Not In School, But Still Learning

Being home is hard for me, I don't know if I've said this before, but I feel like my life is on pause. I'm in between YWAM right now, and I've spent pretty much this whole time thinking my brain and heart are also on pause until school starts again because what could I possibly learn while I'm at home? Ha. God has been trying to convince me that there's still growing to do before I go back in the summer, and that these few months of my life are just as important as ones spent at the base or on Outreach.

So what am I learning right now... I've seen how faithful God is to the promises He made me while I was in Peru. We did a lot of talking then -funny how that works out- and He's come through on everything He said He would help me with once I got home. I guess I'd have to go into details to explain what I mean but I'm not going to do that here so if you'd like to hear examples, we should hang out or talk some other way :)

By the way, you can reach me by email at sarah_valentine1@yahoo.com or S0meCallMeRed@hotmail.com. I don't check my email much, but I realized I had never put it in here or on my letters...I think...

What else am I learning.. Ok so a big part of my DTS was having hope for my future that I didn't before. Just not thinking I'm good enough to accomplish anything, thinking other people are so much more faithful to God's work than I am so why would my future ministry be anything worth talking about, like extremely down about myself and my "lack" of gifts and skills, etc. A few people have given me some insight the past couple weeks on what kind of person I'm going to be in the future (through visions and God speaking through them...I don't know how many people following this blog actually believe in this kind of thing so I guess if you want specific details on this too you can ask me). It's really crazy the things I've heard, just tiny glimpses of what could be true of my future ministry if I let it happen. The things I've held onto the most are that I'm supposed to be an encourager and a counselor. It's funny knowing that now because my initial thoughts are "yep that's definitely in the future because I've got a LOT of growing up to do before that's true". I don't consider myself an encouraging person just because I'm such a downer all the time, and I think I'm terrible at consoling people because I'm so blunt all I can say is "yeah that does suck" when people just want to hear "it'll be ok". But God has funny ways of showing me He's working on me right now because I'm getting lots of practice in...
My friend Jo (from YWAM, also went to Peru with me), her dad just died last week. Obviously words can't even describe what she's going through (please please please keep her and her family in your prayers!), but the interesting part is that since me and her are so close, I'm the only one she wants to talk to. I mean at first I was the only person in the world she wanted to talk to, and now I'm the person she can actually be real with and we talk every day about how she's doing and what else is happening in our lives. Because of my personality, my real-ness that I can't help and the fact that I don't want a surface answer of "I'm doing good", I'm realizing it's easier for people to talk to me because they can be themselves and say what's actually on their mind instead of just saying what people want to hear.

I've also been told that my listening is going to be the biggest part of my counseling, that people will take great comfort talking to me about things because I can listen. So I'm really trying to put that into practice and be the person that people can trust so this can really happen someday. I'm starting to believe my future is sincerely going to help/impact a lot of people instead of just hope that I do something kind of worthwhile.

So these are a couple of things I've been thinking a lot about the past few weeks and trying to improve on. Not much else to say for now...
Peace out everyone.

Quick "Home" Update

I went back and read my old posts to see how much I actually explained about YWAM and stories and such. Eventually I'll try to put in some more details about what YWAM is and what they do, and I'd definitely like to share some things I learned during lecture phase, and also still answer questions about Peru/Outreach -you can ask me in comments, facebook, email, whatever.

But one of the things I noticed is that I was talking about job interviews recently so I should probably let you know what I'm doing the next couple months. I'm working for my Aunt Pat right now, doing some office work basically, she wants to go 'paperless' and needed me to teach her how to do it, thus providing me with a part time job because it's really time consuming and she still needs to do her normal work. I had been hoping to get a serving job at a restaurant after a couple weeks of working for Aunt Pat but I think God had other things in mind. I was really planning on making a lot of money between coming home and leaving again, but God kept telling me I needed to let go of that and depend on Him more. And it's not like I'm not making money right now, it's just not half as much as what I wanted and know I could be getting waiting tables. But I've realized I'm doing just fine for now, and God is going to provide for me after SOMD so I need to quit freaking out about it.

I've been decently content the last week, going to work during the day, spending time with friends and my sister at night, and I've found this super random volunteer thing to do on the weekends. I'm stringing origami paper cranes together (there's over 106,000 of them) to represent the number of people in Minnesota that are affected by brain injuries. My mom found it online somehow (craigslist), so we went last weekend and they do it a few times per week, so I'm gonna keep going. I guess it's for the Brain Injury Association of MN now that I've googled it. Like I said, it's super random, but I needed some place to serve at anyways, so this is a good short-time volunteer thing I can do right now.
I've been sending out update newsletters the past week or two to everyone that was on my support team list that I have addresses (and stamp supplies..) for, so if you're not getting letters from me and you'd like to, PLEASE get me your address somehow! It's obviously way cheaper for me to continually update here, but I can also email you my updates (whether you want the mailed copies or the blog posts).

So yeah! Things are good right now, and I'm aiming to update this at least once every couple weeks while I'm home, so keep checking back!
Chau everyone :) -that's how the Peruvians spell Ciao-

this is me and some of the stringed cranes. yeah there's a LOT of them. like this is one corner of the room that was full of them. there's sooo many!

Tour of the Iquitos Base

Here's another video tour, this one would actually be the first one chronologically... This is where we stayed in the city of Iquitos. Sorry I forget sometimes to talk in a normal voice when I'm around my friends... I use accents and weird voices all the time, like the one I keep using here. Also there's a lot of random Spanish words so hopefully you don't miss anything essential.

http://youtu.be/IzyJs50RF6M