True North Blog

Prodigal House, a ministry program of Long Island Youth for Christ, provides emergency and short-term residential housing for teenage boys ages 12-16. (For more on Prodigal House visit their website.)

On Dec. 5th, from 10AM-3PM there is going to be a fundraiser for Prodigal House at Hibernian Hall (80 magnolia Drive, Selden, NY). If you would like to be a vendor at this event, donate items for the bake sale or volunteer to help out, please contact Katie Morrison!

The following is an awesome outreach opportunity being put together by our college & young adults. If you have additional questions please contact Dan Fruhauf or Matt Senior.

College and Young Adult Outreach to the Homeless of NYC Subways

This is an initiative to lend a warm hand to people in bitter need.  During the cold months of the year the Subways of New York grow in number of homeless people seeking shelter and especially warmth. It is a blessing and an opportunity to serve these people who need love and compassion.

On November 15th and 22nd, we are looking to invite you to donate sleeping bags that will be delivered and handed out to the homeless in the NYC subways. Since True North is the kind of church that gives overwhelmingly, we will be asking no more than two per family, and no more than one donation per person. There will also be a sign up sheet at the info table for any college or young adults looking to participate in the delivering of the sleeping bags. The distribution date will be on Friday, December 4th. We will be meeting in Penn Station at 9pm at the main terminal.

Hello, one more time, to my fantastic family at TNCC,

As you may or may not have realized, I have now reached the final week of my time in Thailand.  We have finished our outreach and are back in Bangkok for our debriefing time before we all head our separate ways.  Friday night is our school graduation, and Saturday morning I’m on a plane for home!  Crazy!!

There are so many things going through my head as I prepare to come home.  I know that things will be different, because time has moved on at home just as it has here; only I haven’t been with you all so it may be a little weird for me right away.  For example, the last 5 months I have been focusing on using the smallest English words possible so that the Thai’s will be more likely to understand me.  I’m probably going to be staring at cashiers like a doofus for the first few weeks, just because I’m not used to talking so fast!

This isn’t to say that you should all expect me to be weird, but I have become accustomed to a culture that is not my own, so I may be in shock for a little while.  But I am so excited to be a physical part of the True North family again and to catch up on your lives!

To briefly summarize the past few weeks, firstly our team ran an English camp at a church in the Nakon Pathom province.  It amazes me what a tool teaching English is for sharing the gospel; pretty much, if you say you’re teaching English, people will come flocking!  It was an amazing week as we helped the church as well, and we saw a whole group of teenage guys come to know the Lord, and a smaller group of the young girls.  In improving their skills in English, we were also enabling these kids to get better jobs and have hope for their futures.

The following week we helped run a kids worship camp at the church of one of my Thai roommates.  It was a great week of getting to know these kids and breaking the barriers so many of them have against foreigners.  They now know that not all white people are like the ones they see on TV, and you would have been amazed to see these kids worship God!  I’ve never seen people so young be so serious about God.  And no, it was not like “Jesus Camp.”

And this past week we spent in Ratchaburi, working with a group of kids who live in a Burmese refugee camp, whom you may be hearing more from me on in the future, because they really stole my heart! We also went out into the villages to have small-group churches and to pray for the sick and elderly who aren’t able to make it to church.  There was one day that we went to a Thai university, and I was able to share with some Muslim students who asked me why I came to Thailand.  They asked me to sing, so sang Hosanna and this other Thai song that I learned here.  It was so cool!

There have been other times that we have been able to open doors to people through sharing testimonies, encouragements from scripture, and performing dances and dramas.  It was tricky sleeping on dirty floors, sometimes with no running water, and constantly traveling from one place to the other, sometimes not knowing what our plans would be for the day!  But through it all I have seen God really stretch me and teach me about how so many people live outside of America.

God has done so much while I’ve been here, and I don’t think I’ll really know exactly how much until I come home and see the person I was before.  I have learned to love differently, to stand up even stronger for what I believe in, and to be the kind of Christian that will make the world want to know more about Christ.  I hope and pray that the ministries I’ve been able to visit and help out with here in Thailand have been as blessed as I have been through the whole experience.  And I can’t wait to be home and a part of your lives again.

Peace and love,

Anna

This weekend is Daylight Savings Time (Nov. 1), so our clocks “fall back” an hour (giving us an “extra” hour). Please be sure to remember to set your clocks. And while you’re at it, change the batteries in your smoke alarms. See you Sunday at 9:30, 11 AM or 7:30 PM for part 3 of Shipwrecks!

We hope you’ve been enjoying our current Shipwrecks series. If the whole idea of shipwrecks interests you, then you might want to check out the following:

Visit Long Island Shipwrecks where you can learn about Long Island shipwrecks, when they went down & where, as well as other facts.

Also, there’s an exhibit hosted by Discovery called Titanic: the Artifact Exhibition in NYC that runs through the end of December. Visit their website for more info. Aside from being an interesting exhibit, this might also be a great opportunity to invite a friend & listen to week one of the Shipwrecks series together for further discussion.

The new www.truenorthchurch.net site is live! You’ll notice besides the new look & feel, we’ve made it a point to make things easier to access and more friendly to our newcomers. Here are just a few things you find: you can now access the latest message from the home page (streaming or downloading); we have a completely new online giving system that’s much simpler; we now have an E-invite that you can email to friends to invite them to True North; and many other cool new feature. Go exploring. We hope the new site serves you well!

Oh, and just so you know, our blog will still be the place to go for up to the moment information & news.

Here’s the latest from Anna Macukas:

Hello Everyone!!

Just wanted to send out a much-belated email update on how things are going on this side of the world!!

At this point, we have finished our lectures and have been on an outreach trip to the south of Thailand for the past two weeks to an area called Phang Nga. We worked with this awesome tribe of people called the Sea Gypsies, or the “Mokan” people, who are fishing people and are very poor.  We worked with pre-schools there that have been set up by an organization called Step Ahead to take little kids out of vulnerable family situations during the day so that their parents can work and they can be safe.  The kids went from extremes of being totally terrified of us “farang” (foreigners), to jumping all over us and basically destroying us.  Needless to say, they were awesome.  We also planted gardens for these people and trees…lots of trees; thousands, actually! This was the area of Thailand hit the hardest by the 2004 tsunami, so these people are still undergoing a lot of re-development.  They now have a special place in my heart and I hope they will be in your prayers as well.

This very morning we are leaving again to go to central Thailand to a place called Ratchaburi.  I don’t know that much about it, except that we will be working with a local church, teaching English, and possibly working with the Burmese refugees that live in the area.  Please pray that I will be flexible and will be able to be prepared, as we don’t know a lot ahead of time here!  Also, my health has been pretty low due to pushing myself pretty hard and also due to my asthma.  I really want to participate to the best of my ability, so please pray that these things won’t hold me back!  You can also pray that the hearts of the people we work with will be open to what we do, and for the unity of our team, since we are bilingual and it is often hard to function with a lot of information lost in translation.

As of right now, unless anything changes, I will be home November 7th!  Our team will be returning to Bangkok the first week in November for debriefing, and then that is the end of this whole she-bang!  I thank you all so much for your prayers and continued support.  They have made all the difference in the world, and as amazing/challenging/eye-opening as this all has been, I can’t wait to be home with you all again!

God bless you all,
Anna

In this encore presentation of our six-week series, Shipwrecks (the very first message series that True North launched with), Pastor Bert examines the lessons we can learn from actual shipwrecks that occurred. Join us beginning October 18th – 9:30, 11 am, or 7:30 pm. Invite a friend!

Pastor Bert returns this weekend with a message entitled “Walking Slowly”.

See you this Sunday at 9:30, 11 AM, or 7:30 PM. Invite a friend!

If you didn’t know it, Anna Macukas is the very first missionary that True North helped send out. She’s been working & training in Thailand. Here’s a little video update from Anna herself:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7dJBV7Gre0&rel=0]