25 Cool Ways to Share Your Faith

Many times when people hear the word Evangelism they panic. They think I can't just walk up to someone and share my faith. It's weird and awkward! Well I want to help you over come your fears. I too am not always confident talking to a complete stranger but lets face it in the end it's the only thing that matters.

I'm not sure how many of you know but since January I (Laura) have had the privilege of Teacher Aiding for one of my favorite classes (Evangelism) and professors at seminary to date. This week I was tasked to read through an assignment where students were asked to come up with 50 ways to share the gospel. Some people were very creative! Out of the 1750 ways I read about I wanted to highlight 25 of my favorite.

I hope they will inspire you the way they inspired me! Some of these are so easy!! Not scary or awkward at all!

So, get out there and tell someone the good news!

1. Turn church parking lot into a skateboard park one Sunday a month. Invite youth to bring friends to church and stay for the event.

2. Donate your old Christian books to the public library.

3.When you make your grocery list add share the gospel to it.

4. Foster a child.

5. Book trade offs with non believers. You can read something about Hinduism while they read a C.S. Lewis. After the trade meet back to talk about it.
6. Have the cooks of the church prepare meals for new moms who are not believers. Collect a list of non believer expectant moms from church members.
7. Add the link to your blog on your business card that will take the person to your testimony.
8. Host a father daughter dance night and invite the community to come. Give a short talk on the Father's love.
9. Buy a bunch of bus tokens and offer a free token in exchange for an interview on religious beliefs while they wait to catch their bus.
10. Host a monthly bike clinic at the church. Teach kids bike safety while serving coffee for parents. Build relationships with parents and children.
11. have a nurse or trained member of the church offer a free CPR certification course at the church one Saturday. Share with people during the breaks.
12. Allow your children to decorate your driveway with scripture and christian images using sidewalk chalk.
13. Offer a scrapbook making class at your church. Talking about memories often lead to spiritual conversation.
14. Stash tracts in all the pinatas at a party supply store (haha)
15. Flash mob a location using the Jesus Christ Superstar (haha)
16. Preform oil changes for single women in the community have someone building a relationship with them while they wait.
17. Restore a classic care with the church youth group and then take it to car shows.
18. While waiting an eternity at the DMV start conversations with others around you and share Christ. They have no where to run or hide.
19. Put an add on Craigslist in the "free" section for the gift of eternal life with your contact information.
20.  Become a crisis negotiator so you can witness to people in life threatening situations.
21. Donate a kidney with the condition that you must be allowed to speak to the recipient before the transplant.
22. Have a free sale and post signs in your local dollar store to advertise. People will want to know why you are giving things away for free. Share Christ's free gift with them.
23. Offer free funeral services at your church. Make sure to preach the gospel.
24. Bible study at a coffee shop. Free coffee to the first 10 people who show up for it.
25. Set up a Photo booth at a local park. Give people who try it their pictures for free along with a card with information about your church.

Laura's Easy King Cake

Happy very late Fat Tuesday everybody! Steve and I decided after missing king cake season last year that we couldn't do it again. So I began to search for an easy recipe I thought I would share my experience here in case any of you are far away from King Cake Land too and want to give it a try too!

I will begin with a disclaimer. It's not a perfect replica but it's pretty good! My plan was go easy. If you are a professional baker you may want to try something more challenging. I am not, so that's why my plan was to go easy.


Laura's Easy King Cake

Ingredients: (I know easy right?!!)
3 cans of Cinnamon rolls
1 container of cream cheese icing
1 box of food coloring
(1 king cake baby if you can get your hands on one)

Begin by greasing your baking sheet well. Next lay Cinnamon rolls in a circular shape on pan. This is when you would hide your baby if you can find one.

After that search your kitchen for something round that you can fit in the middle so that your cake will keep it's shape. I used a oven safe bowl for mine.

Bake using the time and temp on your Cinnamon roll packages. While you're waiting for the king cake to cook it is the perfect time to make your frosting. I took the packets of icing that came with the Cinnamon roll packets and poured them into cups. I added additional cream cheese icing for flavor and so that there would be enough. I then added food coloring and mixed well. ***Note for the purple add more red than you do blue!

Once your timer goes off you'll have a pretty good looking king cake.

The only step left is to get the frosting on....

And enjoy!

Happy Mardi Gras!!!

The Jewelflower

If you know anything about Steve and I you know that neither of us are nature lovers. Sure we appreciate nature and even take the rare hike but in general we really arn't "Green." Why then you might be asking are you titling this blog: "The Jewelflower?" Well that is a good question because it has very little to do with this blog...

One of the things that defines Marin County where we live is being Green. Some churches in the area (a few years ago) got together and decided that a way we could show the local community we care is to do some service in the parks around the county. So last weekend about 200 church volenters went out all around the county to do just that. Steve and I felt like it would be a good way to reachout in our community and signed up to help out at the Tiburon work site.

After a nice worship serivice that morning all the volenteers headed out to their sites. Our site director gave us a printed discription saying that our site was known as the home for the endangered Jewelflower. We decided to make a game and guess what color the Jewel flower was.

Steve guessed it was going to be blue. I thought it was going to be purple. We invite you to guess too! We'll let all you other non green people know at the end of the blog.

Once we arrived at our site we were given the task to remove the weed called Broom. Behind Steve in the picture is tons of Broom. I being my non green self thought it was pretty and would have guessed it was a flower not a weed.

We were given very heavy orange tools to help us pull out the Broom. It was hard manual labor and slow work. We hope that even though we were quite far off the beaten path that someone was affected by our work.

We decided if we do it again we will try and pick a more public place to go. We were a little sad we didn't get to meet anyone to tell them why we were doing this work but we still had a lot of fun trying something new.

So is it killing you to know what the Jewelflower is yet? Yeah it was killing us too... because we never saw it the whole time we worked. Once we realized we weren't going to find it we looked it up online. Scroll to the bottom of the blog to find out if you guessed the color right!

Ministry Moments

Since returning from the Middle East Steve and I have been in high gear. I thought I would update you on a couple of ministry moments from the last month.

One ministry highlight of ours was getting to drive three middle school girls to and from our youth Super Bowl party. We enjoyed listening to their humorous insights on life (why Coldplay rocks, what kind of awesome car they want when they can drive, how they can't stand people who constantly "like" their stuff on Facebook, and which celebrity break up was the most heart breaking...) and answering some questions about ourselves (Do you like Coldplay? Do you live together? Do you have facebook?...) One cool question that made this such a ministry highlight moment of ours was "What religion are you?" We were able to quickly share the gospel and what we stood for as Chrisitians. Isn't it awesome when evangelism is that easy!

Another Ministry highlight of the month was in our churches Wednesday night ministry. I have been praying for a while that I would be able to take the children I babysit to church with me and I finally got my chance! They came with me for the Wednesday night children's music and loved it. After talking to me and the children their parents have decided to let them come with me regularly! Praise God for his faithfulness to answer prayer! The greatness of Wednesday night didn't stop there. We had our largest group of youth attend since we joined.

I decided to write this blog because far too often it is easy to focus on the disappointments in ministry instead of the great things God is doing. God is doing great things here in Marin county and I am so thankful to be a small part of it.

A Sneak Peak!

We had such a wonderful trip! We wanted to share just a few quick pictures with you. Thank you so much to everyone who prayed for us while we were away!

Where Jacob Wrestled with God

Mt. Nebo, looking into the Promised Land

Bet you don't want this Milstone around your neck!

My husband not some Jordanian man.

The Temple of Doom!

Playing around at Petra

The Garden Tomb: He has Risen!

Steve the Cowboy

In Jerome's home where he translated the Latin Vulgate

Playing in the ocean

Riding on the Sea of Galilee

At the Jordan River

Egypt

Steve and a camel

Riding on the Nile

Playing

Steve and I found ourselves doing a little "playing" during December and by playing I mean we went to see two plays!

The first was "The Glass Menagerie" By Mississippi's very own  Tennessee Williams. Our local theater was giving a ministers discount so we were able to go with some of Steve's church staff to enjoy an evening out together. Steve and I even somehow lucked out and got upgraded tickets near the front of the stage. We were over all quite impressed by the performance and we are planning to go back for their next production in the spring.

Our second play was the Broadway musical "Bring it On." Being a former high school cheerleader Steve though this would be a fun one for us to go see. We got a little Christmas money from my Grandma and we were able to splurge on a really nice evening out together. Steve made reservations for us at a Brazilian BBQ place near the theater. If you have never been to a Brazilian BBQ it is truly a treat. They come around to your table and offer you all sorts of expensive meat like steak until you cannot eat anymore. They are also famous for having a huge salad bar which is more like a buffet if you ask me. We left feeling stuffed and pampered.

After a short walk to encourage our food to digest we hit the famous Orpheum Theater. The show was wonderful. You don't even have to take my word for it (a girl former cheerleader) Steve loved it too! The show was filled with tumbling, stunting, dancing, and of course singing. It was tons of fun.

We had such a good night we plan on trying to go again next summer to see another play there. We hope you had a wonderful December and were able to get out and play a little too!

"Thanksmas"

Finals are officially over and now we get to do the fun stuff like updating everyone on what we have been doing!

 Over our Thanksgiving break we were able to go up and visit some more West Coast Reynolds in Seattle. Steve's parents hosted us, his sister and kids, and his brother and wife for a big Christmas/Thanksgiving extravaganza. We coined the word "Thanksmas" to cover both holidays that we were celebrating.

Our first day in town we enjoyed a trip to the city. We were pretty lucky as you can tell from the sky because it didn't Rain while we were out of the car!

 This is our beautiful neice Alexa. We enjoyed learning about how babies work over our trip. Our conclutinos are: They wake up early, their always able to find the things you dropped on the floor, the baby gate is another word for jail, and they are super fun!!!

 This a picture of the girls (missing Kayla) in front of a really cold water fall in down town. No one wanted to take this picture but I think they'll be glad they did now. It turned out pretty cute!

 This is our other beautiful niece Hailey. We loved learning about preteen culture with her. What we learned: The Disney Chanel is still cool, Justice is the new Limited Too, ipads iphones and ipods are the coolest Christmas presents around and they want them, Starbucks is very cool, seeing Santa is not cool, and they still are still super fun!!!

 Can you see how big Lilly's smile is in this picture. She LOVED Alexa. Alexa was pretty brave if you ask me because Lilly is 5 times her size. All week Alexa called Lilly a kitty cat.

Our week was also filled with lots of cards and games which we loved!! These are a few pictures of a new board game I had never heard of before called quelf. It was so much fun! If you're looking to give a board game to someone this Christmas I highly recommend this one. It comes in a Jr. version too for kids.

Thanksmas morning was filled with food, presents and of course Dallas Cowboys football. This is a picture of Steve opening his new Kindle Fire.

Steve Feeding Alexa Apple Jacks

The only thing that we didn't get pictures of was the black Friday Shopping that Dad R. and I did at Walmart and Target. It is really too bad because it was a sight to see.

We had such a good time in Seattle it was so hard to say goodbye. We look forward to our next trip which will hopefully be sooner than later!