2011 FUI is just around the corner...

While it's great to read this blog and reflect on all that God did last summer through the Fresno Urban Internship, we're also excited to be gearing up for FUI 2011!

If you know anyone who might be interested in a life transforming summer in inner city Fresno, encourage them to head here for information and an application.

And, it's never too early to begin praying for this summer! If you've gone already or are a prayer partner, please join us in praying for the preparation and recruitment that are foundation to what's ahead.

A Change in My Life

Written by Jason Stevens - a second year at Fresno State:

"I was born in a Christian family and have therefore been a Christian all of my life. I have not exactly been the most “active” Christian however. I went to church and believed in God, but I never really got to experience an opportunity to live out God’s word. I went to camps and on one mission trip to Mexico but those were in high school and a majority of the reason I went was for the fun memories.

Now that I am in college and I learned it is not about the fun for myself, but it is really all about living out the word of God and trying to be like Jesus. As I came into this FUI project, I was informed that it is not made for fun, but rather a learning experience for us all. At first thought, I was wondering why so many people wanted to go. I wanted to go because I have been craving Gods guidance for about a year now when I decided I wanted to live my life out for him. I found out that people in college want to experience God more then to just go have fun, and let me tell you… God has certainly made an impact in my life and many others here, so the experience of him crashed on us like a wave in the ocean taking you off your feet and directing you in the path of its will. I have come to understand so much more about myself and my relationship with God.

My sight was at the Rescue Mission working in their rehab program. I have seen God’s work in their life as well as mine. Guys came off the street or out of their own homes and away from their families to join this rehab program to fix an addiction of theirs, but instead, they have found God in their lives and accepted Christ. I have never seen such a dramatic change and large commitment. These men take this new life with confidence and understanding that God himself can be their pillar of strength. These guys are the best guys I have ever met, guys that I would never expect to have been previous gang leaders, or drug addicts or some with violent crimes related to alcohol. If there was any man more respectful and service-offering, I have not met him yet. The impact God has had in their lives has showed me that he is there for me too in my sufferings. I came in expecting to help the community, but I feel I have been helped more then I ever could have offered to do myself. My life is changed in my knowledge of God and I will never forget this experience. I have now given my problems and all of my pain to God so that he may deal with them and heal me in every situation that could potentially separate me from God. My life has been moved closer to the Lord and I am now much more spiritually mature just by the understanding of Gods impact by his overwhelming love and mercy. Praise God!"

Pictures of the City

This is only part of the reason why so many of us have fallen in love with Fresno...

Intern Site Photos

As a gift to our agencies that we worked with all summer, each intern took a site photo. Here are all the interns and where they worked this summer!

Sarah and Michael from the Bridge Academy.

Alex and Bryson at Hope Now for Youth.

Kevin, Melissa, Mackenzie, and Glenda at Light and Life Urban Ministries

Sol and Cameron at Mobile Market

Krista and Lawrence at Bethany Inner City Church

Lissah and Lauren at the Evangel Home

Eric, Tramaine, Amanda, Marissa, and Vivian at Fresno Street Saints at Bigby Villa

Shayne, Marissa, Zoe, and Joyce at Fresno Street Saints at MLK

Carolyn and Jaret at FIRM (Fresno Interdenominational Refugee Mission)

Jason and Matt at Fresno Rescue Mission

Sarah and Julie at Youth for Christ's City Life

Tracey, Josth, Meghan, Mariah, Shannon, Betty, and Danae at World Impact

Tangible God

"Before FUI I knew God. I knew who he was in my life, I knew his heart for missions, I knew his love for people, I knew his sovereignty. Well, 6 weeks engaging with the city of Fresno has shown me how ignorant I was and still am to the character of God. FUI has introduced be to the incarnate God and the incarnate gospel. It has introduced me the God who became flesh and dwells among us. I have been consumed by a gospel that is tangible and relevant. In the city its hard to see a tangible God, violence, poverty, oppression consume you. All you seem to see is ugliness in broken down infrastructure, malnutritoned children, and seemingly unchangeable circumstances. But God has changed my eyes from that of one out looking in, to one in looking out. He has shown me the world from this perspective. And I know God is here, he is present and he is working.

The first class of the project we talked about loving our neighbor. We spoke of the greatest commandments asked of Jesus in the Gospels, He replies to Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind and love your neighbor as yourself. These by many are believed to be separate not in relation to each other, but Jesus was asked of one commandment and He gave one commandment. Loving God and loving your neighbor is one command. You do not love God if you don’t love your neighbor. God has shown a very minute part of his heart for humanity. I am learning to love my neighbor but in essence I am learning to love God.

My site has become my training center. Throughout the summer we have engaged in various service projects, we have volunteered at many places and this has definitely shown me how to love my neighbor. However, it has been the teens that I work with whom I have learned the most about what loving my neighbor looks like. My teens have been at times difficult. They are amazing but they are a product of their environment and the sin within it. I’ve in this process I’ve learned that most importantly they are children of the almighty, they are influenced by sin just as I am but God has shown me so much of himself through them, their nature of hospitality, their passion and compassion, and there willingness to serve they have a great work ethic which they showed by putting in insulation and painting at different FIFUL sites. They have shown hospitality by inviting me to their home and having a meal with them. And they’ve show compassion by their tears in love and sadness. He has through them shown me how to love my neighbor.

God is here, he is engaged in this city, in the prison walls, at the rescue missions, in the churches who praise him, and in the people who call him Lord. God loves my neighbor I love my neighbor. God loves the city, I love the city."

by Lawrence Lyons

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

“I remember the exact moment when my ethnic identity journey began: it was one day in elementary school when a classmate told me that I wasn’t black because I acted too “white-washed.” The tone in the young girl’s voice told me this definitely wasn’t a good thing, and quite frankly, it made me incredibly confused and a little angry. It felt like a war had been started inside of me, and I was bombarded with the question of what it meant to be black. For the longest time, it seemed like this journey was at a stand still. But, looking back over middle school and high school and even my first year of college, I can see how God was using all of the dissonance, disgust, and questions that arose to continue leading me on this journey of discovering what it means to be me, an “atypical” African-American woman, in His kingdom.

I didn’t feel comfortable around African Americans because I identified with white culture and therefore was much more readily accepted by it. But I couldn’t fully fit in with white culture because my skin color would not allow it. The pain of not being able to figure out where I fit in is not something I wanted to dwell on or process through, so I buried it until I couldn’t any longer and I had to face it at FUI.

One of the topics in our urban ministry class happened to be on racial reconciliation. Disconnected from all the things that I had swept under a rug and neglected to deal with, I entered the class thinking I was already well on my way to being a reconciler and that my issues with my ethnic identity were long since over. As our speaker began to talk about her own journey in discovering her ethnic identity, I was reminded of my own journey and all the pain that it encompassed. I had to allow myself to feel the weight of being the “model minority” a false identity that I had partly adopted on my own and that had been partly been forced on me. I felt like it was my duty to dispel any negative stereotypes associated with being black and to maintain the idea that I was a “good kind of black person,” something I had been “affirmed” in time and time again. Along with that, I had to accept that I had internalized the notion that African Americans were created to be not as intelligent as other races, and then realize that I desperately needed to let that go. I also allowed myself to feel the heartache of having my achievements written off to affirmative action and to maintaining a diversity quota. As plain as day, I could see all of these false things I had been carrying on to that were perpetuating racism and doing nothing to help with the plan of reconciliation that God called for. By being numb to and passively accepting these fallacies, I was actually undermining reconciliation. This made me angry at the systems in place in our society and culture that made these ideas hard to escape, but more so, I was angry with myself for being so blind to my own faults. I felt like my journey had never really begun and that I was starting from square one; I felt so lost.

I suddenly felt a strong desire to learn about African American culture and history. In InterVarsity in my first year of college, God had already begun to help me find my identity in Him and show me that I was a child of His kingdom first and foremost. Now, God was telling me that my next step to reconciliation was in reconciling myself to my own culture. He was opening the door to show me the beauty in being African American. God made us all different and that beauty and the gifts in our differences are of God. It’s the oppression and racism and hate associated with it that is not of God.

I’m beginning to see that God created me with these experiences on purpose, not just the ones associated with my race but all of them.  He is the Master Creator, after all.

Recently, I have found much comfort in Psalm 139:13-14: For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

I want to know that full well. Armed with a clearer view of myself, and the truth given to me through Jesus Christ, I can now continue on this journey living out my life being a reconciler for the Kingdom of God.”

by Lissah Johnson, a second year at UC Santa Barbara. 

Life of Refugee

This post is from one of our students, Carolyn:

"Yesterday I started learning a Lao dance that tells the story of a refugee people escaping to arrive here and finding Jesus. On my first day at Fresno Interdenominational Ministries (a.k.a. FIRM), the woman who was teaching it to me told me how she survived a land mine explosion that knocked her unconscious for a few days. She credits God for saving her so that she could later know him. Through this woman’s testimony and faith and so many stories I hear at FIRM, I am learning God’s heart for the foreigner, for compassion and justice and hope.


These three things are lacking from the Lao and Hmong peoples’ recent history. FIRM has a beautiful pan’dau, a hand-embroidered Hmong quilt illustrating a story, that taught me this history missing from mainstream textbooks: During the Vietnam War, the CIA recruited Hmong and Lao guerilla fighters to disrupt the supply chain of the Communist north that ran through Laos. After the U.S. left Vietnam and deserted these fighters, they ran from the Communist soldiers tracking them, abandoning their sick and injured so that some few could survive to cross a treacherous river into Thailand. Then they left the sickness and dangers - like poorly built stairs that collapsed beneath them - of the refugee camps there to come here.

I was taught that the U.S. is the land of opportunity where hard work brings success and prosperity, but that isn’t entirely true. This is a country that gives refugees five years on social security to learn a new language, culture, and way of life and then cuts them off, inspiring suicides. The unsettled, fragmented reality of these people was illustrated in where one woman’s children had been born: two in Laos, one in Thailand, and one in the U.S. I learned this in a practice interview in FIRM’s combination English/citizenship class, of which she was a part so that she could get work and then put her life back together.

Another way FIRM is helping Southeast Asian refugees move forward is by setting up community gardens. These allow former-farming families to sign up for a plot to grow produce and medicinal plants they otherwise would not have access to. I especially enjoyed helping all the gardeners set up the irrigation piping in the new garden because we could work together joyfully toward our common goal of finishing the last preparation for planting despite the language and cultural barriers. It was part of new, hopeful stories beginning in which healthy food is available at a reasonable price.

Today during the urban ministry class, I wrote poems as a way of processing what I am experiencing and learning. I intended to write from my perspective but adopted a refugee’s, because their stories have broken my heart over and over as I learn about them and internalize their stories:

“…finally, fleeing my continent/finding my way to another world: /new language, new culture, new friends, confusion…”

We’re all refugees in God’s kingdom, having run from evil in the world to a place of shelter and a chance at new life. So I’m looking forward to my next dance lesson tomorrow, and my next day to learn from and serve refugees and the God who took me in."

Carolyn is a 3rd year student at UCLA.