Kyle Konnection

Tonight, my heart was broken. And truthfully, I don’t really understand it. I find my heart pulled so many different directions. I don’t know what to think. We talked about God’s heart for people tonight and I found myself thinking so much about God’s heart for East Asia. I can’t even begin to explain to you the depth to which I just want to enter into an unreached people group and minister. Yet at the same time, my heart is ripped away from that thought by the shear overwhelming nature of how much people here need to understand it. I feel that we have become far too focused on ourselves and fulfilling our desires and far too unconcerned with God’s heart. How can our lives be lived for anything else?

In all reality, we hold onto the last words of people we care about. Why do we then choose to ignore the last thing that Jesus spoke of? Are we that oblivious? Are we that selfish? Do I really care that little about God’s heart?

“‘But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’ And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” – The last words of Jesus (Acts 1:8-9)

Besides my salvation itself, I feel as though these words should have the single, largest impact on my life. Yet I find myself living for myself. Am I really living in total abandonment to my Savior? Does my life reflect Jesus in everything I do? Am I willing to take up my cross, to live with no guarantee of shelter, to forsake my family and friends, to live as an imitator of Christ in bringing glory to the Father?

My heart says no. It’s too much for Him to ask. This thought haunts me. But the words of this song have not left my lips since I heard it tonight. You Won’t Relent Until You Have It All.

Father, I want you to have it all. My heart is Yours.

I have been receiving a lot of questions as to why Campus Crusade for Christ is changing its name to Cru. I will attempt to answer that here, but you are welcome to call, text, or email me with further questions. 40 years ago, Campus Crusade founder Bill Bright, told the staff of Campus Crusade that the name of the organization would have to change at some point. You see, in the 1950′s when Bill Bright first started the missions organization, the term “crusade” had a lot different meaning than what first comes to a person’s mind now. A crusade was seen as an evangelistic meeting or gathering, similar to the Billy Graham Crusades. However, with the focus over the last 10 years on the Muslim world, the term “crusade” has been much more used in its negative context, revolving around the Church Crusades a thousand years ago. Bill Bright anticipated this change in how people viewed the word crusade 40 years ago.

The name change was pushed to the back-burner for a long time because people didn’t see it as a necessity for change. However, about 10 years ago, the ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ started not only noticing the problems with “crusade,” but also with “campus.” Campus Crusade for Christ is no longer a campus-only ministry. The organization now touches the lives of billions of people around the world. The ministries of the Jesus Film and Josh McDowell and Athletes in Action, as well as ministries revolving around marriage and the family have made the term “campus” incomplete in describing the mission of Campus Crusade for Christ. The name was limiting the organization’s ability to bring people onboard to reach other parts of the world because people were saying, “I’m not involved in the campus at all, why should I partner with Campus Crusade?”

So we made the change. But even though the name has changed, our goal and our mission remain the same. Our mission is to help fulfill the Great Commission by winning, building, and sending in the power of the Holy Spirit and helping the body of Christ do evangelism and discipleship. In other words, our dream is that everyone would know someone who truly follows Jesus. Every tribe, every tongue, every nation. Our goal of reaching the world for Christ has not changed because the name of our organization has. We will continue reaching the world for Christ and building upon the 139 million people that have accepted Christ through our ministries over the last 60 years. This name change has been a result of prayer because this organization is an organization of prayer. We will continue to follow God, wherever and however He leads.

For more information, visit Campus Crusade for Christ’s website at www.ccci.org/cru

By the time week three rolled around, our whole fam was exhausted! With the classes we were taking in the morning, the ministry we were doing in the afternoon and evening, and the fam events like Bible study and prayer time, we were all essentially working fourteen hours a day. While this accomplishes a lot in terms of building relations with the campus and meeting/sharing with East Asian students, it is also ripe for burn-out. So that weekend, we took a restful retreat to a mountain town for a casual hike in the middle of the night to watch the sunrise. Sounds great…in theory! But theory and reality, as I’ve learned over and over in physics, are not always the same thing! The mountain town turned out to be something like downtown LA with people everywhere and taxis threatening to run us over and the hike, well…let me tell you about the hike!

We bused to the beginning of the hiking trail and were immediately bombarded by vendors. This was a little unexpected for me, but hey, it is a popular hike to take in the middle of the night, so I guess it made sense. The hike began. My expectations were further shot when we began to climb a paved stone pathway up the side of this mountain on stairs. And I’m not talking about a little three-foot wide trail. No, this thing was like twelve-feet wide with stone handrails on both sides. So basically, it’s pitch-black, I’m on some random stone pathway climbing up a mountain, I hate stairs, and there is thirty-three other people with me all under the mentality of no-one-left-behind. Sound ridiculous yet? Just you wait! After like an hour and a half of climbing, I started telling myself that we had to be getting close. We had just gone through the hardest section yet of stairs, literally hundreds of them without even a break. Up ahead, I saw tons of people gathered and the idea of being finished rushed through my mind. Upon arriving, I saw a stone archway where something about the halfway point was written. I just about died! I had just climbed stairs for an hour and a half and I wasn’t done yet!! And to top it off, people were getting off of buses at this location, so apparently, we could have taken buses halfway up this mountain and we didn’t know it! Sound fun yet? I’m not done!

We took like a half hour break (putting us at about two hours into the hike) and began the ascent once again. From this point on throughout the hike, there were vendors everywhere. They had all of their stuff right on the trail and were yelling at us as we went by. So now, it’s pitch-black, I’m on some random stone pathway climbing up a mountain, I hate stairs, there is thirty-three other people with me all under the mentality of no-one-left-behind, I’m only halfway there, and there are people yelling at me constantly to buy something. Oh and did I mention that it’s now like 1am. Yeah, pretty awesome! The hike continued, stairs and more stairs are all that is in sight, but hey, you could only see like twenty feet in front of you anyway. Finally, at 3:30am, we arrived at the top. We had made it for the sunrise at 4:30am. The sunrise came and went, and suddenly it hit us that those stairs (6,290 of them as we later found out) that we had climbed to get to the top of this mountain were menacingly waiting for us to go down. And so the trek began…again. So now I’m going down some random stone pathway on the side of this mountain, I hate stairs even more downhill, there is still thirty-three other people with me all under the mentality of no-one-left-behind, I’m still very close to the top,  and there are people yelling at me constantly to buy something. Yippee! Couldn’t have been better! Oh and it’s 5:30 am now. Let’s just say that when I hit my bed around 10am that morning, I was out within seconds.

So what is above is what I took out of the hike, little did I realize the impact that it had on my fam. The next morning, we all sat down in one hotel room and began to talk about how we experienced the hike. It pretty much started with thoughts very similar to my own and progressed to absolutely amazing analogies. As one of my disciples, Jonathan, began to share, my heart really opened up to see how drastically this hike had influenced my fam. Upon looking down the mountain from the top, he had realized how impossible of a task he had just accomplished. In fact, if  he had seen what was before him on the way up, he would have given up because of the difficulty and length of the hike. But because it was pitch-black and he could only see twenty feet in front of him, he could keep moving forward. The same is true of following after God. If we have the full picture of what’s ahead and can see all the difficulty of what He is going to put us through, most of us would probably give up. We would be found sleeping on the side of those stairs. But God reveals His will to us as we continue to walk through this life with Him. We get glimpses here and there of what He is doing and have to trust that where He is leading us is truly in our best interest. But just as the stairs were always before us on that mountain, so God has each step marked out for us and is constantly beckoning us upward. And when we get to the top, we get to look back in full illumination and see all that God has accomplished in and through our lives. And all we can do is stand there amazed at His work. He is a great God.

One of the girls on our team also had an amazing experience. As we were going back down those 6,290 stairs, we saw how each of those vendors managed to keep their supplies intact. There were literally sixty-year old men with giant poles across their backs carrying flats of water and soda up the same 6,290 stairs that we had just climbed. We had barely enough energy to get to the top ourselves, but these men were carrying loads of 50-100 pounds up right in front of us. And each stair they ascended was painstaking, you could see it in their faces. And Cassie saw in it an analogy of what Christ had done for us. She saw the load that Christ carried for us, the heavy burden of our sin. And she saw the pain on his face as He endured the torture of each grueling step, from the trials, to the beatings, to the harassment, to the cross. It was painful just to watch those men walk up that mountain. How much more painful was it for the Son of God to take on the sins of each of us and endure the worst this world has to offer? It impacted her…it impacted me. I couldn’t believe all that my fam had taken from this hike. You see, if I had known how difficult this hike was before we started, there is almost no way that we would have even begun. But God was faithful in hiding it from us because He had something to teach us in it. How amazing to see His will tangibly go forward and even more amazing to see a physical representation of His sacrifice for us on the cross. I have to say, at the end of that hike where it was pitch-black, on some random stone pathway climbing up a mountain, up stairs that I hate with thirty-three other people all under the mentality of no-one-left-behind, and alongside vendors yelling at me to buy something…it was worth it!

The first week in East Asia was crazy. As a leader, I was responsible for handling everything with the campus, including paying for tuition and housing. Let me tell you, walking into an East Asian bank with thousands of US dollars to convert into the local currency is quite the experience. Now imagine that experience while not knowing the language and in a city where the people have literally never seen an American before…yeah, pretty much, it was insanity! But besides all the random behind-the-scenes stuff, the first week could not have gone better. Our fam was spread out everywhere across campus meeting students, some in the cafeterias, some on the sports fields, some in the shopping malls. The campus was huge and as a a result, we all bought bikes to get around. Literally, I walked halfway around campus one time and it took 45 minutes! But everybody in our fam was starting to meet East Asian students and we all fell in love with them.

I met a guy named Fall on the ping pong courts that week. Literally, it was a gymnasium packed out with ping pong tables where all the coaching happened. It was pretty sweet! Topher (one of the guys in my fam who I discipled) and I got to meet up with Fall around ten times over the course of the summer. It started out by just hanging out with him, playing ping pong or enjoying meals, and progressed to spiritual conversation. Over those five weeks that we spent with him, we got to see him open up and really come to a place of recognizing how important of a decision we had laid before him. I don’t know where he is at now, but I know that God will continue working on his heart.

I guess that’s one of the biggest things that I learned this summer. My role has never been to see people change. Yet so many times, I measure whether or not I was successful based on this criteria of change. But what I realized is that when I look to this criteria to measure my success, I am doing an injustice to what God has called me to. You see, my only role is to give people the opportunity to change. God’s role is to work in their heart to produce the change. So if I saw that change happen…great! If not…great! Either way, I had accomplished what God had put before me to do. And so even though I left without knowing where Fall was at and whether or not God had produced the change in his heart, I know that he understands the option that is before him. And God is faithful, I can only be in prayer for Fall now.

Well, besides the horror that is jetlag, it is great to be back in the States! I have been back for a week now, but spent a couple of days down in Southern California debriefing with my fam (team). So I wanted to update you on everything that happened in East Asia. Now if I did this in a single blog, it would take me like 8 hours to write and at least 3 hours for you to read, so I figured I would break it up for everyone’s sake. So keep checking back all this week for new blogs on my trip to East Asia!

I figured I would start with the beginning, seems appropriate I think. This year, we went to a different campus in a different city within East Asia from where I was three years ago. We moved because the campus that I was on is now self-sustaining. They have East Asian students who are leading, discipling, and sending out other students all over the place in Asia. Truthfully, I didn’t realize how different this summer was going to be. I should have been clued in as we landed on a very narrow slab of concrete in the middle of rice fields, but no, I kept thinking that this summer was going to be extremely similar to the last. The bus picked us up, we headed to campus, and reality hit…hard! Not only was I a leader on this trip to a place that I had never been, the campus was completely different than I expected, and the mission before us suddenly seemed impossible. But I was excited. Three years ago, I had seen God use my team and I tremendously on another campus in East Asia, and I knew that God had big plans here as well. And so the summer began!

If you are reading my prayer letter from January and are looking for the continuance of the article started there, jump down to the post entitled “Inner Fission” and continue reading. This post is designed to be an extension of that one.

Two weeks ago, I talked about how God has been ripping apart certain aspects of my life in order to get me to see the need to trust Him. It has been such a long and difficult process, but God is finally allowing me to see Him at work. It first started with me surrendering my ministry to Him over the first week of this month. Since I can’t really change who I meet with or the guys that I pour into since I do have responsibilities to keep, the week was more focused on my attitude changing regarding trusting God. And over the course of that week, I do really feel like I surrendered my ministry to Him. But as I got to the end of the week and was journaling through everything that had happened, I just began to express a lot of frustration from the week. My journal entry quickly turned into 10 things that I was frustrated with God about right now. Obviously a journal entry like this is quite hard to wrestle with and over the next couple of days, I began to see what God was trying to show me. You see, those 10 things were the very things that I was still trying to have control over. And truthfully, I began to realize that those were the 10 things that I thought I could have done better if I was in control. What a terrible attitude to have! So even though I was trusting God with my ministry, I was still not trusting Him above myself. He still had a lot of work to do.

This last week has been quite the opposite. After realizing how terrible my attitude was in all of this, I once again had to go into a full week of ministry. I had to trust God, but was still confused on how to do that. What God showed me over the next couple of days completely blew my mind. I had to talk in front of the Crusade weekly meeting on Tuesday about East Asia this summer and last minute, half of my talk was thrown out the window. So I had to get on stage in front of 800 people and trust God with it. And God totally used it. He completely took control and actually called several people to East Asia through that talk. And as the week continued on, God continued to show up. I can’t get into everything that He did for the sake of privacy for those I lead and minister to, but let’s just say that I saw God show up more in this week than I have any other week this year. It was amazing!! Even better, the things that He showed up in were completely out of my control. In other words, even if I had been trying to have control over all of my ministry, these things would still have been outside that realm. All in all, God wanted me to see that even if I was in control, there was absolutely nothing I could have done to do any of those things that had happened that week. They were completely out of my control because they involved other people’s responses to God. God is completely capable of handling things without me and can do the ministry that I do far better than I ever could.

So basically, God has rocked my world over the last couple of weeks. It has been a crazy ride, but one in which I had to be patient and see where God was taking me. As I summed it up to one of my disciples…sometimes sitting back and waiting is not so much about us not doing anything as it is about allowing Christ to do something. This is what I had to learn. I had to be patient on God to work and I had to allow Him to work. So yes, it was an issue of trust, but even more so, it was an issue of waiting on God. He has proven faithful and I know that He will continue to do so.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will direct your paths.

Ok, so you know that my blog post is going to be pretty interesting with a name like inner fission, but I can’t think of a better way to describe what has been going on this week. So here we go…this week has been one of the most trying weeks that I have had since starting full-time ministry. At the beginning of this week, I realized how much of a hypocrite I had become. You see, I was teaching other people things that I wasn’t even applying to myself. And even more dangerous, I was caring about other people’s relationships with God to the point of neglecting my own. But I guess that’s the danger of full-time ministry. I was too focused on the ministry to realize that I was leaving God out of it. This thought triggered what could only be described as inner fission. But before I get into what that means…let me tell you what fission is for those of you who don’t know. Fission is a process that happens in nuclear weapons and nuclear energy alike where atoms are violently ripped apart. Well, that is what God decided to do to me this week. He violently broke apart some of the very things that I had been holding onto for so long in order to show me that I was not in any way, shape, or form surrendering them to Him. And my response…Ouch!

I’m the typical science geek in all of this, so when God asked me to surrender, I tried to throw in the control rods and slow down this inner fission. I wanted to have control, but God wasn’t about to let me. He pushed for three days before I understood that he didn’t want me to do anything. He didn’t want me to try and solve the problem of bringing Him into my ministry, because the very problem was caused by my controlling nature in the first place. I trusted myself with the guys that I minister to more than I trusted God with them. I had to retreat to the sidelines and let God deal with this one. And over the last couple of days, that is what He has been doing. He has been teaching me how to truly trust in Him, not just in the things that I’m ok with releasing to Him, but in everything. He’s teaching me to trust Him with friends, with family, even with ministry. And that makes all the difference in the world. It’s no longer about me having control, but about me trusting that God is in control and that His plan will come to fruition.

Ok, so this next part is going to get pretty sketch in this analogy of nuclear stuff, so read on only if you dare. At times, God works in our life by breaking us apart. This breaking could be in our comforts, it could be with our family, or it could be with a variety of other things. But ultimately, he has to break us in order for us to grow. This is what I’m referring to as inner fission. At other times, God seems to put things before us that seem to line up so perfectly. He does things that seem to put together our lives and allow us to see the larger plan that He has. The growth here stems from seeing that God really does have a plan and it becomes easy to trust Him with it. I’ll refer to this as inner fusion. Well, we each experience both. Sometimes we are being broken before God and other times, God is just lining up everything for us. But in each case, we are growing in our relationship with Him. Ready for the kicker? Each one of these nuclear processes creates a tremendous amount of energy that is released and can be used. God allows these processes of inner fission and fusion to work in our lives for the same effect. He wants energy to be created and released for our growth. And although we frequently throw in the control rods to try and stop the process from occurring because it hurts too much, God has purpose in it. So consider it joy whenever you go through trials of many kinds, knowing that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. And perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

For those of you who don’t know, I spent the last week in Denver being trained on how to lead a summer project. This covered everything from making a vision plan to buying flights to what to do if someone is bitten by a monkey. Yes, bitten by a monkey…it actually happened on a summer project last year! Needless to say, the conference was quite comprehensive. When my team and I arrived in Denver, we met together with staff members and students who were leading summer projects all over the world. In fact, there were 87 different international summer projects represented going to 33 countries. Considering the number of people at this conference, I was a little hesitant when the emcee said that each of us had to introduce ourselves to the entire audience. As we moved from one person to the next however, I started to get a big picture of what God was doing in the lives of these leaders and what God was going to do in the lives of the students that answer His call to go. It truly did have a huge impact on me.

Right before attending this conference, I listened to a sermon by John Piper on prayer as part of my staff training. He said, “Until we believe that life is war, we will not know what prayer is for.” That quote has been dominating my thoughts since then. I have always seen prayer as a way to communicate with God about the needs of myself and others. But prayer should be more than that. It should be seen as an opportunity to bring nations and peoples before Him. Prayer is the work of missions! In other words, missions is not effective without prayer behind it at all times, for it is God who must do the work. So as I sat taking in all of these names at this conference and listening to where each person would be going, my heart continually turned towards prayer and has remained there as I continue to think about the summer. I pray that as you go throughout your week that you remember to keep others in your prayers. It is not just important, it is life-changing!

Here’s the sermon if you want to listen:

Prayer – The Work of Missions

It’s amazing how busy you can get and forget to update things like your blog, but I figured I would finally give an update. As you know, many students attended a conference a couple weeks ago about finding God’s will for their life. Well, for the last two weeks, I have been following up with several guys out of my Bible study who attended that conference. It is so amazing to see how God works. He never ceases to amaze me! Every single guy in my Bible study that went to the conference came back with an understanding that ministry is not limited to those who do it full-time. They figured out that based on the Great Commission and examples out of the Bible, that we are all called to be missionaries wherever we are at. I can’t tell you as a Bible study leader and a discipler how awesome that is to see! The funny thing is that all of these guys are very active within Campus Crusade at Cal Poly – they are doing ministry on a regular basis! But that’s not the type of ministry that this conference talked about. I am specifically talking about the conversations that each of us get into every single day with people that do not know Christ. Ministry being done here is vital.

Over the last couple months, I’ve developed a new perspective on ministry. A lot of this has to do with working as a missionary full-time, but a lot of my thoughts on missionaries have been changing as well. I’ve realized that missionaries do not primarily work around not-yet Christians. Missionaries help to bring the Gospel into different areas for sure, but their primary work is to develop a community of believers that can function without them. I have seen that happen in East Asia three times in the last ten years. Our missionaries from Cal Poly are on a campus there. The cool part is that they are only there long enough to bring students to Christ and develop them as believers, because then they can do it without us. They become a ministry themselves – self sustaining while we move on to another campus! Well, needless to say, my primary work at Cal Poly revolves around developing the believers here so that they themselves can reach out to those around them. You see, the people that are in the best position to spread the Gospel here in America are not the ones who have been called into full-time ministry, they are the people that have friends, coworkers, etc who need to hear! That means that each of us, in full-time ministry or not, are in a unique position to reach certain people. I hope you are as excited to do your part as I am to do mine!

I had a revelation this week…I am no longer a student! Over the last couple months, I have been doing ministry on campus every day. Well this week, I have been at a staff conference with my team (picture) and for the first time in several months, it just hit me that I wasn’t a student anymore. The staff conference has been great though. It has focused on training me in evangelism on a relational level. This means learning how to bring the Gospel into friendships without destroying the relationship you have with them. It has been awesome and focuses a lot on asking good questions. And it’s not even so much about sitting them down and sharing the whole Gospel with them at once, but rather giving them glimpses from your own life of how the Gospel has changed you. Pretty sweet!

Now that the staff conference has been going on for 3 days, the students are going to join us! This student conference is my favorite conference of the year because of how much it focuses on the Great Commission. The idea being put forth this year is 100% Sent. Campus Crusade reaches millions of college students each year and we see many of them join staff with us or another ministry, but overall, the vast majority of these students will be going into the workforce. These students have been trained in sharing the Gospel, they have been trained in leading Bible studies, they have been trained in mentoring others, but if they are not challenged to do something with it, most of them will never use any of these things again. So the idea is that just as much as I am sent as a Campus Crusade staff member, so they are sent into the areas that they are going to be a witness for Christ there. Rather than just the few percentage of students being sent who go into ministry, each student (100%) is sent wherever they go! Pretty sweet idea! The main point is that despite the large number of Campus Crusade staff members that there are, it is nowhere near enough to fulfill our vision of allowing everyone to know someone who truly follows Jesus. We must all take on the calling that Jesus has placed on us to bring the Gospel to the world. It has to be all of us.