To Distant Lands!

It has been a blessing to come back to Missouri for the holiday week and see my family and friends.
I loved to be able to talk with people and share what God has done in my life and update them on all that is going to happen in the next two months. Having my fellow student Nick along was really a blessing as well. He was a part of YWAM coming back with me.

Nick and I learning to do balloon art for
ministering to kids on outreach.

We leave tomorrow, Saturday the 28th to return to Ozark, Arkansas, then after last minute preparations we jump onto the wings of the wind and soar to distant lands, South East Asia.
A big THANK YOU to all who have supported me and taken part in this outreach. More than anything I request your prayers. There really is a huge difference when God's people pray, it can be the difference between a powerful outreach and a poor outreach. I don't ask you to pray that God blesses "our" endeavors but...

    Pray that we have wisdom to see how God is working and join Him in "His" endeavors.
    Pray we are sensitive to the people and their culture. There are a lot of customs we will have to get used to.
    Pray also for confidence and wisdom as we have teachings and sermons we will be presenting and many of us have never done anything like this before, much less in another culture through a translator.
    Pray for wisdom and patience in dealing with each other, since we will be living close for 8 weeks and may get on each other's nerves.
    Pray that none of us get sick and we love the food.
    Pray we learn and grow. We are bound to make mistakes, but it would be good if we can bounce back up and keep going. Humility is key in this.
    Pray we are a blessing to the people there. Short term outreaches tend to be more of a benefit for the one going, but lives of the people we reach out to can be touched also if we genuinely show concern for them and who they are, and not just try to impose western ideas on them.
Also please keep our other DTS outreach team that is going to Paraguay in your prayers.

Outreach is such a huge part of a  DTS. It's when our whole world view is challenged, and when we see God in a new way. God has been in the business of missions since calling Abraham out of Ur to a new land. He wants to reveal His deep love for all peoples of the world and what He is doing in those places.
This life we live is about discovering more of God, and I don't think we can have a significant grasp of who God is without stepping out of our comfort zone and letting Him sweep us into a whole new world where He is working and doing things in ways that we couldn't imagine, the world of cross cultural missions.
I so desperately want to get a bigger view of who my God is, so that like Isaiah in Isaiah 6, I can fall before Him and say "Here am I! Send me."
I believe we won't have a heart for the Kingdom until we have had a revelation of the King.
That is what I want to have.

This is our South East Asia team!

Here is video about what is already going on in Cambodia.

Glimpses Into DTS Life

It has been too long since I have posted here. I would love to give an overview of all the different things I have been learning but I have a feeling I wouldn't have enough time for that and then I would just procrastinate. So instead here are some pictures that can hopefully give you a peak into what my world has been for the past weeks. God has been doing some exciting things in my life lately.

I will begin with some rather "flattering" pictures of dorm life. I really have some great roommates though, and we have so much fun together, studying and discussing what we've been learning and growing in.

Meals are a great time to socialize with people. The food is pretty good too!

This is the YWAM Ozark family; staff and students. I am thrilled to be a part of them.

It has been great to go to different churches in the area and bless and be blessed by them. Lately we have been attending a small church with about 30 or so attendees. They love us and we love them. They even ask us to come up and sing a song or two every Sunday. It's so much fun! I wish every town could have a YWAM base in it. Sundays have a whole new dimension when a crowd of passionate young people swarm into your church! :-D

This our trailer which we use for hauling all our gear around to our different camping locations. That's rather obvious though isn't it.

This is right before I went repelling for the first time in my life. It was so exciting! What a great view!

This picture below is not of me but that is Gabriel, a different Gabriel. We met up with a YWAM DTS group from Madison Wisconsin for a week of lecture phase.

Yes, I came down that.

Don't ask me what's going on in this picture but this is our students-only Madison and Ozark team. The staff sent us out on an overnight backpacking trip on our own. Trust me, we love our staff,

but boy was it amazing to put our skills to the test and do things all by ourselves.

We were only allowed to take minimum supplies for this trip.

This is the makeshift tent we all squeezed into. With ten of us in there it was quite cozy.

Team Bacon was our name. Yeah, that was Britta's idea. We went along with it though.

The next week our group for Ozark went to the YWAM Go Conference in Oklahoma, where we met up with several other DTS's from the country. It was an incredible time where I met many new people and realized again that I had a family from all over. I could feel the heartbeat in these brothers and sisters of mine to go and share the love of Christ to every corner of the world.

The job is still massive, but we are getting closer and closer. Oh how I wish the church would awaken and get a fire in their hearts to go unto those people who so desperately need Jesus. There is nothing in this world, no idea, no government, no plan, no organization, nothing but Jesus that can solve the world's problems. We will be just running in circles chasing our tail till we realize that.

A great video we saw at the conference. It really get's at the heart of YWAM

Praying and worshiping over the big map of the world.

This is the three of us Gabriel's at the conference right before we went our separate ways. I pray God blesses and keeps all my new found family wherever our Father leads them.

One of the great things about an outdoor DTS is that we get to see so much of God's splendor in creation as we learn about who He is and what His heart is.

This is the area that we went rock climbing.

Rockclimbing! So much fun!

That's ME!

I have to say, there were some pretty tough rocks to climb.

Frickle, one of our favorite snacks! MMMMMMM

Hanging out around camp with one of our speakers and his dog.

God is at work in all of our lives here at the DTS. There are so many things that we have been learning about that it would take an entire book to put it all down. We've been learning about the Character of God, Fear of the Lord/Intimacy with God, Spiritual Warfare, World Missions and 4k Mapping, Human Trafficking and Justice and Compassion, The Great Story/Inductive Bible Study, Identity in Christ, The Power Presence and Person of the Holy Spirit, how to use drama in missions, hearing the voice of God and so, so much more. It will take my whole life to digest what God has been speaking to me through teachers and fellow students here.

I have gotten to do street and mall witnessing, praying for people in the nursing home, and hear God give me words to speak into people's lives.

It isn't even over yet, though! We still have a month of lecture phase and then two months of outreach!

I am super pumped!

I miss you all at home, though, and would love, love, love to hear from any of you!

God bless you all!

YWAM DTS Beginnings

It has been three whole weeks since I left Missouri to do my Discipleship Training School in YWAM Ozark, Arkansas. It has been some of the most intense and riveting weeks of my life.
There are 10 of us doing the DTS 8 guys and 2 girls.

                     Connor, Brad, Nick, Josh, Michael, Gabriel,

                               Dan, Caitlin, Rebekah, Bryce.

The YWAM base sits atop Manitou Mountain, a name given by the Native Americans meaning Mountain of God or (Great Spirit).
I can tell you that the Spirit of the true God really dwells here. There are many people at this place from around the States, and the world.
It is amazing to hear many of their stories of the things that brought them to this place to give everything for Jesus and the Discipleship of His people.
It is an outdoor DTS so the first week we got here, we set out on a 10 day outdoor adventure. We packed our gear and belongings in trash bags and buckets and headed to Buffalo National River to canoe for four days. I had never canoed that much at one time in my life before. I had a blast and so did everyone else, swimming in the river, knocking each other out of the canoes, and gazing at the magnificent Arkansas scenery.

We pitched our tents and on the river bank and cooked up dehydrated foods for our meals, which actually tasted amazingly yummy.

Our first week's speaker came along with us, and we had sessions around the campfire along the river. It was one of the most beautiful classrooms I've ever been in. We had lots of time to talk about the foundational characteristics needed throughout the Discipleship Training School and the rest of our lives.
We would need the humility to always be able to learn, with discernment, from any teacher despite their teaching style. What really stuck out to me and really confirmed my need to be here is that someone who wants to serve God must have roots that are deep, vast and strong in Him or else we will fall when the trials come in our times of ministry. (Luke 8:13 The parable of the sower, seeds, and soils).
That is what so much of this DTS is about for me.
I want to give God my all and not be held back by any uncertainty in my foundations.

A big element of DTS is learning to serve and work together as a team, so each night different people were assigned different tasks for the next day. Fire/bear hang/EPA crew, meal prep crew, meal clean up crew, the navigator, and the leader of the day were chosen. It taught us responsibility on the trail and how things roll while in a group of people in the wild.

After canoeing for four days we enjoyed our weekend on a vast gravel bar beneath a massive cliff  that was on the opposite side of the river. Our weekend speaker was the father-in-law of our school leader and he talked about the Life and Work of Jesus Christ and how he came as the perfect Man to reclaim the earth from the enemy and restore dominion to mankind. Now we as Christian's are to live in the authority of Christ's name serving with power.

After the weekend break we switched gears and hit the trail, with only what we could carry on our backs.

We trudged up steep, rocky hills, plodded through tall grass, searching for a barely visible trail, and delicately stepped from rock to rock where the river crossings were shallow enough, and waded through the deeper parts.

We camped under the trees and got our drinking and cooking water from the streams that crossed our path, either boiling it or putting iodine in it to make it safe to digest.

One of the most powerful elements of the trip to draw us all closer together as a body and team, was when the days travels and work were done and we sat under the vast expanse of the starry heavens around a crackling fire and told our life stories, those events and happenings in our lives that made us who we are. Our group is very diverse with many different struggles and victories, but we have gone though this first trip together and become so very close. Even though YWAM isn't affiliated with a denomination or considered a church in-an-of-itself, I would consider it one the truest and most real things to church I've ever been apart of. We are believers living and working together for the kingdom of God.

So during our backpacking trip we carried our week's speaker along with us in the form of a projector and ipod (which we may also use on outreach for showing the Jesus Film), when we had camp set up we would gather around with our notepads and head lamps and watch our speaker talk about relationships.

It was Wednesday when all of us were all resting around an outhouse having our daily snack of cookies and joking around when up drove a volunteer parks service person, who asked us if we knew that we were trespassing.
We had been in the wilderness for the past few days and had no communication with the outside world. Little had we known that our federal government had shut down and also the national park we were on. We were all shocked and didn't know what what to think. We didn't know much of what was going on, but the park person told us that we needed to be out of the park the next day by noon.

We spent one more night in the park and were able to get out the next day. We all loved camping but were glad to get home. None of us had done more than swimming in the river and our aroma was quite frighting.

The schedule is quite full here even at the base and I feel bad not getting an update out sooner. Maybe I can fill you all in more later.

So for closing I will say that I finally know where I am going in the world for outreach.
Half of the team will be going to Paraguay and the other half (my team) will be going to South East Asia.
Please be in prayer for all of us as we prepare for going to these countries and also for the rest of the lecture phase that our hearts will be open to the things God wants to teach us.
I love you all! God bless!