Some Pictures

Some of the girls @ starbucks! The Forest by our house, back when it snowed! Now it is hot outside!
This is Yan- This is how we sat everyday this week! it was so comfy
Brad- speaking on hearing God's voice! he was so cool! and some other DTSers
The Class room

I skied through a cloud!!!!!
Some of the group :)
The whole group!

Class time!

Bonjour everyone!

Sorry I haven’t made an update in a long time, I have just felt so busy! I have been learning so much that it is even hard for me to processes all the information, so then trying to sit down and write it in a blog, takes a really long time for me to do! It is week 7 now and my brain and my heart and just my emotions are on over load… you learn all this information and then that information leads to transformation.. so it can get kind of crazy. But I love telling you all what I’m learning and what is going on so I’m going to try and update more often!

Anyways I was looking through my blogs that I have posted and I haven’t really told you about any of the lecture times! A.K.A class that I have everyday! So here are some of the speakers that we had, each speaker we have for a week. So I shall tell you who the speakers were, what they taught on, and some major points that I received from their teachings! How exciting.. are you ready to learn?!?!?!

Paul- taught on God’s Character

• God is a personal God, which means he is a person… which means I need to start treating him like one. He created us to have a the enjoyment of having a personal relationship with us.. Therefore lets make it enjoyable for him! For example when it comes to mine and Lauren’s friendship, if she talked all the time and I couldn’t even get one word in, I would get really annoyed. God likes when we pray to him… but I wonder if he gets annoyed if we just pray for hours and then at the end say amen and don’t listen to anything he has to say?!?!?!
• “As a prisoner of the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.” Ephesians 4:1…. What is our calling? Our calling it to walk in intimate friendship with God.
• “Where He leads, He will feed.” God isn’t going to call me to become a lawyer and then not provide the money for law school. He isn’t going to call me to be a missionary, where I have no salary, and then not provided the money for me to eat.
  

Dan Sneed- taught on identity

• This was the week I wrote that blog- “Fearing God” so I defiantly learned a lot this week. I learned who I am in Christ, and what the means and what that looks like. I really searched my heart this week, and during my quite times with God he really revealed to me the passions that he has placed on my heart and how he wants me to serve Him.
• Obedience= you do exactly what you are told to do, therefore we obey God. Honor= a heart issue, therefore we honor people on earth, But we obey God.
• “I pray that your life will be as wonderful as it was in God’s mind when he created you.”
• Dan use to work in a drug rehab. On time this 21 year old man came in named Rich. He was very brain dead because he has done sooo many drugs. He couldn’t even put his first and last name together.. that is how bad it was… so his brain was very gone. One of the workers there had an idea, they should start reading the bible to Rich everyday. Dan thought this lady wasn’t thinking straight because Rich was already way to far gone to come back to normal. But Dan said ya the volunteer students can read the bible to him because then the volunteer students will be studying the word everyday. To everyone surprise, Rich started to memorize what the volunteers were reading to him, and then he started to put his last and first name together. A year and a half after he entered this drug rehab, he left and went to Stanford University! Now he works with the US government, helping run a drug rehab program. Isn’t it crazy to think that the word of God to change someone whose brain was almost completely dead! Imagine if someone with a healthy brain read the bible everyday, or maybe just read it with expectancy that all the words are true.
  

Yan- taught on Evangelism

• There is no one way to do evangelism and you don’t do evangelism, you live it.
• “Serving a worldly king is such and honor, but why do we consider it a sacrifice to serve the heavenly king?”
• This week I learned so much! Yan did a lot of exercises/games with us.. One of them was we had to share our testimony(life story of how we became a Christian) But we couldn’t use any church words/ Christian words… because if you are telling your testimony to a non Christian who has never gone to church, they are never going to know what you are talking about if you use all these fancy church words.
• Another game we played- we all got in a huge circle in the room, and then Yan was going to take on a role of a person (one time he was a guy trying to hit on a girl, one time he was gay, and one time he was a really nervous guy that didn’t talk much) So then the setting was that we were all at a bus station.. And Yan was these random people, and we were ourselves. Yan was going to come up to one of us in the circle and just start talking like we were waiting for the same bus. They trick was we had to some how turn the conversation to God, but as soon as Yan lost interest in the conversation he would say Good bye. Get it? sorry its kind of confusing, but the point was…trying to talk to strangers (like people you met at the bus stop) about God with out freaking them out. It was really good to watch, because one guy in my class was picked to play and so the conversation started and then the guy invited Yan to a youth group and Yan didn’t know what a youth group was, so my classmate started to explain it, and Yan said Good bye! Ha I would have left too because if I was a non Christian and someone started explain to me a corny youth group I would be freaked out.
• Then we put all we learned into practice and went into down town Lausanne. We went to make people smile and share Gods love. So we had balloon animals to give out to the little kids, and then Yan said if you have a good conversation about God that would be great, but just love on people. But obviously we had just had this whole week learning on how to evangelism, so we were all super excited/ kind of nervous to try it out!! It was really cool my team was able to talk to a couple people about God in a causal way. But other teams went into some deep conversations and a lot of people even prayed for the people they had just met!! How cool!
  

Brad- taught on Hearing God’s Voice

• This week was insane! And really fun. I thought hearing from God would be a lot harder than it actually is. So it was exciting because God spoke to me so much this week. Well he is always speaking but this week I really opened my heart and my ears.
• We did a lot of exercises this week too.. one we played in out outreach teams. So I has 7 people in my group and the game was we were all sitting at a table and one person was the picker, and everyone would close their eyes and the picker person would chose someone.. but know one knows who the chosen one is besides the picker and the person chosen. So then every takes time to listen to God and says God want do you want to tell this person today or what is a picture you want me to tell them about.. So you just talk to God about this person… but you have no idea who the person ( the one chosen) is, but that is ok God does. And then you share the information you received and at the end you find out who the chosen person was. Because when you know who the person is- for example if someone told me to get a word from God for my sister Lindsey it would be so easy, because I already know Lindsey and know her strengths and stuff. So this is a good exercise when practicing to hear God’s voice because you don’t know who are receiving information for so you can’t put your own thoughts into because you already know the person. During the game I was picked, therefore I knew I was the one that was being prayed for but everyone just knew they were praying for someone in the room. On of my friends Josh said “for some reason I get all these Christian songs that are coming to me head, and God just wants me to tell you that he loves the way you worship him.” To make sense of that during class, I have a notebook in which all I do is doddle worship songs! And one of my other friends before had said, that is really cool that I do that because it is like I’m always in a mind set of worship, and I was like sure whatever, its just something to do during lecture if I get bored!! Josh didn’t know I was the person he was praying for, and he didn’t even know that I doodled worship songs in my notebook! But here is God showing him all these Christian songs and telling him to tell this person that he enjoys their worship! I think that is pretty darn cool. And stuff like this happened everyday this week!!!! It was such an awesome week
  

And I have a lot more that I’m learning and that God is showing me! But this blog is getting a kind of long! So I shall update again soon!

I am going to....

“The poor do not need our sympathy and our pity. The poor need our love and compassion and our help." Mother Teresa

I’M GOING TO NORTH INDIA!! ( Calcutta and New Delhi)

Funny story……..I was really nervous before they announced the locations… Because I was just sitting there talking to God saying, “Seriously God, what if two of the choices are Africa and India!?!? I don’t think I could choose between the two!!” Because I have such a desire to go to both!!!! So then it was time for them to show us the locations, they showed them in a power point presentation…South India, North India, Egypt and Sudan, and Eastern Europe… and i was like omg Calcutta! I could not believe that was one of my choices because I would love to go there because I know It is really poor and Mother Teresa lived and worked there! So I went on a walk with God and I told him- God tell me if you don’t want me to go there… because that is really where I want to go but I will go wherever you want me to go… but I could not get Calcutta out of my head!!! And I just had such a peace about it!

So I turned in my paper with the first choice North Indian and then the Second choice I said I don’t really have one but maybe South India. And after I turned in my paper I was talking to my friend Claire about out reach and she said, “I think you chose, Africa or India” and I said, “Ya I choose Ind… wait what?!?!?! Africa wasn’t a choice!!” And she was like ya Sudan and Egypt are in Africa!! Ok I so confused because I knew Sudan was in Africa! But I was so confused… why didn’t I realize that when I was praying about where to go for outreach. I wasn’t upset at all I just smiled and laughed because I’m pretty sure God did that on purpose!! Like he totally blinded me from Afirca… it is like that verse… “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of you heart.” he knows what my heart deisres and where I belong, and if I would have known Africa was a choice I would have been so confused on which one to pick!! Oh M G I just think it is funny! I Love God.

Snowball Fight!!

It has been so warm here lately! It felt almost like spring... But then yesterday we woke up and there was no snow on the ground but then it started to snow and never stoped! So after work duty we decieded to play in the snow! It was so fun! It was so beautiful everything was pure white! Like a winter wonder land!

our home covered in Snow!
The Front Lawn
Debbie putting snow down my coat!
Lets attack Leslie!Fun Fun!
The hill Sledding

Fearing God

Bonjour!
I have been learning so much lately! The hard part is trying to find time to sit down and write a blog! So I’m sorry I don’t have a new one every week and I’m sorry that when I do I have on they are so long! Haha. And I’m sorry that when I do finally write them they are so long! Oh Lauren put up a really cool blog about what her schedule is and a ton of pictures of the base, and my schedule is pretty much the same but the base is so big it would take me forever to take pictures of every room, but they have such a good website that has so much information, and you there are actually a ton of pictures from my DTS that you can see! so the website is www.ywamlausanne.com if you want to check that out!

But I just want to quick tell you about my work duty because I love it! We have work duty, everyday from 1:30-3:30, and I am on the hospitality team/special projects. We do a lot of baking! Because each time someone has a birthday we bake them a birthday cake! (And there is around 150 people here including all the staff) Also we bake and set up for community night, which is every Thursday night. The whole base gets together ( because there isn’t just a DTS school going on here right now there are different schools all together) So we all get together and have worship, have a guest speaker and then go town to the dinning hall and have yummy snakes and it is all decorate cute. And then on Tuesday we clean the hospitality house which is where all the guest speakers stay. My River Landings Animal Clinic friends would be so proud to hear that I sweep the whole entire house, which is huge!( And I always think of you guys when I’m sweep.. J) So that is my work duty and I just love it! Because the other work duties are like housekeeping, kitchen cleaning, and other stuff, and I get to bake! I love my leader too, her name is Tanzi and she is from Alaska and she is just the cutest!

So the title of this blog is ‘Fearing God’ and I’m so excited to share with you what God has been showing me! Ok so, I need to stop saying so, anyways…….before coming here I DID NOT know what it meant to fear God. Well I thought I knew what it meant; I thought it meant to be literal scared of God. I mean when you fear something you are scared of it, and that is why I never understood when people were saying they fear God because that is just crazy because God is love. Well it is all come together this week when I found out what is meant to fear God. Fearing God means: to be more concerned with what God thinks and feels rather myself or anyone else thinks and feels, to be more impressed with God’s reactions to our actions than with other people’s reactions. What does this look like.. In Genesis God tells Abraham to take his one and only son up to a mountain and kill him as an offering! Just as Abraham was about to kill his son God said, “Don’t lay a hand on the boy! Now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.” (Genesis 22:12) Abraham was about to kill his only son because God told him too! Abraham didn’t stop to think, ‘well what will my wife think when she has seen what I have done?! ‘ AND he didn’t ask a ton of his friends, ‘Hey guys God just told me to kill my son and what do you think I should do?’ NO Abraham cared what God’s reaction would be to his actions, rather than worrying about other peoples reactions. I know this story is a little hard to apply to today because we don’t kill/ have sacrifices/ burnt offerings, but I think you get the main point.

The first week I was here one of my friends asked me if I feared God more or people. And I said people, no doubt. But I didn’t really understand my answer until we had some teaching on fearing God and until I read more about it in the bible. I was shocked to find out that my whole Christian life I have not been fearing God.

I have a really Good example for this…. Before coming here I had a passion to help the poor. But I thought everyone had that passion! Because I mean who wouldn’t want to say I want to help the poor. And I especially thought, “How cool I’m going to YWAM where everyone there is going to be just like me, these young adult who are loving God and recognize that are so many people suffering in this world.” Anyways being here you get to know everyone really fast and there is no small talk when you first meet people, it is more like what are your passions? How do you think God is going to use you? How were you raised? I was so shocked to see that God gives us so many different talents and passions! Like one girl is an amazing dancer and she wants to bring God into the Theater business. Another guy is really into technology, like films and stuff and he wants to show people that films can be a beautiful way to express God. This other guy is into the diamond industry and he wants to have a Christian jewelry store. Why do I tell you all of this?? Because I’m a really bad dancer, because I know absolutely nothing about films, and I know nothing about diamonds besides that they are pretty!

What is my talent and my passion.. to help the poor. I want to help those people who don’t have clean water to drink, but if they walk 5 miles they might get half way clean water. I want to give food to people that haven’t eaten in a week. I have such a desire to work with kids and people who have AIDS. I want to love on the millions of orphans in Africa that have AIDS or that have been orphaned because their parents have died of AIDS. I want to show them God loves! I want to tell them who Jesus is and what he has done for them.

Helping the poor isn’t just a dream of mine, but I truly believe God gave me that passion and he gave me the heart to do so. Because being here I thought everyone would think that way, but they are too busy thinking about the theater they are going to open or their diamond business, which it is totally awesome that God gave them that passion!!! But he didn’t give those kinds of passions to me. Last night the owner of the YWAM base took up an offering because he wants to purchase a workout set here on the base that everyone can use, that is really nice but it costs A LOT. As the baskets are being passed around, I’m thinking first of all, walk outside if you want exercise and also all of you guys are Christians and what about the 30 thousand children who die of starvation each day, do you know that is like six September 11ths happening every single day?!? So as the baskets went around I just sat there really confused and really realizing that I am different, because God made us all different with different passions and desires.

So what was that whole tangent about?.. was I have been fearing man, rather than fearing God. Because it when come to this subject, I have always cared what people thought of me, people have thought I was strange because I think this way, some people think I live in la la land, where i think that I can help who ever I want. People have told me I can’t. People have told me I won’t. People, people, people… see it is easy to be concerned what people think of you and be concerned about their reactions to your actions. BUT we are to fear God not man. God has given me this heart that is unique and return I have been like, “Thank you God but I’m going to have to give it back to you because people don’t accept that.” No I should be being concerned what God thinks and feels and being so excited that God has giving me these desires, not try to hide them. Ok I’m going to stop talking about this because I sound like a broken record, but that is something I have learned that has taught me so much. I use to hide my heart and my passions because I feared what people would think of me, but I don’t anymore, (I’m not saying I don’t care about your opinion or you anymore, I mean like if you tell me I can’t and God tells me I can.. I will listen to him). So I’m so excited because I learned what it means to fear God and that is something I desire to do! Because these are all words that I just typed but now I need to live it out!