April was an eventful month for me. At the end of March I left Adelaide and traveled to Melbourne (Southeast of Adelaide) to spend 2 weeks there doing a course on leadership - once I finish all the paperwork and assignments I will be officially certified to lead DTSes. The course gave me a lot of good insights into leadership in general, as well as time-management skill
s etc. Even with all of that, perhaps my favorite part was getting to know the other students. We were from about 5 or 6 different YWAM bases, so it was really good to network with them and hear about different ministries and visions that other bases have. YWAM Australia is doing a lot of
amazing things and impacting lots of people, it’s an honor to know these people and be a part of it.
After Melbourne, I had a bit of an adventure with planes and airports (my last blog entry tells the whole story), but when I finally got to Brisbane, I met up with a team from Adelaide and we all ran a NIKO camp there for a week. NIKO is an outdoors challenge that aims to help the participants grow in their leadership abilities and their relationships with God. We had a fun group of high school students from YouthStreet Townsville participating. To add to the planned challenges of the week, the first day we had a quite major rain storm and had to change quite a few aspects of the camp due to that. We were all quite a bit soaked and some of the kids had a hard time, but overall the participants (and staff) took it all in stride and enjoyed the rest of the week. Although we didn’t know any of the kids beforehand, the staff that had come with them said that many grew in leaps and bounds and they were really excited to see the kids stepping up onto things they hadn’t expected. I personally have learned a lot from NIKO and was excited to see others benefit from it as well.
After the week in Brisbane, we headed back towards Adelaide, stopping for 3 days in a small town called Morgan to run a kids’ program at a church camp going on there. We had about 15 kids, all there with their families, who we entertained while their parents were listening to teaching. We enjoyed spending time with the kids and in the afternoons had the opportunity to go tubing on the river nearby. I had a lot of fun reliving parts of my childhood at my grandparents’ cabin - I even got to
go fishing, although we didn’t catch anything. It did make me miss the lakes in Minnesota!
After being back home in Adelaide for only 3 days, I left again to be part of a rally in Melbourne. The rally, called “The Rescue” was being put on by an organization called Invisible Children, and we were raising awareness about the situation in Northern Uganda. For more than 20 years, children in this area have been kidnapped and forced to fight in a war they have nothing to do with. There has been little media attention or public knowledge about this situation, and for the last 3 or so years Invisible Children has been fighting it. I really believe in this cause and wanted to be a part of it. About 65 of us took a bus from Adelaide to Melbourne to be part of the rally, and it did catch a bit of media attention. We filled the night with listening to political figures speak, learning more about the issue, and an impromptu percussion/dance session. The event was actually happening around the world and in Chicago they held out until Oprah put them on her show - pretty exciting! (Pictures from the event on the right. If you’re interested in more information, visit invisiblechildren.com)
Needless to say, after all that traveling I was pretty well spent and happy to be back home in Adelaide. It’s funny how being away for a month in another part of the country has become commonplace for me at the moment, but I’m glad that life is never boring!
LEARNING
The last 2+ years that I’ve been a part of YWAM have been a constant process of learning and growing, and the last month or two have been no exception. As I’ve really been setting my own schedule and for the most part organizing all the ministry I’ve been doing, I’ve been learning to manage my time, think in details, manage people and plan ahead. Those have been really important lessons to learn and will be imperative, I’m sure, as I move forward in ministry.
One of the main things I’ve been working on (and learning from) lately is school seminars, where we go into a school for an hour or so assembly and talk about any range of topics from a Christian perspective. We did the first one of those at the end of April, talking about our identity and value from God’s perspective. I thought it went really well, I had a great team with various backgrounds and we were all able to share from our own experiences. I have another lined up at the end of May and lots of other schools that are interested in us coming to talk to their students. I’m really excited about this prospect, and really amazed that we have this opportunity to go into public schools and talk to kids about what we believe. I’ve had to learn very quickly how to run these, how to get people together to help me out and how to engage the kids, but I feel that every time I have an opportunity to lead a seminar or assembly or ministry opportunity, it goes better than the last, so that is encouraging!
The more I do youth ministry, the more I do feel passionate about, so I’m still talking to God about where he’s taking me with that. As I’ve mentioned in other updates, I first got into focusing on youth to support my friend, Laura, but she is still in America support raising, so that has caused me to re-evaluate where my heart really is. I have been more and more excited about the prospects that we have regarding the youth in Adelaide, so we’ll see what God does with that. I am praying regularly with Damian, another staff who wants to help with youth ministry, about options and ideas. We will see where God takes us!
Outside of “work” hours, God is still teaching me a lot in my personal life. After growing up in a very Christian environment, I’m finding myself needing to ask real questions about what I believe and why I believe it, and what God says about things that I take for granted. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been talking a lot to my friend in Brisbane about spirituality and what I believe. It’s been a great experience, because I find that so many of the “answers” that I offer make sense to me, but they aren’t quite enough for her. I am realizing there are so many real life issues that I haven’t ever really thought through. Although it is the truth, saying “because God says so” isn’t always enough for people who don’t know God. I’m glad that I’m having to think through these issues because I know that once I’ve wrestled with things I’ll be so much stronger. I want to be able to really talk to people about God and his love and what he wants for their lives and feel like I have real answers to offer them. God is taking me on a journey, and I’m really happy to be challenged and messed up if it means being closer to him and more ready to impact other people’s lives.
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