let's catch up

So, I've been kind of absent when it comes to keeping you all updated over the last few weeks. First let me apologize, the days have been way longer than I expected. It's been good though, I'm still trying to fully unpack a lot of what I've learned, but I can already see changes.

One of the biggest things is the way I start my day. To say I'm not a morning person is a huge understatement. I despise waking up early. I could stay up until 2 or 3 am without batting an eye, but before I got here waking up before 8 am was just something I wouldn't do. Here breakfast is 6:30-7:15. You can see we have a problem. Something else that was missing was a daily quiet time, like really diving into the bible. I was reading through different books but if I didn't have time one morning it wasn't a big deal. Here, I'm awake by 6:30 most days with a goal of waking up at 6. I actually enjoy my morning quiet time, and I can see the difference in my day if I don't have it. There's just something about starting the day off reading the word. I can't really explain it, but if you don't have a morning quiet time I would strongly suggest you start.

Going along with that I would just say that I've seen the bible in a new way. I'm not sure why but most American Christians just don't read the bible. Then we say things like "I'm just waiting for God to tell me what he wants me to do." A speaker of ours recently said it this way: "sitting at the table with your Bible closed and expecting to hear God is like walking around with your phone off and complaining you haven't gotten any text messages". I'm definitely just as guilty in this, and in the months prior to coming to YWAM I started reading my bible more, but like I said now my daily time in the word is in the hours not minutes column. It's wild to see how it speaks to things in my life every day, like to the point it's freaky. I'll read a passage and then it will directly apply to something that happens later that day or happened the day before. The old Testament now has value in my mind haha. Such a crazy thing to say, but it was so hard to read in the past, and I would never voluntarily open my bible to it. We had a bible reading plan that spent 9 weeks in the old testament and working through how everything in it points to Jesus. If you don't know the old Testament you can't fully understand everything Jesus did or said. I'm being pretty generic with this stuff I know but if you want to know more just shoot me an email or comment.

We leave in 10 days, it's hard to believe 3 months has passed so fast. This community that I live in is amazing. The kids have it the best I think. There are a few playgrounds on campus and most of the family housing is around them. Almost all families just have open doors with kids running in and out of them constantly. All the parents talk about how their kids just play outside so much more here than they did back home. They don't care about toys, lots of toys are just left outside in the parks and get played with by whoever is around at the moment. There are kids everywhere and they are all friends, it's just an amazing model of community living. It's hard to find anywhere to be alone but the tradeoff is being able to walk around see people you know and join them in hanging out. I'm not sure if I mentioned before but I live with 6 other guys, 7 of us share 1 bathroom. Surprisingly it works haha.

The sunsets here are unreal. Our Cafeteria sits high on the hill, and is a giant open air building with a clear line of sight to the sun setting over the ocean. Almost every day of the week I get to watch the sun set over the ocean after dinner, it's something I don't take for granted. I've seen the "elusive" green flash multiple times a week.

Something else I didn't think I would do much is go the prayer room. We have a room that is open 24 hours and is dedicated to prayer and worship. Most nights there are a few hours of live worship music being played. Occasionally we have "burns" where they pray for something non stop for a set period of time, usually 24 hours. I thought the idea was cool but didn't see myself going there much, but now I go there multiple times a week. It's just a nice meditative to place to intentionally go to focus on prayer and time alone with God.

Mondays are the best day of the week. We start the morning with worship at 8am for an hour, then we gather at 6:30 pm for "ministry night". It's basically 2-2.5 hours of worship with the intention being to get close to God. I can say I've had some amazing Holy Spirit encounters on these nights. It's wild, like crazy moves of God, hard to explain kind of stuff. I'm usually kind of by myself in the darkest part of the room with tears running down my face and my eyes closed hearing from God. It's one of those things I always wondered, how do you hear God's voice, and honestly I can't really tell you. But I know that I've heard him speak to me on those nights, I've seen things with my eyes closed. I've had conversations, asked questions and gotten answers, prayed deep prayers, received conviction, seen places, I just don't know how to describe it. But I LOVE Monday nights, it will be the thing I miss the most about this place. The worship there has been so next level. Yll the skills of our worship leaders are amazing, they are such talented musicians. The "set lists" are super loose, it's more like lets have a few songs on deck but see where the spirit moves, and it just turns out so good. They are so humble, they all play and sing together and nobody is singled out, it's another thing that's hard to describe, but I think we are going to be live streaming the worship nights so maybe you can just watch them soon. One thing that I think stands out the most is "singing in the spirit", basically the worship team just plays music and you sing what's on your heart. Sometimes I just sing melodies without words, sometimes I sing words from my heart, sometimes the whole crowd just starts singing in a chorus in unison. It's so beautiful when the crowd is singing louder than the worship leaders and I love that our leaders like it that way. It's just God's people blasting praise towards heaven. I think that's what makes the atmosphere so different, it's undeniably authentic. You're not just singing words on a screen you're singing words from your heart with your eyes towards heaven, it's impossible for the tangible spirit of God not to be in the room. Honestly I want to take this type of worship back with me. There has been nights where the music or leader was just so far from normal and not what I like, one in particular that was really hard for me to find a heart of worship and not criticism. On that night I just got so convicted by the words of our speaker the previous week: "if you can't lead yourself into revival how do you expect to lead anyone else?" So that was real. But it was a great experience because, let's be honest, sometimes the worship music just isn't "good". It's in those times that we need to remind ourselves what it's really about. You can lead a horse to water but you can't force it to drink. It's funny though, because on those days where I'm just "not feeling" the music, if I really press in, pray and draw near to God my heart always comes around.

There's a lot more I could add but I think I'll just do it in another post, this one is pretty long already.