Aaron Proffitt

Yesterday proved to be one of those marathon church planting days for the Aletheia Tampa team. When it was all said and done, we spent 8 hours on campus (from 1:30pm to 9:30pm) and Emilio spent an extra hour on top of that so he receives the gold medal for most time spent on USF’s campus yesterday. There is so much going on right now. It feels like it should be the fall right now, not summer.

The afternoon began with four of us doing some campus evangelism. Emilio and I had an incredible opportunity to talk with the sweetest girl from Haiti (French major at USF), who prayed to receive Christ. We also talked with a Hindu from Nepal for over an hour. That was interesting to say the least! JR and Suzie had some interesting talks as well and we ended up talking to people for over 2 hours. That was just the beginning of it all.

At 4 we set up a table as part of the freshman orientation organization event. It was an incredible opportunity to connect with some of the incoming freshman at USF. There are so many new freshmen that we will be doing this on Mondays and Thursdays for the next six weeks! Can you believe that!? We met a few people who were more than interested in getting involved with Aletheia when they get to school. We also learned how to better connect with the hoards of freshmen that we will come in contact with over the next 6 weeks. We will no doubt be seasoned veterans of this after the 11 more times that we do it.

Our day ended with our fifth meeting on USF’s campus. It’s the middle of the summer now and we are definitely feeling it. Many of our “usual suspects” were gone last night, including those who are studying abroad, or working, or on vacation, or on mission trips. But God still brought a nice group out to worship and learn including 5 new people. And I was wondering if anyone would come as a result of us handing out hundreds of freeze pops (I call them otter pops…it’s a California thing, you wouldn’t understand) last week…Well, we had three people come as a result of that. God is so good!

All in all, things are going well. Momentum is building. We added to our team this week yet again with the addition of Erica and Sarah. Erica will be living with Ashlee and I all summer so we are excited about that. She is the best tenant ever…a true servant she is. Ace and April will arrive in about 40 days or so. That will really give a boost to our technically deficient team.