Sunday May 16, 2010

We had the opportunity to worship at Cityview Baptist Church in Surrey on Sunday morning. Cityview Baptist Church is one of the biggest Baptist churches in the Greater Vancouver Area and one of very few that has a building. Most of the churches are held in homes or even out in nature at a park or something of sorts. On the front of their bulletin it stated, “Cityview: a church for LIFE” and on the back it explained the LIFE acronym:
Love God with our all.
Include people in the grace of Jesus.
Find freedom in the Truth.
Engage the world as a servant.
The service was good and Pastor Craig O’Brien spoke on how Jesus creates a new community within us and also how to seek the lost by moving toward them with open hearts. He said that if you “open your heart to the Father, He will bring more treasure (lost people) to you than you know what to do with.”
After the service and as I was walking out the front door, I saw a penny. I naturally picked it up. Then I saw another, and another! Someone jokingly stated that I must have opened my heart to God because He was bringing me treasure already. :)
Some people then went back to the College while others decided to stay around the city for a while longer. A group of 16 went to eat at a Thai restaurant where I ordered Mee Goreng. It was interesting but still tasty.
Once we finished eating, we headed to the bus stop to begin our transit home. Due to the fact that it was the weekend, we had to take 3 different buses and the SkyTrain instead of only taking one bus and the SkyTrain like usual. After we got off of the SkyTrain and headed to our bus stop, we realized we had missed it by approximately 4 minutes. The next bus didn’t come again until an hour later which meant we had to buy new tickets.
After running here and there hoping to catch a different bus, we decided to wait it out. The bus finally arrived and we made it to our next location only to realize that it had happened again. We had missed our bus by 4 minutes. It wasn’t until then that we learned that earlier that afternoon, the SkyTrain had shut down, therefore throwing off the times of all the transit vehicles. It was an adventure and we eventually arrived safely at PLBC.
At 7 PM, we held a worship service in the A-Frame building of our lodgings with ION Community Church, the new church that Sean is starting in the area. Brett, Seth, Laurey, and Liesl lead worship and Sean spoke. He spoke about how God wasn’t simply a rural God, but a God of the city and how we as Christians need to be moving with the masses. He informed us of the work we would be doing on Monday, for we would be working with him and for him in the North Vancouver area.
Following worship, Whitney, Seth, and I set off to divide all of us into the four groups that would be out gleaning the city and college campuses for information. In the middle of our dividing, we received the news about the truck accident involving the HLG Haiti mission team. We gathered up our team and went to the A-Frame to pray. It was wonderful that we could all pray together, being a strong force standing behind our fellow friends and believers in this time of pain and worry. It definitely helped bring comfort to those of us with close friends in the accident. I know that God hears the desires of our hearts, and that night, our hearts were with our friends in Haiti.