Meet the intern: Justin Brown

My name is Justin Brown, and I had the great joy of being part of the DiscipleMakers internship this summer. As an intern I got to work with the Systems Department in the DM HQ, and the experience went above and beyond my big expectations!

Coming into the summer I had two main things that I wanted to learn. First, I wanted to grow my character by becoming more selfless. Second, I wanted to understand what it meant to work on a team with a common goal. The Lord was very gracious in allowing me to learn so much about both of these things through the project that I worked on.

My background is in web development and as such I was assigned the project of updating the software for the Staff website. The site was running a version of Plone that was about five years old. In the grand scheme of updating the software, my job was to update two parts of the site that would otherwise break when we made the switch to the new version. These parts were 1) the Systems wiki where we, the department, store all our information on pretty much anything computers (and even favorite pizzerias like CiCi's), and 2) the "DM Events" photo albums.

Right from the start I found out that I had no idea of what I was doing and that I had to learn everything from scratch. This taught me a lot about humility - that I don't know everything and I have to ask for help. The lack of knowledge gave way to work that was just plain hard. My temptation was to retreat from the hard stuff and get distracted with other stuff, email, fail blog, etc. As I identified these tendencies and got time with Brian Roberg (my boss) outside of the project, I realized that this was an opportunity to be selfless by doing the hard things for the betterment of others. The only way I could do this was having a knowledge of what Christ has done for me!

Heading into the Fall semester, I'm excited to apply the things I learned by looking for ways to do the hard things out of a desire to serve others and not myself. The main way this will play out is being diligent in my work and time so that I can take the opportunities the Lord gives me to preach the gospel! Please pray for both me and all the other interns that we would keep the gospel in mind and apply all the things that we have learned. Pray that many might come to know Christ through our efforts to serve Him!