India, here I come!!

Hey everyone! This is going to be my last blog post before I go to India and I am going to try to kind of sum up some of it so that it doesn’t take three days to read. While I am in Inida I will try my best to post a blog or two, depending on how often I am able to have internet access but please, it I do not get a chance to, please don’t hold it against me. I will write heaps about the entire trip when I get back from India, so don’t worry about never finding out what happened. Here is what has happened these last two weeks before outreach.

The Sunday following Patrick Dodson’s teachings I co-led the older children’s Sunday school service at the Maungaturoto church. That sunday night, instead of our normal lectures, we had an Indian couple come and speak to us about India and what is going on there concerning missions. On Monday we started our normal lectures for the week. The speaker was named Teki. He spoke to us on Cross-Cultural Introduction. It was very interesting and he taught us a lot about Muslims and their beliefs that I did not know before. One of the main things for the week that Teki was trying convey to us was about how we should act in different cultures. One question that really got me thinking was “What makes you an American?” Besides the fact that I was born there I couldn't really give an answer. Teki told us, “while you are in India be an Indian,” and that is what I am going to strive for while I am there, to be as one of the natives in how I relate to them. That weekend we got to go camping as our last adventure as a school. We went to Pahi and camped near the beach. It was amazing, the sunset that was there the first night was so beautiful. At the beach there is a huge rock called Lion Rock and it really looks like a lion sitting at the waters edge. On the way home from camping we stopped at the airport to pick up two Mission Builders and while we were waiting I got to eat Dunkin Donuts. It was amazing! I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw it, I had no idea that New Zealand would have Dunkin Donuts. It made my day.

Jono Turner was the speaker for the last week of lectures. His topic was on the Holy Spirit. The whole week was one of the best weeks that we had. It was just what we needed to finish off the Lecture Phase with. One amazing story from the week was that on Tuesday during lectures we decided to pray for healing in a few different people so we started praying very fervently. One of the girls we prayed for had some pretty severe Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in her wrists and all throughout her forearms from playing the piano and drawing (she’s pretty artistic). While we were praying for her she was healed and she had absolutely no pain in either of her wrists. It was definitely God performing a miracle. It was truly amazing to see God work in such real ways and I know that this was only a small taste of what will be happening while we are in India. The rest of lectures wasn’t quite as exciting as Tuesday but it was still a really good week and I think that Jono was one of my favorite speakers overall. On Friday we had a fancy dinner as an “End of Lectures” dinner. After that we had a Talent show that was pretty awesome. As the end performance me and two other guys got up, dressed in tights and danced to the Cotton Eye Joe song, it was so much fun.

This past Monday morning we had a pancake breakfast as a final breakfast with everyone from both outreach teams. On Tuesday we said goodbye to the Chennai outreach team. It was so sad, I may have cried, I don’t remember, it was probably just that dirt unfortunately got in my eye the whole time the Chennai team was saying goodbye and driving away. What bad luck I have with dirt, that it would happen when I don’t want it to. After they left we went to the beach to help get our minds off of the other team and to stop us from skulking around. It was a really nice way to get us to not think about being sad. I realized that after this I will probably only see the people from the other team for another three weeks and then most likely never again after that and that made me really sad.

I leave tomorrow the 26th of November which will be the 25th for all of you. I am extremely excited and only a little nervous. We have a twelve hour flight to India. Here is a rough itinerary of what I will be doing and when so that you have an idea about what I will be doing when I am there.

MY ITINERARY:

November 26: Leave New Zealand for Calcutta

November 27-30: Orientation on culture by YWAM Calcutta

December 1: Travel north to Darjeeling (hopefully see Mt. Everest :] )

December 2-10: Partner witth YWAM Darjeeling ministries

December 11: Travel back to Calcutta

December 12-16: Partner with YWAM Calcutta ministries

December 17: Travel south to Orissa

December 18-

January 9: Partner with John Bridges’ ministry

January 9: Travel north to Calcutta

January 12: Depart India and arrive in Thailand

January 12-14: Debrief and relax in Thailand

January 14: Leave Thailand for New Zealand.

January 16 or 17: Travel south to Tauranga for the week and serve at YWAM ‘Jubilee

Celebration’ followed by ‘Call to All’

January 24: Return for report back week

I have some pictures that you can look at in a second but first I would really like to thank you all for your continued support through prayer and I implore you to continue praying for me and my entire team as we are in this foreign country that is very dangerous. I ask that you would pray for our health while we are there, some of our team is not feeling well and have been in bed resting and it would be terrible if anyone were to get that sick it would be very disastrous for our team and ministry. We need everyone to be in full health. I would also ask that you keep our safety in your prayers. We have many long train rides and many trips that we require us traveling great distances and traveling can be very dangerous. Some of the leaders who have been to India before have told us that on trains anything that is not secure on your person can easily get stolen and we do not want anyone to lose anything. Again I want to thank you all so very much for all the prayers and support that you have given me during this entire adventure that I am on. Your prayers mean so much to me, it truly is an encouragement to me to know that I have people back home who are interceding for me. This school so far has been amazing and I know that God only has more amazing things in store for India. God sure knew what he was doing when he led me to this place. I love you all. May God bless you all richly and may he reveal himself to you in new ways everyday.

Here are two pictures of the sunset at Pahi.

This is 'Lion Rock' and see, I told you that it looked like a lion.

Here are just a few random pictures that I took at Mangawhai on Tuesday.

The red algae was really cool.

Yet Another Post...

Since the last blog post a lot of things have happened. On Sunday before our new speakers Hinrich and Katrina talked to us on their topic of Back to the Basics, we got to play rugby. It was pretty awesome. I don’t understand why we don’t play it in the states. Although it was fun, I did get a little hurt. What a surprise. During the first lecture Hinrich and Katrina had all of us take pipe cleaners and make our dreams out of it. That was really cool because I got to see what some of the dreams of the other people on my team. The next Tuesday was a good day, I made friendship bread. Mmmmm, so delicious! It was also a good day because, instead of normal lectures, we got to act out stories from the Bible with a partner. Not to brag or anything but we were pretty much the best, my partner and I did so well that we were asked to perform it again for open meeting on Wednesday.

For our biweekly adventure we went to Waipu caves and got to rock climb. That was a lot of fun. I never knew how much fun climbing things actually was until I got to rock climb here. There was a cave there at the caves, wow, fancy that, a cave at the caves. Anyways, the cave was massive, it wasn’t huge as in the ceilings were super high but inside you could just keep going it you climbed far enough. I went pretty far inside, far enough so that I couldn’t see the light from the cave entrance. As soon as I got far enough into the cave as to not be able to see the light from the entrance I noticed little lights on the ceiling. Glow worms! Glow worms are so cool, there must’ve been at least a thousand little green dots on the ceiling. It looked so awesome, it is too bad that cameras can’t get that kind of image. If you could see into my head though, you would be amazed at them. I would say that that was a really successful adventure. That was a friday, so that night we had a team of DTS students from Newcastle who were on outreach come to our base and stay with us for about a week. At first when they came I wasn’t too sure about them because they were very quiet and didn’t seem to want to interact with any of us, but after a while they eventually opened up to us and I was able to get to know them actually pretty well.

Kevin Stitt was our new speaker for the week. Hew spoke on the topic of the Character and Nature of God. That week started off really frustrating. Something about the topic made just about everyone in the group start to hate Kevin, but someone mentioned to us that no matter who the speaker was, everyone hated the person who spoke on the Character and Nature of God. Once we started to realize this, we were able to focus more on figuring out what we believe because the things that Kevin was bringing up were challenging us in our faith and in what we believe in. It was overall a good week, lecture-wise. But it was a really good week mainly because we had the Newcastle team stay with us. Over the week I got really close to just about all of them. Now that they are gone I really miss them a lot. During the week while we were having lectures the Newcastle team was speaking in schools and other places advertising about the main program that they were doing which was a huge event on Friday night.

Friday night was amazing to say the least. Friday morning we woke up and found out that the power was out. That was not very good at all. As you can imagine, we needed power to do everything that we wanted to do for that evening. Everyone was praying for it to be turned back. Apparently a major power line had gone out and just about everywhere north of Auckland was without power. It was such a major line that we were told that it could take up to a few days to repair, thankfully it was fixed in a matter of hours. We were expecting somewhere between one and three hundred kids and there ended up being at least three hundred, maybe more. The whole program was amazing, first we introduced the Newcastle team and then they played a few songs for the kids. A few of the guys on the Newcastle team are in a band back home. After that my team got to play a song for everyone and yes, I played bass in front of all of them. Go me. After that they did a pretty sweet skit that I will try to add a link to it or add it to this page but i’m not too sure how that will work out, we will see. Anyways the skit was very similar to the Lifehouse skit which some of you may or may not have seen and they did an amazing job with it. After that some of the Newcastle students gave a testimony and talked to the kids for a little while. When they had finished with that one of the Newcastle students hopped on his skateboard and did some fancy tricks for the kids and they all loved it. Afterwards the gospel message was given to everyone and then anyone who wanted to talk more about it was encouraged to come to the front and talk to any of the YWAM students. That was where the real fun began, I got to lead two boys to the Lord. Pretty sweet if you ask me. Anyways that was the main event and it was a huge success. The Newcastle team had to leave the next day and that was a sad day for sure.

This past week we had Patrick Dodson as our speaker and he talked about Identity, the Character and Nature of God, Biblical Worldview, and Your Future. It was a really packed week, especially because we had two lectures a day since Patrick had to leave on Tuesday night to go to his son’s sixteenth birthday party. The week was really good, it went by way faster than I had expected it to. On Friday a few of us went to the primary school in Paparoa and held a disco/dance party for about half of the kids at the school. YWAM has had a disco/dance party for the school kids for about four years now and we were told that we had done the best out of all of them. Probably cause I was there.... just kidding. Because some of us had gone to the disco party we were able to have Saturday afternoon off to ourselves. It was amazing how quiet the base can get when you take out most of the loud people. It was a very appreciated day of rest. There are only a little over two weeks until outreach and the time keeps going by faster and faster. I can’t believe that it has gone by as fast as it has. Before I know it I will be back home with all of you. So that has been my update for this time. I hope you enjoyed it and I want to thank you for all of your prayers, it really means a lot to me. Have a wonderful day.

Another post.

Its been a while and I’m sorry about that. Things are kinda crazy around here, and super busy, not to mention intense. A lot has happened in the past few weeks. I guess it has been about three weeks since the last post, so I will start kind of where the last one ended. The week after we had gone to Mount Manaia and Ocean Beach we had Kim ... as our guest speaker and she talked to us about relationships, not relationships between guys and girls like I though it was going to be, although I think she did touch on the subject, but it was more of learning things about ourselves and our relationships with others in a non-boyfriend/girlfriend way. I learned that I am pretty much a phlegmatic but with a good bit of sanguine in there, which means that I don’t care and I like to have fun. Sounds like me, eh? On that Tuesday, instead of having base recreation time, everyone went to Pahi, which has one of the largest trees here in New Zealand. That was a lot of fun and it was a nice change to go somewhere and just have a little fun. The lecture we had that night was interesting, they split us up and we talked about girls and the girls talked about the guys. That Thursday I gave a sermonette to the group and that was actually not too bad, and for me to say that means that it went really well cause I don’t like talking in front of lots of people. On Friday instead of having an Adventure like we were supposed to we went down to a town north of Auckland and we went shopping at the Westfield mall which is one of the biggest ones on the north island. After that we went to the Waiwera hot pools. It was pretty much a small water park with some pools heated by some hot springs. It was a lot of fun. That Saturday we went to the Mauri Museum and spend the morning there. There was some interesting stuff but its just a museum so it wasn’t really that interesting to me, but thats just me. After that we had Youth Group and Epic Kids which are the youth programs that we host for the kids in the community.

Goldie Gibson was the new speaker for the weeks topic of Identity. I don’t know why but it was really hard for me to concentrate that week and I don’t know what it was that was not letting me pay attention to what Goldie had to say. What I did get out of her talks was that I need to invite God into my problems so that he can help me through them instead of thinking that I can do it on my own and that I have to go through my problems alone. I think that is really going to help me a lot. On Thursday we were finally able to relax and have a little fun, we played ultimate. It is so much fun, I love that game. I also learned a new dice game, called barboot, that is really fun. Its really simple. That night was super fun, we had a random rave, but without the drinking and drugs and everything else that goes along with them. We had lots of techno music a strobe light, fog machine, laser light and some pretty sweet colorful lights. The next day, Friday was a free day and so we were able to sleep in. I slept in until eleven, it was amazing! I haven’t slept in that late since before I got here and it felt great to do it. I want more days like that. That night was Korean Night, we had some amazing chobob and kimbob along with a few other things but I don’t remember what they were called. The kimbob is Korean sushi and it was really yummy. I didn’t realize how good sushi actually is. On Saturday we got to work, lucky us. Part of the group went to a house to help get it ready for some new renters. The lady who had lived there with her family was crazy. Let me just say that I will never let anyone staple anything to the walls in my house. There must’ve been at least four or five hundred staples that we had to full out of the walls. I think the lady went out and bought herself a new staple gun and wanted to make sure that they got their money’s worth out of it. She staples just about everything, there were even staples in the doors. That night, as a group we watched Braveheart to relax and hang out. Such a good movie.

This week started off with our lectures from Beryl Henwood. Her topic for the week was spiritual warfare which is a very interesting subject to talk about. I am learning a lot and it is really testing me on what I think and believe. Some of the things that I have seen are pretty crazy and if I weren’t a Christian and I saw what has been happening around here I would think that everyone here was loony and that they belong in some mental hospital or something but I know better than that. On Tuesday we had some pretty intense stuff happen which I won’t get into but trust me, it was crazy but amazing. Tuesday was an exciting day, Besides lectures which were pretty stodgy for the most part we play more ultimate on a field littered with cow patties. Any sport or activity just gets that much more intense when you add some cow patties into the mix. I also got a nice haircut on Tuesday, so it was a pretty good day. Wednesday went by so fast, I don’t even know what happened. One minute I’m in morning lectures the next we are done with open meeting. It was crazy. For our small group time which we always do on Wednesdays we went into town, Mungaturoto, and hung out there for a while just to get away from the base. When we got back we had open meeting which is our Wednesday night church service that the whole community is welcome to come to and hear from our speaker. So far I have had such an amazing time and I know that I wouldn’t trade this experience for anything. I love the people here and this country is amazing. I think it would be awesome to live here permanently. Anyways so that was pretty much an update of what has been going on the past few weeks.

Fun Times

Hey everyone. It is now four weeks and it only feels like I’ve been here for a few days. It is crazy how fast the time has gone by. It also feels like I’ve been here for months because of how close I have gotten with everyone, Especially this past week. There are some amazing people here and I’m so glad that God has brought us all together. Everything has been amazing and has far exceeded my previous expectations of New Zealand and DTS before I had gotten here. I have also been a lot busier than I had though that I was going to be. I had thought that there was going to be more free time but we do a lot of hard work and it seems that the work never ends. My duties that I have to do just about every day is cleaning bathrooms. It is really easy so I don’t mind that I have to do it. I usually have to clean dishes about once a week and that isn’t too bad.

And as a forewarning: in case you don’t see many blog posts it might be because they just put in a new internet system and now we have to pay for the internet that we use ourselves and it costs a lot, but I will try my best to update it as much as I can. Also time really flies here, its all going by so fast that I don’t really get many chances to take some time and write a blog for you. God has been teaching me so much here and I’ve learned so much already. I can’t wait for the rest of this trip and I am so excited that we are going to India. Me and the rest of my DTS are going to India for our outreach and since I’ve heard so much about India and the need for people to go there I am excited that we get to go there.

This past week we went on one of the adventures that are part of the DTS and so we climbed Mount Manaia which is near Whangerei [pronounced fun-ga-ray]. It was a really fantastic view from the top. There are some pictures that I took on the way up and at the top at the end of this post and there are also some pictures of the beach that we went to which was called Ocean Beach. How original, I know. But it was a beautiful beach and I am glad that we were able to go to the beach, even if it was only for a little while. I wish we could’ve spent more time there then we were able to. This week the topic was the Father Heart of God and it has been really interesting. I love our lecture time when we can learn more about God from the amazing speakers that we have like this weeks speaker, Frank Naea. Anyways thats pretty much what has been going on so far. Here are the pictures:

Mount Manaia:

Ocean Beach:

PIctures!

Here are some pictures of some of the stuff that I've been doing, where I am, and where I've been.

             

Hey everyone!

First off I would like to say sorry that I haven’t been able to post this sooner. The internet here is different than at home, here you pay for megabytes instead of the speed and apparently having fifteen people using the internet and uploading pictures really eats through the megabytes, who knew? Anyways, I arrived in New Zealand on Saturday, which was actually Friday back in the states. The plane ride here was about twelve hours long and I didn’t really sleep, I was pretty nervous actually, but I don’t know if it was because of that or not that I wasn’t able to sleep. When I arrived at around four in the morning I sat down and waited, my ride wasn’t coming until two in the afternoon. Thankfully I didn’t have to wait the entire time by myself, I ended up meeting about half of the people that were going to Oak Ridge with me by the time I was half way done with the waiting for our ride. There are so many Canadians on my DTS that it’s kinda crazy, eh? Eh is just about every other word that I hear, not kidding at all. But it’s not too bad eh?

So the past few days here on the base have been amazing. Each one has been very different but different in a good way. I will try to explain as much as I can about them but I don’t know how well that is actually going to work out. The second day here everyone went to a beautiful waterfall and we were able to jump off of it into some freezing water, it was so much fun and that was only the second day, I have so many more to go. I will be putting up pictures as soon as I can but because of the internet I'm not sure on how soon that will be. There's so much that God is doing here, it is amazing, but I will talk more about that in a later blog post. I basically just wanted to let everyone know that I have had an amazing time here so far and it has only been a few days. I am so excited for this trip and everything that I will be getting to do. I will try to keep you updated about everything that has been going on down here in New Zealand but for now this will have to do so until my next post: goodbye and God bless.