Kyle Konnection

So I finished my post last week thinking that I had understood what God wanted to teach me in bringing me back to the Gospel. Well…I was wrong. His refocus on the Gospel has been hitting home all week long. It came up in Bible study, discipleships, friendships, and church. I’m beginning to think God is trying to get me to see something. And I think the point He is trying to get across is how much He wants the Gospel to penetrate my life. He doesn’t just want it to touch me and affect me for a short period of time, He wants my life to be completely absorbed in it. He wants my life so enveloped in the Gospel that it has no option but to come forth. And that is exactly what I’ve seen this week. As the Gospel affected my life so deeply earlier this week, so that same Gospel has been going forth out of me since that point. It is deep, it is loving, and because it has affected me so much, it is emotional. Now I’m in no way, shape, or form saying that our faith is dependent on emotion. I think that the Bible makes it clear that our faith is not to be dependent on emotion. But my thoughts on emotion right now tend to see it as a spice that adds flavor to my relationship with Christ. And let me tell you, it has this week. On Saturday, I was sitting on the front porch of one of my disciples’ houses. We were talking through a lot of things, one of which was conversations that had absolutely blown us away that week. He had just had a perfectly natural conversation with a friend where he got to share the Gospel for an hour and a half! It was absolutely amazing to hear what God did through him. And then I shared with him my story from last Sunday where I shared the hope of the Gospel with a fellow believer. And what do you know, it was all I could do to hold back the tears. But it wasn’t just in my eyes, I could see it in my disciples’ eyes as well. There was just a certain passion behind the Gospel that neither of us could quite express, but it was impactful. I guess the importance of the Gospel has just hit me really hard. As I said in my last post, it is something that is just as much for believers as for non-believers. In fact, when we are called to perseverance in the Bible, we are told to “consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.” Our strength and our perseverance come from our understanding of who Christ is and what He has done for us. What an awesome and exciting truth!

Oh and just to let you know, the reason I have emphasized my relationship with God so much in this blog is because I believe that what I am learning is truly what I can impact people with the most. It is what I am passionate about and therefore what comes naturally in my conversations with others. What I am learning in my relationship with Christ is what I am teaching others in Bible study, discipleship, etc. For it is “out of the overflow of the heart that the mouth speaks.” It is my heart that has been changed, so why should my mouth speak any differently? If you could be praying for me and many of the guys in my Bible study this week, that would be awesome. We are going to a conference this weekend focused on life after college and being a missionary wherever you are sent…workforce, friendships, other countries, etc. It should be awesome but definitely very challenging! Thanks for your prayers!

Well, I have a couple of thoughts in giving my post this name. One is because I haven’t blogged in a while, so I figured this would be an appropriate title. But for the other two reasons, I will give more explanation. This last week has been one of my busiest weeks as a Campus Crusade staff member. As many of you already know, I had to raise money this summer to help cover my living expenses and ministry costs. Well, each year, the actual campus ministry at Cal Poly has to do the same to cover the costs of campus outreaches, socials, and weekly meetings. Guess who got put in charge…yeah, you guessed it…me. I actually had a super fun time planning this dinner fundraiser and helping to send out the invitations, organize volunteers, and coordinate the event. It is something that I do believe that God has gifted me in and has given me a lot of practice in considering my involvement in student council during high school and a couple of huge events during college. Needless to say, things like this do wear me out and I was exhausted afterward. I’m glad the event is over, but it is still amazing to see what God can do in a single night.

My other thought regarding the “At Long Last” has to do with my own spiritual life. For the last year, I have known God’s calling on my life and as best as I could, I have followed it. It has meant giving up my career plans and letting God completely shift my life. But through it all, I guess I was just having trouble understanding why. I mean, I definitely knew the importance of reaching others for Christ and I had a desire to do this, but I was waiting for God to show me more in this. And Sunday, it hit me. I was talking with a friend and just telling him what I had been learning in Romans, when it really did hit. I was explaining how much Paul tackles sin in the first couple of chapters and just shows the extent of God’s wrath and judgment. And truthfully, it is a very hard passage to read. But as I got into the purpose behind him pointing out that wrath in such detail, God really laid it on my heart. Paul’s purpose was to show that every single person on this earth is in need of a Savior, and whether you are Jew or Greek doesn’t matter, you still need the same Savior. And as I sat there saying all of these things, the Gospel just became more and more real to me. As most of you know, I’m not a very emotional person at all, in fact, I try to avoid emotion as much as possible. But as I relayed these passages in Romans to my friend, tears were flowing down my cheeks because I was realizing that as much as the Gospel is for other people, I need to hear it just as much each and every day. I think we all do. And as I left that place, it was just absolutely amazing how different I felt. I had understood the why, and the why was just as much for me as it was for those I have been called to minister to. Thank the Lord for His divine plan! He is so amazing!

Since I haven’t posted in a while, I would encourage you to check out my newsletter section on my webpage. It has all the most recent information about things such as Fall Retreat and even the guys that I’m discipling. So yeah, check it out. I would love to be praying for you, so feel free to comment on this post with prayer requests.

All I can say about the last week is wow! I am totally exhausted, but God is so amazing and I’m loving the work that I am doing more and more each day. This last week was a big stretch for me…I had to trust God with the little things. And as weird as that sounds, I think that it is so much easier for me to look at the big things and say, “Oh, God will totally take care of that.” But the little details…those things that we hardly notice about our day or the menial tasks that we have to accomplish are also things that God has under His control. I think the biggest way that I noticed this over the last week was just in my enjoyment of the administration tasks. I had to get some stuff printed for the ministry here and run quite a few errands. And what I noticed is that those things felt purposeful. This is something that I’m not used to at all! For me, the little details always add up to the big picture which is what actually matters. But God taught me that a lot of times, it’s not just the end result that matters. It’s very much about the process of getting to that result. God has so much to teach each one of us and the result is only part of that. So these little things that I did this week did have a purpose. Their purpose was to show me the importance of the process, because I think in a lot of ways, this does have spiritual implications. For instance, if God had raised all of the funds that I needed in a single day to be able to do this ministry, what would I have learned? Instead, God used the entire summer to teach me that I need to trust Him not just with my plans, but also with my means to those plans (i.e. finances). I would not have developed that kind of trust at all without that process. And that is exactly what God has started to show me this week through the little things I’m doing in ministry.

On a completely separate note, I have been focusing on God’s heart for the nations with the guys that I disciple (mentor) and it has been really convicting for me. The more and more that I share what God’s heart is with these guys, the more I realize that my heart is beginning to grow for them. One of the biggest things that capped it off was a sermon that I heard this week…I have literally listened to it 3 times now! It is by Ron Hutchcraft and was given at a Campus Crusade staff conference about ten years ago. This sermon along with the Scripture that I have been sharing with my disciples has completely changed my perspective on evangelism. I would love for you to listen to it, so here you go. Remember, this was a talk to thousands of full-time missionaries, so you will have to interpret it for where you are at. The sermon is 45 minutes long and I would suggest listening to it in one sitting. If you are looking at this on Facebook, you will probably have to go to my website to check it out (kylefletcherccc.com).

Click Here: Rescue the Dying

Hope you enjoy!

WOW!! So it’s now Thursday and this week has been absolute insanity! Last Friday was SLO Bound, the time that Campus Crusade met all the new freshman and I really mean all the freshman (for more info on this, check out the September newsletter on my blog). After getting contact information from all these Freshman, we had to begin the follow-up. On Sunday, my friend Nathan and I went into the Fremont dorm on campus and started meeting some of these students. We had several really good conversations and a couple of the students wanted to get involved in a Bible study. Now imagine this happening in every single dorm on campus…Campus Crusade literally had over a hundred Bible study leaders in the dorms on Sunday afternoon! There were definitely mixed results. Some Bible study leaders talked with students and had over 20 people join a Bible study, others didn’t really have anybody that wanted to. But I think the hardest of all would be those who got kicked out of the dorms. One of the guys in my Bible study, Daniel, is currently a  Bible study leader for the Freshman. I got a call on Monday because an RA had just kicked him and his coleader of the dorms for soliciting students. This is definitely not something that is easy, especially with how much courage it takes to go into the dorms and meet students in the first place. But Daniel pushed through. He started making phone calls and emailing the guys that he had contact information for and several of the students met up with him. It was definitely sweet to see God do something even when it became very difficult to follow up contacts.

Tuesday was our first weekly meeting. I was definitely very nervous this year about how everything would work because for the first time, Campus Crusade has had to move off campus. This meant transporting students, a lot of which do not have cars, all the way across town for our weekly meeting. I showed up to help Daniel take some of the guys from his dorm and was floored to see almost 20 upperclassman standing there with their cars ready to take Freshman to the meeting. It was absolutely amazing to see the love that these upperclassman had for the younger students. Because of this, we had over 800 people attend our weekly meeting!!

I’m sitting here running through everything that has happened in the last couple days, and I think that this post could literally be 10 pages long. But I’ll keep things a little shorter. I had 15 guys show up at my Bible study last night, which was absolutely amazing! I got to go sharing on campus for 2 1/2 hours yesterday and that was sweet. My friend Kevin and I had conversations with people that were waiting for class, had lunch with a guy we just met and talked about his spiritual life, and invited several people to Bible studies. It was definitely awesome and I’m so excited to continue that over the next couple of days.

All in all, I’m really enjoying working as a missionary. My whole day seems to be focused on God and allowing God to work through me in the lives of students here. And even when I am working on things such as finances, I am able to see how even the administrative things really do have a  purpose in reaching students here at Cal Poly. I’m so excited to continue being one of Christ’s ambassadors on this campus! Please keep my campus, my team, and I in your prayers. With your help, we are reaching this campus for Christ more and more each day.

This last week, my entire staff team went on a planning retreat to Capitola. Someone was kind enough to donate their beach homes for us to use and so all of our planning meetings were right on the beach…pretty awesome! It was definitely fun getting to spend time with my team as we planned for the year and a lot of new friendships were started. It’s a huge job getting ready for the year to start. We have over 500 people in Bible studies and well over a hundred being discipled…and that was at the end of last year. Now imagine losing a bunch of Bible study leaders and disciplers because of graduation and you understand the dilemma we face. We spent several hours just placing people into Bible studies and figuring out how to pour into them this next year. It was a long process, but something that is worth the effort. My Bible study is actually combining with another one, so I will have a bunch of new people to start the year with.

I’ve begun to experience a lot more of what it means to be on the front lines. As a missionary, I am directly hitting home at Satan’s work and my team and I have already begun to see the results of that. I got back from the staff retreat and was basically attacked with temptations of all kinds, anything to get me to fall down and become ineffective in my ministry. It has been such a trying experience as I’ve worked through that for the last couple of days now. But ultimately, it’s allowing me to discover even more how much God is in control and the power that He has over it all. One of the girls on my staff team was also taken out this week as she went to the hospital with back problems. She is currently still there and will be getting back surgery sometime soon. All in all, Satan is really trying to drag down our team even before we start.

I’ve already noticed the Freshman beginning to trickle in. Most will be leaving their families for the first time and starting to make decisions about life on their own. Six weeks from now, most of these freshman will have made decisions that will affect their entire lives. And we have a single chance to bring God into that. This Friday, the Freshman will be arriving downtown and will get the chance to interact with Campus Crusade for the first time. Three thousand freshman…a hundred Campus Crusade members…only the beginning of the next six weeks! After getting contact information from almost all of them, we get the opportunity to follow up and knock on their dorm room doors.

Please keep my team and I in your prayers as all of this starts.

Ok, so today was my first day working with Campus Crusade! As you can already tell just in looking at when this was written (1am), my hours are a little weird. But I’m definitely still excited. This morning I went to Jamey’s house (my campus director) to meet with my new team. After spending all summer developing a team of people to partner with me financially, it was definitely a blessing to finally arrive at the place I had been talking so much about. I met my new team which consists of 22 people, some of which are interns like me and others that have been on staff for years. We sat around and talked about everything that God had been doing in our lives over the summer and a lot of the fears and hesitations that we have going into this year of ministry. I know for me, I have been dealing a lot lately with just the question of whether I’m actually ready for all of this. Starting in a week and a half, I will be starting one of the hardest yet most rewarding things in ministry…discipleship. Although this is probably my absolute favorite thing, there is also a huge responsibility in leading others closer to Christ. And lately, I have had a lot of doubts as to whether or not I’m actually ready to pour into the lives of these students. But over and over, God keeps showing me that all I can do is point these students to Him; it is not my job to change them. So I pray that my heart is ready for such a task…that my relationship with God would continually be strengthened so that I can truly pour out into their lives. And so as I prepare for ministry with my amazing new team this week, I can only begin to imagine all that God has in store for this year. It is in Him alone that I must place my trust and Him alone that can change the hearts of others.