Sweet Kona

this week the students are off to Kona, a city on the Big Island, leaving us staff here at the now ridiculously quieted base. They're participating in a series of lectures given by professors at Bethel College in Redding, California as well as staying with the YWAM base there. and guys, this base is HUGE! it runs like a university and is more or less the hub of YWAM around the world. They run dozens of different schools there so it's very much a change of pace;( i.e., last year, in my Kona week, a group of 20 or so four-year-olds helped usher us into the presence of God by being the first ones to dance in a worship session of upwards of 6 hundred people. later the tiny-infant-missionaries were found praying for healing over the sick in my school; later that night, at a worship concert, i saw two senior citizens willingly crowdsurf = )
even the southern baptists dance over there! )
anyway, this week there's only ten of us or so on the base. needless to say, cooking for 10 people is somewhat easier than cooking for 60, especially when some of them are fasting this week, so it's been a welcomed reprieve. i'm still busy, but it's not the controlled chaos that it can be = )
it's been good. i've gotten a chance to just sit and hear the Lord whisper to me. being still. knowing God is God and He's got this whole life/future/world/whatever held in everlasting hands so i can stop wringing mine and freaking out.

Zephaniah 3:17

The LORD your God is with you,
He is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you,
He will quiet you with his love,
He will rejoice over you with singing."

i think i've spent a lot of my life thinking that Jesus is like some
cosmic social butterfly. but that's not quite it. He spent just as much of His earthly time, if not WAY more, in solitude and prayer as He did preaching to crowds and lovin' on kids. it's amazing to know that Yeshua is equally introverted as He is extroverted, to know for myself and all the other back-of-the-classroom, short phone calls and long emails, forget-to-wear-pants-before-i-ever-forget-my-journal kinds of people: God doesn't think we're wierd

this week hasn't been necessarily life changing nor this revelation heaven-rending and it doesn't need to be. it's just been sweet to taste and see the Lord's goodness these couple days.

Purity Siege

Every second - $3,075.64 is being spent on pornography

Every second - 28,258 Internet users are viewing pornography

Every 39 minutes: a new pornographic video is being created in the United States

12% of total websites are porn related;

there are 116,000 search requests daily for child pornography and over 100,000 websites that offer illegal child pornography

90% of 8 - 16yr olds have viewed porn online (most while doing their homework)

(stats taken from http://www.internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/internet-pornography-statistics.html)

...this IS happening and someone needs to stand up. it started small. we figured only 7 or 8 of us would be there. we'd meet in a home. maybe have someone play guitar. we planned to do whatever the Lord laid on our hearts. only days before the event, a local church offered us a place to meet and last friday night about 60 people gathered in Waipuna Chapel, worshipping and praying for purity on Maui and in ourselves as well, crying out to a God who can heal our bleeding nation, who gives grace to the humble and who wants so badly meet us knowing that without pure hearts we can't (psalm 15). we continued for two hours or so, one person taking the microphone and leading us intercession, followed by another and then another and so on...

the next morning, roughly 30 us were there, a hundred yards or so outside of a porn shop that recently opened in Kihei. two of our group went into the shop to meet with the owners and explain what we were doing there, crying out to God for His grace to abound and His love to fill the shop and all who go near it. they explained we weren't standing in condemnation and we weren't. many of us had struggled with pornography in the past and none of us more fallen or finite than the other. we all need God. we all need redemption. the owner, to our surprise, had no problems with us being there and asked us to lay hands on him and pray for him on the spot (in a porn shop!!! HOW AMAZING IS THE LORD!) we prayed for him, his family, that he'd prosper and that God would just reveal Himself more and more to him.
outside we stood in a line and fasted our eyesight for an hour, wrapping snow white linen as representative of righteousness. we prayed. we worshipped. we cried out for God to simply come down, to have mercy. the book of Ezekiel tells us that God is looking for people to stand in the gap so that's what we did. our sin reaps destruction. our sins of pornography, abortion, homosexuality, sexual perversion WILL have consequences and God is desperately longing for someone to care about our nation as much as He does. the cops came. they wanted us to leave the premises because we were a distraction to traffic (understandable) but then they noticed they recognized some of us. a fellow officer of theirs teaches self-defense classes and is a Christ follower. some of his students were leading this purity siege and immediately the officers hearts were softened. they told us it was no problem and if we needed anything just give them a call.

i don't know how many cars drove by. i don't know how many people honked their horns, how many of them for what we were doing, how many against, how many were just wondering what the heck was going on = ) and it doesn't matter. the point is we stood and God showed up.

we are hopefully going to continue doing this once a month at various places, sometimes for God to end pornography and sex trafficking, sometimes to end abortion, but always for God to pour out His mercy. it wasn't a protest and i pray it never appears to be. this is what we're doing to stand in the gap for Maui.

Aloha!

Aloha!
I figured it was time to find a new tool for updating all my supporters, friends and family as to what God is doing out here in Maui, HI. The Lord has been so hugely active this last month, there's NO WAY i could cram it all into one little update letter; so i've conformed to the world-wide-web-world of blogging. = ) Each Friday i'll try and give quick update with pictures, videos, poems, what the students are up to, what the base is up to, how to pray, (how much i miss ya'll!) and of course weblogs of what the Lord and I are up to here with YWAM Maui

So let the up-dating begin! = )
I recently started my two year committment on staff at a missions base in Maui, Hawaii. Every year Youth With a Mission (YWAM) Maui disciples and commissions dozens of students in six month intervals. The students, in a coconut shell, participate in lectures (teachings ranging from: who God is/what He's like all the way to worldview and how to share your faith to change the world), communtiy service, daily worship and intercession times and eventually are sent out to parts of Southeast Asia to apply what they've learned. It takes a lot of people to make all this happen and it is my privilege to serve the Lord best through serving these students for this season soooooo.....
currently i help to cook 50 meals, 3x a day and wash a whole lot of dishes (whilst occasionally chasing cockroaches and geckos out of the kitchen). While challenging, not my mention my culinary deficiencies, it's honestly been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
As Christ-followers we often talk about serving the Lord but that always carries with it the stereotype that this must be done in a pastoring position oran overseas excursion remeniscent of an Indiana Jones flick but seldom do we consider making waffles as something that could be done "as unto the Lord".
There are somewhere around 25 students here right now participating in our Discipleship Training School (DTS) and it's been amazing to just be here with them, to talk with them to worship with them and pray wiith them, to cook for them, to clean up after them = )
They're an awesome school, all of them after the Lord's heart and it's been sweet just getting to serve them so directly like this (plus if any of them get on my nerves, i control what goes into their food, muahahaha! just kidding... kind of) = )