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.