Arrived and Already On Brain Overload!

SOMD has officially started! Me and a few friends from DTS met up last Saturday and spent the night together catching up and hanging out before the busy school life started again, and from there me, Ahnna, Kallie, Caitlin, Scott, and Brenden made our way to the YWAM base on Sunday afternoon. We reunited with a few people we'd known before from our base, Jasmine, Jo, Jenesa and Monica, and met Ivan (from Argentina, did his DTS in Chile I think) and Becca (from Texas, did her DTS in England), so we've got 12 students total. It feels like we've already been there a month instead of just a week, but that's usually how it is when you live with people 24/7. Even though it's been a long week with not enough sleep, it has also been really fun and exciting because of our class subject where we learned a LOT about ourselves and each other.

So this week was Strength Finders and Spiritual Gifts. Bonnie, our school counselor, was our speaker. If you haven't heard of Strength Finders (http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/strengthsfinder-20-tom-rath/1008432146?ean=9781595620156&itm=1&usri=strength%2bfinders#CustomerReviews)   you should definitely look into it. You get the book which has a code in the back to take the online test which takes maybe half an hour, you answer a ton of questions about how you relate to people and situations and stuff, and at the end it gives you a list of 5 of your top strengths based on your answers, and how to work with them in your life.
My top five are Communication, Restorative, Empathy, Input, and Belief. It also gives you descriptions for all of those explaining what they are which the book has general explanations of each one, but after taking the online test the definitions it gives you are based on the questions you specifically answered. So there were a lot of other people in my school with empathy, input, and belief in their top 5 but all of their descriptions of how that strength is evident in their life was WAY different than mine. After I got my results, I brought them to a few of my friends in the living room and asked if someone would read them out loud to me, and it ended up being so funny and entertaining how entirely accurate it was (like Communication really explains why I talk so much...I'm a verbal processor to the core) that we ended up reading them out loud for pretty much every student.

Then a couple days later we took another similar test that would give us results for our Spiritual Gifts which gave us equal insight on ourselves and each other because we had 2 days of discussion on all of them during class. So my list of Spiritual Gifts in order are Mercy-74, Encourager/Exhorter-73, Giver-72, Prophet/Proclaimer/Perceiver-68, Teacher-65, Administrator-61, and Server-53. With the Strength Finders there's a really long list of all the strengths so they just give your top 5, but the Spiritual Gifts, I listed all of them (the results you can get) and the numbers are how high I ranked in each one. So it was very interesting seeing how equally I ranked in the top 3, and even through my 4th one -prophet- every word of the descriptions defines me. It's crazy. If you guys wanna see the explanations for all of them, I'd love to show you somehow so you can understand me and the way I function, but I think this blog is gonna be long enough by itself so I'm not gonna type it all up here.

But like I said, this week was really fun and interesting and I'm so grateful we did it the first week. It really helped us understand why people act the way they do and how their brains work, how they react to situations and why. They purposely did it the first week because last year during this school, lots of people were having conflicts until this week when they could really understand each other and they suggested that this week be first for every school because it's so helpful and I agree with that wholeheartedly.

Sooooo I would love to explain more in depth these gifts and strengths but I kinda have to go. I'm at Caribou with a few people right now, but I wanted to give you guys an update and let you know I'm still alive. I'll be sending out update letters within the next couple weeks I'm pretty sure, so if I still need your address, please give it to me!

Next week our topic according to our schedule is Cross-Cultural Communication which will be interesting considering our speaker is one of the funniest people we have on staff at our base. I'm pretty excited about everything we learned this past week and what's coming up!
Oh also, everything we do is being translated in Spanish because Monica doesn't know much English and Ivan understands most English but not everything, so my translating skills are improving drastically. I'm extremely happy about it :)

Ciao guys! I'll try to update again next week!