So, I am in Perth now, it has been good. Like I said I might in the last blog I did get over my dislike of change pretty quickly. I mean I do miss home now more then I ever have when traveling before, but I think that is just because I have more at home to miss then I ever had before. But for the most part I have been enjoying everything here and am happy to be here.
I have been here for about two and a half weeks now, so I will just start at the beginning and get you caught up.
In Sydney I missed my flight so I got stuck on a later flight so what was supposed to be a two hour layover turned into more like a 6 hour layover. So I got to Perth much later in the day then I was expecting. Right after I got to base I just threw my stuff in the room I was staying in and went to dinner, then right after dinner the rest of the school was going to play some games in a nearby park, so I joined them for that. Then I just went to bed. For the next few days there wasn't really anything planned, the school hadn't official started yet, so I was just hanging out on base. I went to explore Perth with a few different people, and we played capture the flag one night, and I got a lot of unpacking and stuff done. So the first few days were quite good.
Then the school official began so we had a few days of orientation. Orientations and all the paper work we had to do was good, they spread it out over a few days and did a quite good job of making it fun and not overwhelming. The main interesting thing that happened during orientation was a scavenger hunt type game. It was more of moving from station to station playing games then it was doing a scavenger hunt, but it was a fun way of showing students a few different areas around the base, and it was good for meeting new people.
Speaking of meeting new people, before I left MT the school made a facebook page and asked people to post something about themselves so I knew a little about some of the other students. A little while before leaving I was talking to a close friend and I mentioned the facebook page and told them a little about the other students, one of the things they said was "I am so jealous of all the cool people you are going to get to meet." To be honest at the time my thought was "yes all these people sound very cool, too cool actually, what if they don't ever want to do anything with me because I am not cool like them." I am very happy to report that that has not been the case at all. All of the people here have been amazing and very inclusive. The people here as a whole have been consistently much nicer then people I have met anywhere else. Everyone doing my same school is so great, I wish I could write a post telling you all about everyone of them and how awesome they each are, however I don't have time for that, and it would probably get boring for you, so I won't do that. But trust me these people are awesome and you should be jealous of me for getting to meet them. There are also several hundred people here and only twenty something doing my school, so I meet a lot of other people as well. It is seriously kind of unreal how nice everyone is, maybe its just that people from the U.S. are not as friendly as people from other countries and that's part of the reason, or maybe YWAM is just special, but literally everyone here is so much more real about caring about people, and including people.
After orientation we started our first week of classes. The first week was really only half a week because the first few days were orientation. So I think we only had six hours of lecture the first week. Though it was a very good six hours. I was not really expecting the lectures to be that great, I knew a lot of people who thought YWAM was a good organization and did a lot of good, but who said YWAMs teaching was not that great. I had also met a lot of people who did YWAM and their knowledge of the Bible seemed a little less then expected. So I was pretty sure that YWAMs teaching must not be that great, and that people here probably wouldn't know the Bible that well. After the first week of lectures though I did feel much better about the classes. YWAM does teach much more on practical application and how to do certain things then they do about the Bible and specific theology. So it is very different lecture content then a Bible college or any sort of theology related degree would have, but I could tell by some of the things the teacher pointed out that he did know the Bible as well as many of the Bible college professors. So the content of the lectures is very different, which I think is why many of the YWAM people I met seemed to not have as much theological knowledge as I had expected someone who spent three months in lectures to have. Also they do have an extra hour or two of lecture on Monday nights that is much more like a Bible college lecture. So after the week I was much more confident that they money I spent to come here will be put to good use and that I will learn new things.
Another thought I had is that the people I would meet in college tended to be "theology nerds" we all loved studying the Bible, and Biblical languages and cultures, and theologies, and philosophy, and what exactly certain words meant and why a word having a slightly different meaning can actually change so much, and hard theological questions, and a good debate. The people here are not really theology nerds though, they all still love God, and it is very evident in their live, as I said everyone here is so different from the rest of the world. However, they just aren't really into studying theology. There was a time (a few weeks ago I suppose) were I would have thought that of course anyone who is actually a christian would want to study the Bible and theology in depth and of course every christian would want to go to college to study the Bible, and that if they didn't they probably did not actually know God. My thought is how could you know something of this nature to be true and not want to study it as much as possible. But I have been realizing that people just have different personalities and that not everyone wants to know exactly how everything works and not everyone wants to study everything, and that that is okay. For example to me the idea of driving in a car everyday and having no idea how the car worked, or what all the parts were and what they did was crazy, so I learned about cars. But there are people who drive cars everyday and have no idea what anything in their engine is, or what it is doing, and learning about cars is just so boring to them, they have zero interest in knowing how their car works, they just want to drive it, and that is okay. Its the same with Christianity, to me the thought of being a Christian and not knowing the Bible as well as I possible could and not knowing the answers to many of the hard questions in the Bible was crazy. But there are people out there who are very real Christians and have a very good relationship with Christ who just don't care what words like axiology mean and who just don't want to study theology, but who are still Christians. I guess it took me coming here and seeing it played out in peoples lives for me to realize this obvious reality. However there are still a few theology nerds around base, and there are second level schools at YWAM that do a very good job of teaching the Bible, and there are a lot of people around here who know the Bible very well. So all that to say that the first week of lectures made me much more happy about being at YWAM, and much more confident in their teaching.
So the first week was good, then that Saturday all the schools did something fun as a school. The school I am doing (4wd DTS) and one other school (YP DTS) drove about an hour and a half to a place called the Moore river. It is a spot where the Moore river ends, then there is about an eighty foot wide sand bar then there is the ocean. So it is a very pretty spot there was a very nice contrast between the color of the Moore river and the ocean. Also it was my first time being to a beach, and being in the ocean. I am not a huge fan of either, but it was still a new experience, and I am glad I got to experience it. We spent pretty much the entire day there, then we had a BBQ dinner. Then on the way home we stopped at a spot that had these big sand dunes. We had to walk a little ways then swim across a river, then climb up the sand dunes to get there, but it was probably worth it. After getting there it was quite pretty on top, and then they had boogie boards that people would slide down the sand dunes on. I didn't actually try going down the dunes but it was quite entertaining to watch other people. Then we just drove back to the base.
Then we started the second week of lectures, and we had the first week of our regular schedule. A quick run down of the daily schedule is: morning exercises from 6:00 – 6:30 am, breakfast from 6:45 – 7:30, morning chores from 8:00 – 8:30, worship from 8:30 – 9:30, Classes from 10:00 – 12:30, Lunch from 12:30 – 1:30, work duties from 1:30 – 3:30, dinner at 5:30. There are a few changes like several nights we have stuff after dinner, and some days we have stuff other then worship in the morning, and Wednesday we don't have morning exercises, but for the most part they keep us pretty busy. Anyway the class for week two is the nature and character of good. It was a very good week, as already said I was not really expecting much from YWAM but I would say that the second week was pretty life changing. There was not that much in the lectures themselves that was actually new to me, I had heard quite a bit of it before in college, but it impacted me in a whole new way. I knew all this stuff before, and I believed most of it before (I will admit I had quite a bit of unbelief though) but it was a totally new experience. Like I knew God was a loving God, I knew God loved people, I knew God loved me. I knew that, it was in the Bible so I “believed” it. I truly thought I believed all these things about God, that God is loving, God is merciful, God is just, God is humble, etc. etc. I tried to believe these things, but somehow I guess I never really did believe them, I never really did understand the full extent of what these things meant. The lectures were good but they weren't anything new to me, but God revealed himself in a whole new way to me, God revealed just how real He is, just how much He really is still working, how much He really does love His people. Its like I was blinded to the truth of these things before, I knew all of them, I thought I believed all of them, it was like if all these things where objects and I was sitting in the room with all these things in the room, but I was blind so I couldn't see them. I knew these things were in the room, I believed that they were in the room, I might even bump into them sometimes when I tried to walk around the room, but I couldn't see them I couldn't really understand them, I would question whether they really existed or not. Deep down I knew they were there, I just couldn't really know what these things were. This week was like I could suddenly see.
After the last class we had an “application” I am not going to go into detail about what the application was but basically it was a time of prayer and worship. It was during this application that God revealed Himself to me in an awesome new way. Maybe I could say that this was when I really met God. To use another illustration it was kind of like if I knew a lot about a person, and maybe even had sent this person a email or two before, but never met him face to face, like I might think I know this person but then when I meet him in person he could be a lot different then I thought. Like for a more specific example the person leading my school. I knew quite a bit about him, there was information about him on the website and in the school handbook and stuff so I knew about him, and I had actually communicated with him quite a bit, I sent and received tons of emails with him, I had even seen pictures of him. I probably would have said I had a pretty good idea of who he was. But then when I meet him in person I realized there was so much I got wrong about him, he was so much different then I thought. He was taller, he was older, he had a different personality then I was imagining and so on. I would say this last week has been like meeting God face to face for the first time. I mean obviously I am not trying to say that I actually met God face to face, but its like I knew all these facts about God and I believed all these facts about God, and I had communicated with God and I genuinely thought I knew God. But then I met God for real this week, and He was so much different then I imagined. He is so much better then I thought. I mean I don't know if I would say I was saved this week, I think I knew God well enough before, I think I was saved before. But I would say this week was definitely life changing, as life changing as if I had been saved this week. After this week I will never view God the same as I did before. Which means I will never view the world the same as I did before. Also I thought I was fully committed to God before, I would have said that I wanted God to use me in life however He wanted. I would have said I would gladly follow God where ever He lead me, but I am not sure how true that was. This week I have said what I have said many times before, which is that my life is fully Gods, my life is not my own but His. I have said this before though I think there has been some part of me that never really believed that, I was never truly committed to it. This week though I think I can finally say with complete honesty that my life is not mine but His, and that my life will be infinitely better this way then if I tried to rule my own life.
So, in short, I have only been here about 2 weeks, but it has already changed my life. I also have gone from feeling like I was being lead by God to do this YWAM thing even though I thought it would be horrible, to being quite excited for what is to come in the next 20 weeks.
There are many other things I could still add to this blog but since it is already quite long I will wrap it up here with one last thing, finances. I have had to spend more money on things then I was expecting so I could still use money if any of you would like to contribute to me. Also one of the staff for the school I am doing is also currently trying to raise money to stay here, I believe she is around $500 short of her goal still. So if anyone would like to donate to me or the staff, you can continue to send money. You can send money to my church. 5554 Grand Ave, Billings, MT 59106 just note that the money is for me, or you could send money to my parents and they can put the money straight into my bank account and that way it will get here faster and with less fee's then if you send it to the church, however if you send it to the church you can get a tax receipt. If you want to send money to my parents let me know and I will send you their address. Also if you want to give to the staff just let me know that they money is for me and not her and I will get it to her.
If you have actually read this whole thing, thank you so much for caring enough to read about my life!! Also remember comments are appreciated!
