And all I go through, leads me to You

And now for a real update on Project. I'll do this in question and answer format, the questions being ones I believe are good to ask any person who went on project. Q. What was evangelism like? How did the students respond? A. Evangelism was very similar to Traverse City. We approached students who didn't look busy, asking if they spoke English, then if they had time to do a survey. After the survey we asked if they would like to go through the 4-Laws (which we had in Italian), and did our best to bring them to a point of decision. The students responded well. If they were too busy for the survey, they told you. They were very amiable and fun to talk with. Spiritually many of them are curious or at least interested to hear your point of view, although they never hesitated to tell you when they disagreed with something. For the most part, they were very good at dialoging about the 4-laws instead of us just telling them the Gospel. We had 7 students accept Christ and 7 more who didn't pray with us, but we think it likely that they prayed on their own. Q. What was a normal day like? A. Normal days ran from Monday through Thursday. At 9 we had an hour to spend with the Lord, which I loved. I tended to go up on the roof where the nuns were growing roses. At 10 we had Prayer and Praise for about an hour. Ryan and Kara led worship out in the garden of the convent, spending about 20 minutes on that, then for the rest of the time one of the students would lead us in prayer. After that I would eat a snack and put on sunscreen, then we would leave for campus, where we would do surveys, eat lunch, and do more surveys. Some days we would have outreach events like having an American Barbeque and having a "Most Influential Person" survey (Jesus won by a landslide!). After campus we had until 8:30 to lounge around, do laundry, nap, read, go to the supermercato, and eat dinner, then we would have some sort of activity, such as a Bible Study on 1st Peter, Training Time for using the 4-Laws, the Satisfied booklet, and Spiritual Multiplication, have a team dinner, or have Men's and Women's time. When that was done, it was wind down time until I went to bed...or a gelato run before curfew.

Q. What did you do Friday through Sunday?

A. The weekends were mostly free time. Fridays we sometimes went sight seeing together. Saturdays we were on our own and Sundays we went to church at Rome Baptist then reconviened at 7 in order to share our lifemaps with each other. One Saturday I took a day trip to Florence and on another we had out Mid-Project Retreat in Frascatti, which is right outside of Rome. Other fun things we did on the weekend included going to a beach on the Mediterranean, going through the Vatican Museum, and basically just relaxing.

Q. How does Rome SP compare to Traverse City SP?

A. Well, it's pretty hard to compare the two because they were so different. I'd say that in Traverse City, I learned how to share my faith, but in Rome I began to desire to share my faith-the Lord really developed a burden for the lost in my heart. There were also a lot fewer students on the Rome Project, which meant that I got to know fewer people, but I got to know them faster. There was way more time spent doing evangelism in Rome and since we didn't have jobs, we didn't do as much relational evangelism. Also, we didn't deal with a language barrier while I was in Traverse City.

Q. How was the food?

A. Excellent. I love pasta-I don't know if I have a favorite dish, but I really like pesto sauce, spaghetti alla carbonara, and this rigatoni dish that I got at a restauraunt called "The Crazy Sheep". Over there you buy pizza by indicating how big of a slice you want, then they weigh it and you pay according to the weight. They had potato pizza, which was really fun. You also have to weigh your fruit before you take it to the cashier or else they get mad...

It's likely that I'll post more entries like this at a later date.

Amy