and safety during our time on the island
• the financial provision necessary for everyone to go
• the financial provision necessary to complete the projects we will be doing while there
• unity, growth and love within the context of our group

Also, we are currently raising money to help fund the projects that we will be doing on the island, as well as to supplement the money raised by students for the cost of their trips. If you are interested in giving for this particular trip, either click the "Donate" button located on the right hand side of this page, or send checks made out to the National Christian Foundation, with "Fund #:648866" in the memo line to:

2314 Williams St
Palo Alto, CA
94306

We appreciate your partnership with us in this venture!

Thanks, and God Bless!

We feel that the word for this quarter is "surrender", accompanied by the loving yet challenging question from the Lord, "what is your treasure? what do you really love the most?" Trent and I recently watched a 3 minute youtube video of John Piper's response to the "health, wealth, and prosperity" gospel that is being touted by so many preachers, televangelists, and other pastors around the world. You can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGzqIcbvARw. He is very blunt about how horrible this "gospel" is because it is not the gospel and is really just idolatry. While I also share Piper in his hatred for the overt "health, wealth, and prosperity" gospel because it is not the gospel, I felt surprisingly convicted by this video. I realized that my heart is prone to wander and treasure other things above Jesus, which is also idolatry! It made me start reflecting on how self centered and small my view of God usually is. God has been doing major heart movements in me surrounding this core, deep issue of where my treasure is. Trent and I, along with many of our students, have been on our knees begging the Lord to "circumcise our hearts so that we may truly love Him with all of our heart, mind, strength, and soul" (Deutoronomy 30:6). Things are shifting and softening in my heart and I am falling more in love with Jesus. I am beginning to feel more of the "rivers of living water" and love for others gushing from my heart.

I am also experiencing a lot of wrestling with Him as well. He is letting me see just how deep some of my other loves run, and He is slowly prying my hand away from those things. I feel like in some ways, God has been patiently waiting and asking, "how much of me do you want?" I thought I had already "lost my life for His sake and found it," and in some ways I have, but there is still more to go. And I truly believe that in God's economy, resurrection comes from death. Seeds must die to bear fruit. I must lose my life for His sake to save it and find it. It costs everything. But then I realize that everything I have is as loss, rubbish, garbage, compared to knowing Him. Philippians 3:7-11 says exactly what I am communicating here. As Paul writes from prison, he says, "But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead."

So my Stanford degree, my gymnastics accomplishments, my incredible family and friends, ministry, are all a loss compared to knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. I want there to be no comparison when it comes to what I love the most. This is challenging! I guess when we come face to face with Him one day, we will realize how pale everything is in comparison to his glory, goodness, and greatness!

Winter quarter has been an absolute whirlwind so far. An awesome whirlwind:) We have had over 50 kids packed into the Stenstrom's house at our first three Cross Training meetings of the quarter (this picture is about half the group!). God has been doing an incredible work in so many people's hearts, and we continue to praise God for the ways we get to participate in His work on the Stanford campus. I step back often and think about the ripple effect that so many Stanford students falling in love with Jesus will have on the world. Channeling all of their passions, talents, resources, and LOVE towards God and His Kingdom is so exciting to Trent and I. God keeps drawing new people to himself and to the Cardinal Life community, and we are humbled and thrilled by His mighty power that is at work in transforming students hearts, minds, priorities, and lives. We so strongly know and proclaim that all glory and credit belongs to Him.

Something that we are really excited for, and know will have a HUGE impact on this group of students: we have about 30 students already committed to coming on a spring break Honduras mission trip! Our brother in law's father, Joseph Natale, started a missions organization there, on the island of Roatan many years ago, and there is a lot of poverty there, though a breathtakingly beautiful place! We are going to build a house for a family, possibly do some HIV/AIDS prevention education at the local high school that the Natale's started (1/5 people have HIV/AIDS in most of the towns on Roatan!), play soccer with the kids, pray and share the gospel with people, and just have fun and love on them! Please pray that God would do a mighty work in and through us. We are so excited about the group that is going, and we know that God is going to rock their worlds with His love, truth, and invitation to radically follow Him the rest of their lives.

One quote by Mother Theresa that has really impacted Trent and I pertaining to how we view mission trips: "the rich rescue the poor and the poor rescue the rich." This is so true. We often go into mission trips thinking we are going to serve and give since we have "so much", but we are served and given so much also. This summer in South Africa, I felt like we were "rescued" to a certain degree from our American consumeristic mentality, and we received so many spiritual riches from the poor there. It seemed like the degree to which they were materially poor, they were that spiritually rich towards God, which is so much more important. I was actually saddened by the spiritual poverty of America in comparison. The family of God, ALL of the family of God, NEEDS one another. So we will go to serve, teach, and love them, and they will serve, teach, and love us! I know our students will come back changed and hopefully more in love with God than ever before. And hopefully the effect upon return will be a closer knit community more in love with God and other people, leading to more people seeing and coming to know Jesus. May His Name be praised and lifted higher through everything we do!

Fall quarter is nearing the end, and it has been such an incredible quarter. It is fun to sit and reflect on all that God has done this quarter. It brings me to my knees in praise of God's love, power, and glory. He is so good! I feel like this has been a quarter of love. God seems to be teaching all of us how to receive his love and realize who we are as his beloved children. Only in receiving his love can we love him and others back, which is the aim of our lives. 1 John 4:10 says, "This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins." If we do not receive his love first, we cannot love him or others as we are called to do. God has been moving a lot of these truths into our hearts, and we have seen students just falling more in love with Him as they experience Him. Our single greatest desire and prayer for our students is that they would truly learn how to receive from God and let Him love them. Right along with that prayer is that they would love God with all of their heart, soul, mind, and strength and love their neighbors as themselves! There are a lot of things pulling at us in our world, and there are a lot of things that compete for our allegiance and love. God has truly been revealing the treasure that He alone is--far above all other things.

Our weekly Monday night Cross Training worship gatherings at Steve and Lori's house (which we are so thankful for their generosity in letting us use their beautiful house as we surely could not fit in our house) has been such a rich time of community, worship, learning, pouring into one another, and soaking in God's love and presence. His Spirit is so alive among us as we come together to refocus and worship Him. He has definitely been working powerfully in everyone's hearts to reveal himself to us, his love for us, his heart for lost people on our campus and beyond, our purpose here at Stanford, and the people he has destined us to become--conformed to the likeness of our King. I really cannot express to you how much this time has felt like a glimpse of what the early church must have felt like. It is neat to see that while he has given us more vision and conviction than ever to be more missional on our campus, he has also been increasing our understanding of how that will most effectively happen--by falling more in love with Him and relying on HIS powerful Spirit that is at work within us, rather than subconsciously thinking that we are self sufficient to carry out his commission on our own. He keeps giving me a picture of a seed that is planted to produce a harvest. It must first die so that the outer shell is cracked open. Then what is inside can grow and come forth. As Jesus said, " I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds," (John 12:24). I picture the outer shell as my self and my pride that needs to be cracked open and crucified daily so that the Spirit inside of me can minister to others through me. So "it is no I who live, but Christ who lives in me," (Galatians 2:20).

We just had our last Cardinal Life of the quarter last night and it was just incredible. We had over 100 kids there and we were privileged to have Stanford and Cardinal Life alumni Ryan and Sarah Hall! If you follow running at all, Ryan is the fastest American born marathon runner ever, and recently set the still current American record at the Olympic trials for Beijing. Much more importantly, they are true disciples of Jesus who love Him so much and are using this platform to unashamedly proclaim their greatest love and treasure far above any running achievements. They spoke so much Godly wisdom to our group last night about what truly matters and what truly defines us, which made us so happy.

We continue to see people coming to know Jesus for the first time and in a much deeper, powerful and transformative way. We ask you to pray for the students we meet one on one with and in small groups (about 100 guys and girls total! Praise God!)--that they would continue to grow in the knowledge of who God is and that they would "experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then they will be complete, having the fullness of life and power that comes from God," (Ephesians 3:19). Please pray for the campus as a whole and the difficult culture of relativism where "no one can claim to have truth". This makes proclaiming the gospel difficult and it seems like so few have ears to hear. But God is amazing and he continues to powerfully reveal Himself to people all the time. He is bigger than our culture! My faith has strengthened in the truth of Romans 1:16 that says, "I am not ashamed of the gospel because it is the POWER of God for the salvation of everyone who believes". The gospel is inherently powerful, and all we can do is faithfully proclaim his love while SHOWING them the easy yoke, the beauty, the love, and the full life of following Him.

One last exciting prayer request is that we are putting on a big human trafficking conference May 15th and 16th. Many of our students are very passionate about being apart of the abolitionist movement that is growing around the issue of ending modern day slavery. There are over 27 million slaves in our world, most of which are women and children, and it is happening in our own American cities! We already have some incredible speakers, groups, and musicians coming, so we are praying that God will use this conference to raise awareness, proclaim Jesus as the true source of freedom, and mobilize the body to take action to help fight human trafficking. We will share more exciting details soon!