STINT BRIEFING 2010, or Why Does the Water Still Smell Like Sulfer?

Tokyo STINT 2010, plus our Stint Coordinator Cayla, our coach Julie, and Kazue (2nd girl from the right) who is going to Osaka with the Korean CCC

so now we've reached the present, where i, the naive soul who said i'd never work for Campus Crusade, am now an official STINTer. to read the "how," see previous post.

every year Cru puts on a one week conference for its STINTers. this year it was held in St. Charles, IL, about 45 minutes from Chicago. the 2nd or 3rd day of the conference, the water began to smell and taste like sulfur. apparently the filter at the resort decided to stop functioning. it was rather foul for a few days. but eventually it got fixed. or we got used to it. we never really figured out which. anyway, at this conference, we met our STINT teams for the first time and spend the week bonding and learning things useful to our STINT year. there are 7 people on this year's Tokyo team:

Ariel: he's my Mr. Miyagi- i can ask him any question about Cru, STINT, Japan, etc. and he knows the answer. it's awesome. he's re-stinting (aka, he stinted last year and decided to go back)
AJ: one of our team leaders. he has much wisdom. like Yoda. he's another re-stinter.
Michelle: the other team leader. she had planned on going to East Asia til they called her and asked her to consider Tokyo instead, literally about 3 hours before i was asked.
Lyndsey: another re-stinter. she's japanese but doesn't really speak any, like me. we bonded over this. she had decided to re-stint and then they told her no other girls had applied and that if they couldn't find one more she couldn't go back to Japan. and that was when God called me and michelle. so crazy.
Mike: the 4th re-stinter on our team. he's a Yankees fan. lyndsey and i are both Dodgers fans. this may cause divisions. stay tuned. he's awesome otherwise. his story is very similar to mine- didn't want to go on a Summer Project, then did, didn't want to STINT, then did, now he's re-stinting. he's the #1 risk-taker on our team, as we discovered during a team activity.
Henry: another Texan! he's taken many years of Japanese and makes me wish i'd paid more attention in Japanese class.

together the 7 of us are the Magnificent Seven, or the Seven Samurai, or the Seven Dwarves. we haven't decided yet. feel free to vote. after spending a week with them, i can hardly wait to get to Japan and work with them for a year. i really enjoyed briefing- it was really cool to see how many people God's called to serve him in other countries. we did kind of have the running joke that you could always tell the Cru people apart because they were the relatively attractive young people with backpacks. michelle, lyndsey and i immediately made friends with some stinters going to Argentina when they asked us to play the game "Signs" with them the first night. we were later joined by a few other people, including phillip, who is going to Rome, and jeremy, who is going to Prague. Signs is a very popular Cru game. you should learn it.

most of our time was spent either learning about ministry in our cultures, learning about finances, learning how to love our team, or in seminars such as "Ministry in Low Response Areas," "Effective Ministry in Guilt, Fear & Shame-based Cultures," "Student Led Movements," "Preparing for Spiritual Warfare," etc. wednesday evening there was banquet for our commissioning, and then we got commissioned by location (i.e. Western Europe, Latin America, etc.). while it was cool to see how many countries people were going to, there were so many countries not represented. they showed a video of statistics that was so convicting- cities of 100,000 people where not even one person knows Christ. i teared up watching it. may the Lord send more and more workers until the whole world knows his Name! after the commissioning we all took lots of team pictures, then we played Signs one last time with our Argentina team friends and a few other new friends. and then suddenly it was time to say goodbye- the worst part of briefing was making all these new friends, and then realizing we may never see them again. at least we have technology and don't have to communicate by carrier pigeon or something.

SPECIFIC PRAYER REQUESTS:
- praise God i've raised almost 75% of my funds; however, please pray that he would grant me the remaining $13,000 soon! if you feel called to support God's ministry in Japan, you can go to http://give.ccci.org and search Kimiyo Brown. if you're already supporting me, you're awesome.
- some of our visa paperwork never reached JCCC and had to be resent, and now it could take up to 8 weeks for us to receive our visas. we are praying that we would receive them in 2 weeks so we may go to Japan ASAP.
- please pray that the rest of my team also receives all of their support on time! our 4 re-stinters have to be back in Japan the first week of Sept. to renew their visas

if anyone ever has any prayer requests i can pray for, please let me know! God bless anyone who actually made it to the end of this post!