During spring break of my senior year in college, I went down to South-central LA with Campus Crusade for a program called Urban Immersion. Basically, we spent the entire week in the projects, working with the kids that lived there, and learning about urban ministry. I tell you, that was probably one of THE most exhausting weeks of my life. Those kids really drained all the energy out of me. In fact, it was after that week that I almost fell asleep at the wheel driving back up to berkeley, as well as ended up on highway 99 instead of highway 5. But as the week passed, God really taught me some things. The biggest lesson I learned was the need for these kids to have someone continually mentor and work with them, not just a group of college folks bombarding them with "Jesus loves you!" for a week and then leave. These kids needed love. A lot of them probably do not even have the capacity to understand what agape - unconditional - love is. Many came from broken families, and half of them were related to each other in a half-sister's uncle's cousin kind of way. So when I moved back home after graduating from Cal, one of the things I wanted to do was find a ministry that I could consistently volunteer with. I emailed a few places, but didn't get any responses back, and then I kind of forgot about it. A few months ago, I started emailing places again, trying to find some opportunities. The problem is that I get out of work too late to volunteer at most places on weekdays, and the ones I contacted didn't have anything consistent for me to volunteer at on weekends. I know I haven't looked too hard, and I'm sure there is something out there, I just need to find it. I need to be kept accountable about finding something, otherwise I'll never get around to it. Heck, almost 2 years have passed already. Anyone else interested in volunteering? :)

Hmm why am I thinking about this now? Probably because I'm in charge of finding a community outreach event for FNL at the end of June... and I have yet to do so. Ooops. If anyone knows of opportunites, let me know! I already tried CityTeam, to no avail.