Our greatest heart's desire for students is that they would truly love Jesus and that their hearts would be transformed. We do not just want a community that knows how to act and speak in the "right Christian way". We want a community of broken, honest, pure hearted students who are truly being made into the image of our Savior. That is who Trent and I want to be too!

I think there have been three theme verses for Trent, me, and our students this last year. The first verse is the first beatitude in Matthew 5, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven". There is so much to say about this simple but deeply profound verse. Poverty of spirit is a recognition of spiritual bankruptcy and leads to true dependence on God. The road to poverty of spirit is marked by suffering, God allowing us to see the sin and filth in our hearts, and coming to the end of relying on self. It is a narrow road, but it leads to life. Yes it leads to life!! God has been blessing us by making us more poor in spirit, but the road there has been painful and hard at times. The result has been greater intimacy with God and dependence on Him for the strength I need to be holy, to not sin, to obey His commands, and to love Him and others from my heart. It is baffling how much I subconsciously think I can depend on myself and my own strength for all of those things. Entering the Kingdom does not come by being self sufficient, but by being dependent on God, which is the opposite of what our culture tells us we should be.

The second verse is Isaiah 26:8, which says, "We trust in you by obeying your commands. Our heart's desire is for your name's glory." The second half of the verse is incredibly convicting and powerful to me. How often do I honestly desire for God to get all the glory and not myself? How often do I want His will to be done at the expense of my own? Because His will being done is equated with His Kingdom coming (in the Lord's prayer), I cannot usher in His Kingdom if I am living by my own will and for my own glory. God has been slowly helping us die to our desires to get the glory, but this will be a life long process for sure! What a freedom it is though!

The third verse is 1 Samuel 16:7 when God says to Samuel, "Man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart." This verse is actually quite frightening to me because we cannot fool God regardless of how "good" or "righteous" our outside appears to be. How often do I care more about what is in my heart than what I do on the outside? If I "perform well and righteously" in a certain situation, am I still concerned with what was really in my heart? Or am I just proud and happy to receive the praise of man? Because I truly believe that I will stand before Jesus one day and give an account for my life and what was truly in my heart, I am motivated to tend to my heart, to seek transformation of my heart, not just my actions. The beauty of a transformed heart is that a simplicity takes over life, which is really just transparency. A good tree bears good fruit naturally. I do not want to be a Pharisee, yet this is easy to become if I don't care about my heart, engage in spiritual disciplines, and seek God more fervently behind closed doors than in front of others.

This narrow road of dying to ourselves leads to wholeness, freedom, and fruit as we get to participate in God's story. It is all about Him!

Our 7 day backpacking trip with students was incredible! The weather was much better than expected, which was a huge blessing because it was supposed to be rainy with thunder showers 5 of the 7 days, with a high of 40! It ended up raining a little bit one night, and then it was mostly sunny and pretty warm the rest of the week! It was so beautiful, as you can see in some of the pictures right below this post. You can also see that there was still quite a lot of snow, but it ended up being a fun challenge.

The group bonded and got along incredibly! It was a pretty mixed group in the sense that a lot of the students going did not know each other extremely well. One of the coolest parts of the week for me was hearing everyone's summarized life story around the campfire at night times. People were really honest and I feel like that was a huge source of bonding among the group. It was also nice to be away from civilization, phones, technology, email, etc for a week. It is amazing how much peace we all experienced. And because we had quite a bit of down time, we all got to spend a lot of time with God and one another in His glorious creation which was literally breathtaking at times and filled us all with so much joy and praise!! While we did not want to leave, I must admit that I was very excited to take a shower, sleep in my bed, and eat some good food:) We were all extremely smelly after not showering for seven days, but it was an incredible experience that we all embraced and grew from!

WOW!

2 of the students climbed the big peak behind and left of us

The lakes were still half way frozen over

We made a huge bonfire one of the nights

Gorgeous sunset one night!

One of the students, Doug, standing in a HUGE GORGEOUS meadow

Lots of snow when we came over the Donahue pass!

Group shot at the top of Donahue pass

Climbing up the pass in the snow

Group shot

All the girls minus one

Thousand island lake

The school year is coming to a close. It has been an incredible spring quarter and year. One of my favorite things about spring quarter was having the opportunity to lead a freshman girl on the tennis team to Jesus and watch her embrace Him wholeheartedly. I am convinced of the Lord's power when he reveals Himself to students who have not grown up with a Christian background whatsoever, and then they just get it so quickly. Within a few weeks, she had me in tears (of joy and praise) because of the wisdom that was coming out of her mouth, how hungry she was to read Scripture, and the things the Lord was convicting her of and showing to her. For example, I led her to Christ on a Friday, and by Monday she had already read John, Romans, 1 Corinthians, 1 John, and half of the book I gave her. And that was even during a busy time for her! Within a week she was saying things to me like, "I want to surrender everything in my life to Him because He is so beautiful and good." Or "I have so much joy and purpose for the first time in my life and I am so thankful to have found the greatest truth and reality." Or "I see how wretched my heart is and how much I long to be more like Jesus." Seeing even one student come to know Jesus keeps the fuel in my heart burning for a long time, and we were blessed to see quite a few students come to know Christ for the first time this year!

The Freedom Summit was absolutely INCREDIBLE last weekend!! It far surpassed my expectations in quality and quantity of people that came! We had about 500 people register in the last few days leading up to the conference, so we had about 1,000 people total. While numbers are not the ultimate gauge of success for anything, we were thrilled that 1,000 people in the Bay Area cared enough about human trafficking to come to the Freedom Summit. We were also thrilled that 1,000 people were educated and given many opportunities at the conference to get involved in fighting this horrible injustice (we had about 25 local and international organizations come to the conference. Each organization was given a table in the "global village" where conference attendees were able to explore, ask questions, and see how they could get involved.) We can't wait to see all that God is going to do as a result of this conference! We trust that many seeds were planted at the Freedom Summit, and that He will cause them to grow as He desires. Beginning on June 1st, videos of all the main and breakout sessions will be posted on our website: www.freedom-summit.org. Make sure to watch at least the three main sessions if you were not able to attend. We also posted the handbook on our website, and this is a great compilation of information on the organizations that were present--their needs, vision, niche in fighting human trafficking, prayer requests, and how YOU can get involved. We were so blessed by this event and praise GOD for all that He is doing here among us!

2nd Mile - Green Oaks Academy from Emilee Shim on Vimeo.

Check out our most recent 2nd mile slideshow. We rennovated an elementary school in East Palo Alto last weekend, and it was a blast! We were excited to bless the students and staff at this school, and it was such a joy to serve. We had a lot of students come out too, which was a lot of fun!

We finally arrived home from Honduras late last night. The trip was incredible to say the least for everyone involved! We felt God move in powerful ways in and through us, the work was very rewarding, the group got along incredibly and bonded a lot, no one got sick (at least no signs of sickness yet...some fevers take a week to kick in so hopefully no one got anything:), everyone grew in new ways, and everyone was used in the lives of the local people who we were privileged to hang out with for a week. Trent and I just love mission trips for so many reasons, and this proved to be worth all of the hard work that went into planning it!

Here is a short snippet from an email that Trent sent the parents while we were there. It gives a brief picture of our work and rhythm there: