Wow, it's hard to believe the students left almost a month ago and we were flung headlong into the Spring quarter. It's been a season of both rest and preparation.
At the beginning of each quarter we hold staff training sessions to equip new staff as well as to remind old staff as to why we're here doing this, to disciple students and spread the Gospel for the glory of God. Now since there were no new staff coming on this quarter we decided to do some team-building and what better way to come together than camping?! So the 20 or so staff all packed up and went to Hana (a rural part of Maui and one of the top ten most beautiful cities in America) and camped out by the ocean, did some worship and mostly hung with the Lord and eachother.
(centipede- aka demon creature from the lowest depths of the infernal abyss. A friend of mine woke up to this little darling crawling on her face. You don't wanna get bit by one of these guys, if you do: curtains.)
that's more or less how i'd sum up this quarter so far: enjoying the presence of God and the mirth of eachother. A woman in one of the churches we go to just lost her home due to the declining economy and had to move everything to a house she owned out in Hana. The house hasn't been used in quite a while and needed MAJOR cleaning so we volunteered. Two weekends in Hana, who'd pass that up?
We spent all day Friday cleaning this house, killing bugs and renovating it's enormous lawn. It reminded me of a home my family and i tore down in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. That evening the guys slept out in tents on the lawn and got up early the next morning to enjoy Hana in all it's glory. We saw a few waterfalls, swam through an underground cave and took in the sights.
Life on the base has been peaceful and sweet, giving me more time to just be with the Lord each morning and evening. Revival Maui has had a few Rumbles as well as a Life Siege and a Purity Siege since I last wrote and is blooming into a pretty amazing ministry. We keep having more and more people, of all generations, showing up each month just to worship God and pray on behalf of Maui.
As i said earlier, this season is one of both rest and preparation, and as i said in an earlier blog, i have some exciting news. I have been asked to staff the Summer DTS. In just a little over a month, the DTS Coordinators along with myself and my co-leader Chelsea will be pouring ourselves directly into a team of students. For three months we will disciple and equip them to bring them to do the same both at home and abroad. At the end of this 3 month lecture phase, Chelsea and I will lead them off to the depths of Southeast Asia and they'll spend the next three months imparting all that they've learned. And let me tell you, I'm so excited for this opportunity! It's why i'm here. I don't have all the details just yet, like how many students or where our outreach will be but when i do, you'll be sure to know. Until then, i covet your prayers for the task ahead of me, Chelsea, the summer school and this team of students.
Alas, we're rapidly approaching the end of the Winter Quarter here at YWAM Maui which means job changes for some base staff, new staff arriving, less rainy weather (hallelujah!) and most of all Outreach for our Winter DTS students. It's amazing to see how far they've come in only three months and so exciting to see their fiery anticipation to "go and make disciples" and pour out just as we as staff have poured into them.
-team Borneo-
It feels like just the other day, we were running to and fro from the airport to pick up 30 or so terrified twenty-somethings and now they're headed into the core of Southeast Asia. I'll provide a brief aperçu as to what the last three months have looked like. At our Maui YWAM base and at every YWAM base throughout the world, we accept students, also from all over the world, to come and train. Our primary school is called a Discipleship Training School (DTS). It boils down to three months of intensive spiritual cultivation in the students followed by a three month outreach to "put feet to the faith" they'd just invested themselves in. So in the several months, the lecture phase, we bring in speakers also from all over the world to come and share what God has shown them. We cover topics ranging from pre-evangelism and basic Christianity, to Hearing the Voice of God (take it from a born-and-raised southern-baptist, prophecy is always an... "intense" topic, much like dancing probably would be, hehehe...) and Godly models for relationships (platonic, fraternal and romantic alike). Believe me when i say it's an intense schedule. There's only a little time each weekday that isn't fore-ordained for ministry.
-team China-
This group of students is particularly close to my heart. I've been so blessed to work with them in the kitchen, or help to hone their gifts in musical worship, to spend my weekends with, or just stay up late in the guy's house (the "Testoster-home") and talk to. They came to the base already annointed people and after three months, you can see such visible changes in their walks with the Lord. It's so amazing to see people that you've spent so much time praying for laying hands on you and praying for you because you're sick or look sad or simply because they felt like the Lord asked them to. Not one of them isn't going on Outreach which in itself is a miracle as there was a huge financial need (thankfully God operates from a seperate economy). We saw thousands of dollars come in for these students, some of which may have been the Lord's physical hand directly (if you haven't read my previous blog "hilarious givers", check it out, sweet stuff!). Every second of time spent on these students has come back ten-fold (turns out investing in people works every time... well unless you're Madoff...).
On Tuesday, we send out the three teams of students to their outreach locations (China, Borneo and Bangladesh). For the next three months they'll be trekking through jungles and sharing the gopsel, or teaching in underground churches (which, much to my dissapointment and possibly yours I'll inform you, are not typically "under" ground). = ) So keep them in your prayers, that God would strengthen them and bless them, that He'd give them His words and His hands to serve, that many would come to know the infinite and personal God of Heaven and that above all He'd receive all the glory.
As for me, this next quarter means a much-needed season of rest on the base. I'm still working in the kitchen however the mouths to feed have dropped for 60+ down to 12 or so. This also gives me more time to serve the base in worship and our local churches, to soak up and pour into the other staff here and also to work more with Revival Maui (also some blog stuff you should check out, "Purity Siege").
-Chelsea and I's birthday Thai food excursion extravaganza!-
I also have some very exciting news to share with you for upcoming days in my YWAM life but that can wait for now. love you all and i miss you.
i've seen the Lord provide before. in small ways, in big ways in subtle ways and obvious ways in ways asked for and, by human standards, ways that are just plain wierd but never like He is lately.
Like all schools, this one has some students that can't afford outreach, a mystery both daunting and exciting that's rapidly approaching our avid missionary-to-be's. some need only a couple hundred dollars and some a couple thousand to make this trip possible and turns out God's not even remotely phased by this "deficit". this is just a couple testimonies as to what God's up to. there's a white board in the middle of our lecture hall/family room/dining area/foozeball arena/anything-else-social area. On it is a list of ten or so names of students who owe money for outreach. The leaders wanted people to know who needed what so the staff and students would know how to pray as well as how to give. almost hourly, i get to watch with a smile as the numbers go down (it's almost like the stock market, except no smile there).
there's a girl here who owes a couple thousand dollars before she can head off to Bangladesh. every penny she gets is put toward outreach and she's been praying like crazy for God to move. She found 800 dollars placed in her journal the other afternoon. Immediately, the Lord asked her to give it someone else, so she did. no one knew she gave this money away... (well i mean except for me... and now all of you) = ) In only a day, she received another 800 dollars from various anonymous people on the base, some staff, some students. I love that. If we keep open hands open, God will always fill them. He's just good like that.
another girl here was blessed with every dime she would need for outreach before she even got here, which is amazing. Normally, the students send out tons of support letters, make heaps of phonecalls, scrounge under couch cushions, collecting each dollar sometimes up to the day of their flight. She wrote support letters too. and the money she received, she gave away to those who needed it.
another guy here (this one is my favorite) had a debt of3,374 big ones. This is before the white board was even posted, nobody really knew how much everyone owed. He was going to bed and there was only one other student in the room. He starts to climb into his bunk and he sees a $100 dollar bill sitting on his pillow. He turned and asked the student if he had given it to him. the student said no and he didn't know who did. he started at getting into his bed again but in the same spot as before, he saw a few more $100 dollar bills. Now he's freakin' out. "dude, was this you?" "no man" he felt something at his feet and looked down to see a small stack of even more hundreds. the two students sat on a bed and counted it all out: 20 of them in all. TWO. THOUSAND. DOLLARS. right there and no one knows how it got there or how he didn't notice it all at once. in all honesty, myself, this student and some others i've talked to on base, believe that the Lord just stuck His good arm down into the finite and placed a 100 dollar bill on his pillow. When he saw how excited His beneficiary was, He must have thought "ah what the heaven, i'll give him some more."
a week later, a thousand more came in the mail for him from someone who couldn't afford it but somehow did.3000 dollars in one week!
{you know what the craziest part is. as i was typing this, there was a knock on my room door. it was this student. he asked if i could come talk to him. He wanted to pray and prophesy over me, you know what he ended up praying for? my finances. he had NO IDEA i was writing this.}
God's just so flippin' cool it blows me away sometimes.
one of the words that our word worship comes from is proskuneo. it means to incline towards in attempt to kiss. it's paints a picture of gentle proximity to the Infinite God. intimacy without impediment.
i know this is a cheesy example but you know in the movie Hitch: will smith is trying to explain to...um... the other guy... how he should approach kissing the girl (who's oddly named after an allergy medication.. not relevant, sorry... but it is wierd though right? anyway...)
he tells him to lean in real close. "you go 90, she goes ten."
i'm starting to think that God is permanently bent over, inclined in at 90% just waiting for us to respond to His first move, to lean in only a little so He can sweep us away in an infinite instance.
lately, you could say God and I have been doing a lot of kissing.
I'm getting to lead or help lead almost four times a week this last month or so: twice a week there's base worship (one large-ish and typically louder and one that's more creative, quiet and chill), every tuesday night for the Winter DTS intercession times ( it's called a rumble. it's basically an hour or so of nonstop worship and focused prayer ), then often at the local churches on sundays and friday nights, and then once a month we do a HUGE rumble and pray for purity on Maui.
my heart here isn't at all to brag. i'm replete with limitations when it comes to music. i just remember way back to 7th grade Sam just starting to learn guitar; the shy kid who only dreamed of playing for his Creator with maybe 10 people around once in a while, now leading all the time for anywhere to upwards of 100 people. it's cool to just see the Lord working my simple, small dreams into His infinite plan and i didn't have to seek these opportunities out. He didn't have to, He's got a lot bigger of an agenda than writing songs for me and yet He, the Creator, loves creating. i don't know, He's just so flippin' good...
wow, it's been a while. You have my deepest apologies. the students came back from Kona a few weeks back and again we, the staff, were plunged headlong into the beautiful bedlam that is YWAM life. From the quiet solace of only a handful of people to feed on base to the confused, animal frenzy at the watering hole, i thus re-began my kitchen duties (now clad in a sweet new apron i might add!). = ) In all honesty, the students were really missed. They are such a heartening school. At every chance to serve they do. We never have any complaints from the students working in the kitchen, they're never late, they don't slack off. They've brought so much refreshment to us as staff that we were eager to have them return. Shortly after, the students from the Fall DTS 2008 returned from their outreach. As God's plan would have it, the locations they went on outreach were the same that our Winter school is headed to in only 5 or so weeks (AH!). From what i could tell, the returning school brought copious amounts of encouragement to the winter students. We held a testimony night and hosted all the staff and both schools. Each Fall DTS team (China, Bangladesh and Borneo) shared a little as to what God did on their outreaches. There were multiple testaments of lives surrendered to Christ, CRAZY stories of spiritual warfare and even some testimonies of supernatural healings. God is obviously up to something in this unwraveling world. We ended the night with worship and both schools prayed and ministered to eachother. It was awesome to witness and honestly, just what my heart needed. It never hurts to be reminded why I'm here: to know God, make Him known. Love God, Love People. Pretty simple. but i'm pretty forgetful.
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 cosmicsocialbutterfly. 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.
...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.
welcome to my blog! i figured it'd be an easy way for friends, family and supporters to keep up with me and what God's doing here as well as give me means to hear from ya'll. below you should find updated testimonies, prayer requests, pictures, video and any number of the other stuff i'll put on here thanks for visiting
i want my life to be spent chasing Yeshua. to love God and love people. that's it. i like things simple.
i love art, all forms of it. music and poetry especially. i'm a fan of wierd clothes and hats and scarves and such. i'm more or less a hippie minus the drugs, not showering, sweet van and liberal slant... ok so i guess i'm not a hippie.
