Guarda Austin Raro!

This last week’s mention-ables…

Dating the church…
-Since moving to Austin, I have been looking for churches. I have been recommended about a handful of churches in Austin. Also, I have checked out Yelp.com (a great resource for citizen reviews of anything in most major cities… I highly suggest it) for churches in Austin.

This week, I checked out two of the recommended churches. I was pretty impressed with one of them - Austin Stone. It reminds me a lot of Four Oaks in Tallahassee. It’s a church with a large college and young adult congregation that meets in a high school. Chris Tomlin was one of the founders of the church before moving to Atlanta this last year.

You can tell his influence in the church because they have a “rockin” worship band - minus the cheesy songs and smoke and lights. They also have the typical trendy things of a young church (which, honestly, strike my interest) - well-edited videos, artsy graphics, and a young “hip” pastor.

There are 2 things that I particularly like about the church:
1) An apologetics/reasons for faith course
This Sunday I sat in on the apologetics course and contributed to the discussion of the week - Why do people trust and why don’t they trust the Bible? I really enjoyed the topic because this is something I have always been interested in since college. I hope to go to the rest of the meetings for further discussion.

2) Urban outreach
Since the church is buying land and building a church in the poor, Hispanic St. Johns Community, the church has adopted a service-oriented focus.

That is sort of their slogan for this period of building and transition. They figured they need to reach out to the poor, mostly Hispanic community of St. Johns before they move there. In so doing, the church has started a variety of programs to reach out to this community - like after-school tutoring for Reagan High (which is in danger of being closed due to poor academic performance), living among the community, volunteering in health clinics, and family support programs.

Here is a video of a couple in the church and their honest hardships living in the St. John's Community:

www.vimeo.com/1868693

The whole St. Johns outreach movement was kicked off this weekend with the Hope Fest. My friend Lindsey, who helped organize the Fest, suggested for me to sign up to volunteer. So this last Saturday I did blood pressures and helped interpret Spanish for the Hispanic visitors to the festival. It was a lot of fun… “?Te quiero chequear tu presion?”

Also, by the end of the day, I had made a friend with a guy named Alberto. Through talking, he revealed that he’s been digging ditches in Austin for the last year and has not seen his family in Mexico for 2 years. At the end of our conversation, he said he wanted to meet up sometime to practice his English and my Spanish. I hope he calls me back. He said he knew the location of a “buen restaurante chino”.


Practicar hace perfecto!
I really enjoy Austin for its high number of Hispanics and opportunities to learn Spanish. This last week I went to two different Spanish conversation groups. One was at UT and the other at the downtown Public Library. The UT group consisted of mainly college students that were Spanish majors. It was a good group but a big one of 8 people. But since we only met for an hour and it being our first meeting - we didn’t do a lot of talking. We are going to the museum this week to see some famous Latin American exhibit. The Library group consisted of mainly people in their 50s to 60s. I enjoyed this group because it was interesting to hear about the lives of 50+ year olds (which I usually find it hard to communicate with). Lonnie, a stoke broker (I think), talked about his gripes about the current economy and how the government is handling (or mishandling) the economy. How do you say Libertarian in Spanish?

There are also two or three different homeless shelters for Hispanics in my neighborhood. If I have time, I hope to get involved somehow. If I get involved with these shelters, I will be working on the front lines of the Immigration issue. Often these shelters house and care for the fatigued, fresh-from-the-border illegal immigrants from Mexico. Kind of exciting.

Making friends…
I have been more daring in the last couple days in trying to meet people. I figured I have to be more proactive in the friends department. On Saturday at the Hope Festival, I met Andrea, a fellow nurse at the blood pressures table, who invited me to the Austin End-of-Ramadan Festival. From their, I met a guy named Clay, a Muslim-ophile like Andrea (due to their recent trips to the Middle East). And they had great Schwirmas (Schwirma is a fun word to say and a delicious food to eat. Its like a Middle Eastern burrito). The purpose of the festival was to share with the Austin community what Ramadan and the Islamic faith is truly about... Jump Houses, cotton candy, snow cones and Schwirmas! Not terrorism and hate. Then from their, I was invited to a UT Football/St. Johns Community Outreach Party where I met some other people.

Then today at church, I overheard someone talk about indoor soccer. I made a comment to them expressing my love for indoor soccer. After about 5 minutes and a phone call, I was on their indoor soccer team. We played a game tonight and won 8-4. At first, when I heard it was a co-ed team, I was a little hesitant (because 8 times out of 10 girls aren’t that good and make co-ed soccer games a chore). But actually all four girls on the team had played club or collegiate ball at some time. All the players on the team were really good. At the end of the game, I had two assists and felt like I had proved myself to the team.