2004: First Volunteer training

"What's the next step?"  "When do we start attending clients?"  Carla asked those questions with so much enthusiasm and motivation to serve.  These are some of the questions I answered not just to Carla, but also to many volunteers that attended the first counseling volunteer training of Center for LIFE.  Like Carla all of them set aside three hours everyday per five days in the week and about seven hours the sixth day of the training.

Let me share with you how God blessed this time.  When I checked the list of the people that already sent their volunteer's application and confirmed their participation in the training, the number of people were not even forty.  Great was our surprise when the first day we received more than 80 participants!  On that day we saw the miracle of the sandwiches, which had to be divided and some how were multiplied to feed everybody. 

The group that participated at this training were very mixed; they were people of different ages, men and women from different churches of our city. 

At the end of the training all the participants got together in different groups to have a "prayer circle".  At this time, all the groups could pray for each member of the group individually, plus for the ministry.  It was on this time that I clearly could see how God's Spirit was touching each person. 

A lady who came everyday told us that at the beginning she didn't thought she would have enough time to become a volunteer, but the last night of the training she couldn't sleep thinking about it, just after praying about that she decided she will stop working some hours of the week, because she had the conviction God wanted her in the Center for LIFE.

Another woman that came everyday with her three small children shared with us her husband's testimony.  When he was six months in his mother's womb, her mom had an abortion and he survived it.  As a consequence of it, he has several burns in his skin.  This new volunteer let us know how thankful she was to God for her husband's life, that's the reason why she and her family would serve at tis ministry. 

Like these women, there are many volunteers that are willing to serve at Center for LIFE with the conviction that this is a God's call in their life.  As someone said, "Center for LIFE is covering an empty space in Santa Cruz, it comes to fill a great need in our community to impact women facing a crisis with God's word."  Amen.