About a week ago I wrote a “welcome to San Francisco” update, but unfortunately I deleted it on accident :(. Here goes take #2: It is hard to believe that we have already been here for three weeks, but it is true! And for the next two months San Francisco will be home. We are living right in the heart of the tenderloin, a neighborhood known for its contrasts. At any given time of the day or night you are likely to find five or six people sleeping outside our door. Cross two streets and you will notice that the Hilton rises out of an entire city block! Yesterday I was out walking in our neighborhood and I found myself wondering how many people would be sleeping on the streets if the Hilton’s managers offered their empty rooms each night to people without beds of their own… just a thought. Our training with Youth With A Mission is proving to be challenging in the best of ways. I (Iven) am spending a lot of time in II Corinthians and am thinking a lot about what it looks like to take every thought captive for Christ. There is so much of my thinking that just doesn’t trust God to be as good, or as powerful, or as trustworthy as he says that he is. And that is something I would like to see change. The realities of street life are also staring us in the face. Today, as we worshiped in our classroom, singing “Blessed be his name,” I noticed a man taking a crack hit outside our window. There is a book out there called Word On The Street  that chronicles the journey of two seminary professors who started studying scripture while spending time among the homeless community in Atlanta. It didn’t take them too long to realize that they would ask different questions and come up with different answers while sitting on a busy sidewalk, dialoguing with the poor, than might otherwise arise inside a sequestered seminary library. This is where we live until December! I am so glad that we serve a God who become poor, lived as a homeless man, and offered real hope to those on death row.