It's All About Jesus!

"Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing...By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full." John 15:4-5, 8-10


This week has been absolutely incredible... and I won't be able to fully describe it all to you! The Lord was moving so powerfully throughout our whole group, releasing love and revelation and freedom! Way to much to write about it all but I'll give you some highlights!
Jeff Reid was our speaker this week. Him and his wife, Bethany, started Comm Trans (the DTS I'm doing, Community Transformations) a few years ago and are now living in a Comm Trans community in a township outside of Cape Town, South Africa. It was really cool to hear how the vision and values of the DTS started and what we're all about. It can be summed up in a few things:
1. Intimacy unto Fruitfulness
2. Authentic Community centered around Jesus
3. Transformational Community
Or in other words - Love God - Love Others - Change the World!
SO GOOD! We basically went through different passages in scripture, including John 15, which is our school's theme passage, that highlighted all of these values - which really just are the values that believers  should have. It was presented so simply and real and the Lord just brought crazy revelation to us all!
A huge thing for me is that I tend to struggle with striving and perfection, feeling like sometimes I have to work harder or achieve a certain level to really earn love or favor from the Lord or people. What just rocked me was the simplicity and truth of John 15 - Abiding in Jesus continually and He produces fruit. Not me. My job is to just remain in him, abide in his love, worship Him, gaze on his beauty and focus on his character, fruit from my life will happen. And he is the one to produce it. And the way I continually abide in him is by obey his commands out of affection based obedience. Doing things out of love instead of for love, because he is COMPLETELY WORTHY! He radically loves me, and all of us, right now, whatever we're doing and wherever we're at, at so out of that love I want to obey his commands and love him in that way! And its about simple everyday obedience. This is something the Lord has been growing deeply in my heart to hear his voice in everyday happenings, partnering with him and obeying him in the littlest things, because I love him and want to walk with him closely everyday. I love that its this simple and the best way I do that is by loving him and gazing on who he is and his incomprehensible beauty and his love for me. Jesus is so good. This broke off my striving! Praise HIM! By doing nothing and remaining in his love for me and loving him back - striving and perfection is broken. I don't need to work for love. This is something I've understood for so long and have even had tools to break off these things in my life, but by simply choosing to just be loved by Jesus, remain in his love, and love him back by doing what he asks me out of my affection for him and his worthiness, I'm truly walking out in freedom from this now!
Okay so wednesday the Lord was doing crazy things in our classroom. He was just moving with revelation of our identities in Him and what he has called us to do and how with Him it is completely possible! I am a radical, worshipping warrior who is going to waste my life at the feet of Jesus! He released so much joy in our classroom and just revelation of his worthiness that we worshiped him like crazy for a while. Then Jeff and Johnny felt that there should be a call to baptism. At first I thought... I've already been baptized so I'll just go and watch and support. But then Jeff explained that baptism was way before christianity, it was a part of Jewish culture. And in their culture they would get baptized anytime there was a significant shift in their identity (getting married for example) or started a new signifiant phase of life, and how it isn't just about salvation (it is part of it and super important) but it is more than that and we can do it and declare a new significant season in our life and give it all to the Lord or when we come into crazy new revelation of who we really are. Plus Jesus was baptized and he didn't need to get saved. All that to say... as we were walking down to the pier where we were doing the baptisms, I felt like I was supposed to do it as well. This is a significant, life changing season that I have started that will be shaping the rest of my life. As well as a complete new beginning for me, and I wanted to praise him in this way for breaking striving and calling me to just abide in him! It was so amazing! I think about 85% of our class including some of our leaders got baptized right in downtown Kona at the pier! We were all so full of joy and loving Jesus, giving everything in our lives to Him joyfully because he is so worth it! A group ended up forming around us watching, a cruise ship had just come in as well so we had quite a few people watching us. And at the end, Johnny explained to the people watching what we were doing and why and asked if anyone wanted to receive Jesus and get baptized, and we had one man come forward!!
Thursday and Friday were full of revelation as well. Jeff taught on authentic community centered around Jesus - loving each other and serving one another, and how easy it is when we look at each other through the way Jesus sees us. Jeff actually got me to come up to the front of the class to demonstrate this and asked 10 people to stand up and affirm me. About 25 people did... it was so overwhelming and amazing, people I haven't even really talked to stood up to affirm me. But the whole point was to look at each other through the Lord's eyes and when we do that it makes us want to serve each other and take care of each other needs and love each other! We then talked about transformational community and looked at how the Lord brought revival to Ephesus in Acts and Paul's letter to the Ephesians. Studying the Lord's ways and how he does things. Its all about Jesus and talking about Jesus brings him glory and people lives get transformed by the simple gospel! Pointing to Jesus always draws people to him.
So many amazing things this week! These are just highlights! We're just ready for what the Lord's going to bring us next week! We have an another incredible speaker next week and I'm so excited to see how the Lord's going to move! Thanks for all your prayers and support!!

Ain't No Mountain High...

So the secrets are all out and for the outreach portion of my school I will be traveling approximately 7300 miles away to....
NEPAL!!!
Monday night we had our outreach reveal night - which was ridiculous! Our school was so excited to find out what teams we would be on, who we were going with and who our leaders would be, and our wonderful school leaders and staff had a blast delaying as long as they possibly could and trying to trick us (they thought they were so funny and it was hilarious). Then they explained to us that  each of us were to get a piece of a small map of the country we'd be going to, then we have to find everyone else in our team by putting our puzzle pieces together and figure out what country it was! Such a fun idea! The leaders all went to hide in a back room (we didn't know what leaders were leading what team), and one by one they called us up, made us do funny things, turned off the lights and then revealed our leaders to us! It was such a fun and exciting night so full of joy and laughter!
My team is 13 people total, 8 girls and 5 guys including our amazing staff leaders Hailey Bland and Matt Bryd. It's going to be an amazing team!! We've had a couple of our small group meetings and each week when we do community outreach we'll be in our outreach teams as well, so we'll get to know each other super well before we head off to Nepal! We haven't been told much about what exactly we'll be doing yet in Nepal but we'll find out more in the weeks to come.
Thanks for all your prayers and support! We'll be finding out the exact cost of our outreach soon so I'll keep everyone posted and then I'll know how in finances I'm doing as well.
More on week two to come!!

Welcome to Kona-Week One

Well week one of DTS has finished and we're just about to start week two. I've only been here for about a week and a half now and honestly it feels like at least a month already! DTS is going amazing! The Lord has already started to bring revelation and breakthrough in our group! My DTS has 82 students from a bunch of different nations - America, Canada, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Korea, China... (maybe a few more), and 22 staff... so 104 of us Comm Trans-ers total! I still haven't gotten anywhere close to getting to know everyone! But its super fun to be part of such a large group all running after the same thing. I am living in a room with 8 amazing and beautiful girls from two different DTS'! I love them all. We're so blessed to have gotten along right away and are so excited to get super close and grow together in the Lord for the next three months!
For our lectures this week our school leader, Johnny Gillespie, spoke on salvation and the gospel, what Jesus did, what happened he did it, what that means for us and where we stand because of it, Jesus as lover of our souls and the father heart of God! Yes, lots of ground to covered but its been amazing! Johnny was such a great speaker and pulled so much from his own story which I love and helps to make these huge topics more graspable. We started on Monday with a beach day (yay for living in hawaii!) and then an amazing worship night!! I love worship and prayer times when you pack a ton of people into a smallish space and just worship our Creator corporately! It was an amazing night to kick off the start of our school.
I've been praying for increased revelation of Jesus as my lover and really just anything He wants to do in my heart and life! I had a lot of prophetic words and encouragement before I came as this being a season of refreshment and resting in the Lord. I can already tell that that is totally what the Lord is speaking to for this season...but already in the last week I've had to fight to make that really be true. Yes He's going to bring stuff up for me to process and work through and have breakthrough in, and I totally want him to, but the enemy would love to come and take my mind off of just resting and place it back on striving or on distractions. And even in this first week I've seen it happen. But going into this next week I'm feeling so great! So excited for what he has in store!! Its corporate week.. which means that all of the DTS' on campus (there's 6 DTS schools running this quarter) and two DTS' from Waikiki and Kauai, all come together for our worship and teaching times. We have United Pursuit Band here this week to lead us in worship!! And Loren and Darlene Cunningham (the founders of YWAM) are speaking. It's going to be awesome! Keep me in your prayers this week for the Lord to expand my capacity so I can receive everything he wants to teach me through these amazing leaders from their wisdom, revelation and impartation!
Oh! Another really fun thing... yesterday (Saturday, October 8th) was the World Ironman Championship held here in Kona. All students on campus get to go and volunteer for the event. My school had the 4am-10am shift, which was so fun.. seeing all the athletes get themselves ready and complete the swim and start the bike. For those of you that don't know.. Ironman is a triathlon race where the athletes swim 2.4 miles (3.9 km), bike 112 miles (180 km) and then run a full 26.2 mile (42.2 km) marathon! its insane!! I have mad respect for these people (including my aunt and uncle who do these races at home!) They are incredible athletes! It was really cool to get to be a part of it!
Well off to week two!! I'll try and give updates a little more frequently. We find out our outreach teams and locations tomorrow so i'll let you all know when I find out!!
Thanks again for all your prayers and support! I really appreciate it!