Videos

This is kind of random in timing since I haven't been in Peru for a long time now, but some people at the Iquitos base just made videos that I absolutely must share. They're especially great if you've been to the Amazon (so fellow YWAMers), even if it was a couple years ago because these pictures go back since the River ministry started.  I figured it would be fun for you guys to see an overview of the ministry of the YWAM Iquitos base. I recognize a lot of the villagers you'll see, and you can actually see pictures with my team (and a couple shots of me) in both videos, which makes me basically famous :)  

They're on youtube, I wish I could just embed them here but since they're not my videos, you'll just have to go through the strenuous effort of clicking on these links.

This one shows a bit from each ministry out of YWAM Iquitos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-4SszAmspo&feature=context-cha

And this one is specifically showing the ministry geared towards youth. Maira and Waldir are the ones that head this up, and we worked with them the majority of our time on my last Outreach (Dec. 2011-Feb. 2012). We did various youth camps and programs throughout the trip which was really fun for me because this is my favorite age group to work with (teens and young adults). 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4UU3gbI1v0&feature=plcp

Enjoy!

My Crazy Summer!

Pretty sure it's been like four years since I've posted.... Another apology, as usual. My summer has been absolute insanity. I started nannying about 10 hours every day, I was a part of Mission Adventures (MA) training weekends at my YWAM base which was about every other weekend, I helped lead two MA trips into Minneapolis, and this week I'm a leader at a junior high event at my old church called Explosion! I'll try to get to all of those at some point. I'll also be starting community college at the end of this month, hopefully will have another job ASAP (huge prayer request), everyone is getting married in the next few weeks so lots of weddings on my schedule, and so many other things are making the end of my summer crazy busy!

Ok. Mission Adventures, for those of you who don't know, is a program run out of a few YWAM bases around the world, and my base in Rockford happens to be one of those locations. Youth groups come in and do an MA trip for 7-14ish days, which means us at YWAM Mpls plan, lead, and host this mission trip. We make all the connections wherever the group wants to go, plan their ministry, and send our leaders on their trip. Some teams go to places like Haiti, Peru, Panama, the Dominican Republic, London for the Olympics this year, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, etc. I think those are all the places we sent teams this year, but I could've missed some.

I had the privilege of leading two trips into Minneapolis last month. Both trips had really different dynamics, but both were super fun. For example, the first team that came in had 9 people total, including their leaders. The next group that came in had like 35 people. Slight difference... And of course, God had different things to teach all of us between the two trips. I'll try to share individual stories for each week in another post.

And now, like I mentioned before, this week I am helping out at Explosion at the church (Cornerstone) where I spent all my youth group years. Explosion is a week long event for junior high kids where we get separated into different colored teams, play games, have worship, extreme challenges (like which team can eat random items out of a bag fastest.. some people got anchovies, sardines, and who knows what else..), we have an amazing speaker, and then the kids are given an opportunity to either have someone pray with them or they can stay back in small groups and talk about what they learned that night. This event is actually where I accepted Jesus for the first time as my Savior -according to my spiritual birthday, I am now 8 years old! hooray! So I really appreciate Explosion and love being a part of it. I have been a leader for the event 3 times before, but I've been gone the past few summers either at camp or at YWAM, so I was super excited to volunteer again this year because I'm living in the Twin Cities! Yay! This week has been really great, loving on kids, seeing students that I led on a team when they were little junior high kids and now they're leading as high schoolers, and dressing up ridiculously to support my team. God is definitely moving, we've had a good handful of kids accept Christ for the first time this week, and last night I was one that helped pray for one of those kids! I talked with him for a long time after and answered a bunch of questions he had, so hopefully he comes back tonight. So exciting!!!!!

Quick prayer requests before I get dressed up in my green team gear for the night. I've been feeling pretty sick the past couple weeks. I think from stress. Upset stomach, headaches/migraines, etc. There's a lot going on, not a lot of time to process, and I really could just use some quality time with God to recharge. Please, please, please be praying for the students tonight as our last night of Explosion! Tomorrow we go to ValleyFair, so tonight is the last night where we'll be sharing a message with them (and of course having tons of fun before that), so please be praying for open hearts and that God would meet them where they're at and speak to them. Also lots of energy for us leaders to continue to love on them with all we've got, and good attitudes, it can get difficult towards the end of the week to keep up with the excitement required for 13 year old kids. But God has been faithful and providing for us so far!

It's seriously been an amazing summer, and most of it I wouldn't change for the world. I can't wait to share stories from the MA trips, hopefully it will bless you guys as much as it blessed me. Thanks for those of you who have continued praying for me and keeping up with me even though I neglect this blog so much!
Ciao friends!

Here's me and my friend Bri, another one of the green team leaders! We are decked out in green and you can only see the top half of us... Don't miss the awesome side ponytail I'm rockin' :) Yeah I definitely don't mind making a fool of myself for the junior high kids... let's be honest, it doesn't take much convincing for me to have a good time with this.

Getting Un-stuck From Reverse Culture Shock

Once again, it's been forever since I've given an actual update, but stories from the rest of the trip will probably have to come later. Hopefully the sooner kind of later.. But I was thinking today that maybe I could share something I'm being challenged with now.

I think my reverse culture shock is worse this year than it was last year. Reverse culture shock is a term that refers to the culture shock that happens going back home after being in another culture rather than stepping into a new world and being uncomfortable. I think it's because I connected so much more with the people, the place, and the culture of the Amazon this year. Last year during my DTS, I was still pretty "me" focused, how everything was affecting me, how I missed things like toilets and washing my hands, and how it was "my" outreach. This past trip, leading students of a DTS, I had to completely depend on God for what He wanted to do through us on the outreach because I knew that if I was trying to lead a team being focused on "me", I would crash hard.

It turns out that when you're asking God on a daily basis for His heart for your ministry or the people you're working with, you can't help but see things through a different lens. When your questions stop sounding like "what can I get out of this experience?" and start sounding more like "Lord, how do you want to use me in this experience?", I think God tends to show up in completely new ways. Sometimes that meant being a part of healings and miracles, and sometimes it just meant an energy boost to get me through the next activity. When He came through on those prayers, I connected to the people we were ministering to in an entirely new way for me.

Because of those prayers, I was able to get in the 'missionary' mindset and be willing to do a lot of uncomfortable things for God's glory. It's a stretching experience in anybody's life, but once you start being obedient to what God is asking, you start seeing the fruit of your work and spiritual growth in yourself and possibly others. It's amazing how God rewards obedience just because He's cute and He likes to do that. And it also amazes me how easy it is to forget all those things after just a short time of living in North America again.

What I really want to be doing is to be asking God for His heart for people no matter where I am. I don't want to just connect with people because they're in Peru, I want to connect with people and make a difference everywhere. I'm finding it difficult here at home because it's so simple to slip into old patterns and not care about the world around me. But I don't want to just be a missionary when I'm out in the nations, I want to be glorifying God's kingdom in the Twin Cities and encouraging others around me to do the same.

So a prayer request comes from this I suppose. Would you be praying that I would be asking God how He wants to use me every day here at home? And that I would have the same passion to love Americans as much as Peruvians. It's quite a bit more challenging because let me tell you, Americans are rude and selfish. Let's be honest, I'm still "American" at times, but I personally find it way easier to fall in love with a cute Peruvian slum kid who has nothing but ripped clothes and a great smile verses the screaming kid at Walmart who wants her 7th pillow pet. Just sayin'.

And it's always easier to pray that someone else would do uncomfortable things for God's glory like step out of their comfort zone and share God's love with people even in the suburbs, but I think I actually want to challenge you guys this time around to pray the same thing for yourselves. That doesn't mean I expect you all to report back to me about how you evangelized your whole neighborhood, but if you're taking your relationship with God seriously, you SHOULD be asking Him as often as you can how He wants to use you. A promise I always have to remember is that God will never give you more than you can handle, so if you're afraid He's going to ask you to do something ridiculous, just know that He knows you can handle whatever it is He wants you to do. Maybe it will start with being polite to people at the gas station, or maybe He's ready to take you further than that and you're supposed to ask a friend how you can be praying for them. I don't have the answers for what you should be doing, He does. But I can at least remind you to be asking Him, for me and for yourself  :)

If you wanna talk about steps you're taking, it would be a huge encouragement to me! And I would love to be praying for you as well. Anytime you guys wanna chat, hopefully you have my cell number or you can always message me on facebook.

Grad and Team Pictures!

There's soooo much to update on, I'm a little overwhelmed and not sure where to start. But I did want to give a little something... So I figured that the least I could do would be post a few pictures so that as I'm referring to people in my posts, you can put a face to the names. And it's a quick way for you guys to get to know the people I've been serving God with the past months of my life.


Our 'good' picture of DTS staff and students (there were tons of cameras so we're not always looking in the same direction) -

Back row: Scott (staff), Jarryd, Nate, Brian, Ageeth, Brenden (staff), Haleigh

Middle: Michelle, Deb (school leader), Ahnna (staff), Debbie, Me (staff), Deanne, Kirstin (staff), Courtney, Tammy, Lara, Dorie, Caitlin (staff), Katie (staff)

Bottom row: Paul, Michelle and Paul's kids :)

It seems like not all of us got the 'funny picture' memo...

And one of our last Peru team photos - 

From the top: Nate, Scott, Brian, Deanne, Me, Debbie

Thank you so much to everyone that kept us in your prayers! It means the world to me!

Home Again

I know it's been forever since I've written and I'm probably not even going to write a lot now. But I feel bad because I haven't updated in so long...

So the last week of Peru was insanity (crazy busy) and we finally got home on February 17th. The DTS students and also the SOMD interns (so me and 4 other interns) graduated on February 23rd. That was definitely a satisfying graduation after 9 months. Then we said our goodbyes and everyone left within a few days. Hopefully in the next couple weeks I can share some stories from the last portion of time in Peru when I didn't get a chance to blog.

Since being home... well let's be honest, I haven't really been home much. Actually the day after the last of my SOMD friends left, I went on a road trip with some of the DTS students to Chicago for a couple days. It was an awesome time. We went around the city, saw Millennium Park, went to the ZOO!!, and did other things I don't remember right now because I'm exhausted haha.

So now I'm home... not sure for how long, not sure of future plans, same story as always :) I'll start applying for jobs within the next week probably and I'm spending lots of time with friends, catching up and resting from the past few months. Hope to keep you all updated in the meantime, call or text me if you'd like to get coffee and chat! I've got plenty of time on my hands right now!

PS. Look how funny I am:

     Anaconda in the zoo in Iquitos..

"Anaconda" in the zoo in Chicago!!  

Hahaha so clever!

What A Week...

 This is me and a new friend from one of our daily kids programs... She was pretty excited about her animal balloon. Actually she refused to have a picture without her 'perrito' in it which is why my face got nicely cut out a little bit :)

So this past almost 2 weeks has been more on the difficult side. We were working with one church that had multiple locations (so one main church with sister churches around the area that are just starting up) and we stayed at each location for 2 days. It was a good set up with kids programs for a couple hours in the afternoon then youth programs in the evenings, with other random things in between like some pastors preferred evangelism in the plaza rather than youth programs at night. But because of communication problems and just a general latino or warm-cultured manner of things, almost every one of our plans was altered or completely fell through every day. From the first day where it was pouring rain which meant nobody showed up to either of our programs so we just went home (which is completely out of our control of course), to a few days later when we arrived at one of the new locations and the pastor had no idea we were going to be there so we had no ministry planned. As challenging and seriously frustrating as it was, the whole team really learned how to think on our feet and make the most out of opportunities.

For example, one night when zero youth showed up for our service, we decided we weren't just going to sit around. We walked a couple blocks to a plaza and started up some conversations with people. I met two younger girls, one 12 and one 19, and we had an awesome talk. The older one whose name was Ana ended up telling me a lot about her life and something she's going through with her parents. It surprised me how much she told me and just wanted to keep talking and the awesome part was I was able to relate to her through my history and pray for her. I shared with her some things I felt God wanted me to tell her and I think she really took them to heart. It was an amazing time where God really spoke to me how much He cares about very specific things. The fact that I, of all people, just happened to sit down with her and start up a conversation as a stranger and was able to relate to so much of her story and then share with her what God wanted to speak to her... I really felt like I was in the right place because He so badly wanted to communicate His love for this girl that He gave us the idea to walk down to the plaza, made sure my group just happened to sit down with these two girls, and that I would be the one talking to her.

Yeah, I was really in awe the rest of the night of how God uses situations that seem like a lost cause to show how immense His love is for his creation and how He uses us when we're available to do whatever we can. Even when it's a last minute attempt at having some form of ministry for the day when everything else has gone wrong, if we're still there to serve God regardless of the circumstances, He uses it for good. He's so cute :)


Sooooo we will hopefully be leaving for our next river trip tomorrow! Word on the street (ok some YWAM Iquitos staff told me) is that there's going to be a protest starting tonight so the roads might be blocked which means we might have to wait a couple extra days to leave. That would be really unfortunate and mess with all of our plans of course, so please please please be praying for open streets tomorrow or some form of transportation that isn't affected by whatever protest is going on! This protesting thing is super typical of Iquitos so I'm not surprised at all that it's happening, it just might conflict really badly with where we need to go. Also prayers while we're on the river for general safety, health since all of us got sick at some point the last trip, for unity in the team, and that we would take even more steps out of our comfort zone to really serve God, each other, and the communities we're in even when we don't necessarily feel like it.

I know this is a relatively long post compared to my last few. Hopefully it gives some insight into the things we're doing here -with God's help- and I'll post again when we're home!
Chau!

So Many Children!

So many kids programs this week... But not a lot of time for me to write anything significant. So I wanted to share a quick picture for you guys, this is me and Deanne loving the clown costumes and having a great time with the kids. We've had a lot of laughs this week...

Hopefully I'll be able to really update on these past few days soon! If not, we leave for our next river trip on the 30th for 9ish days and we will need LOTS of prayer!! Ahhh I really miss everyone lately and I can't wait to see you all and tell you great stories when I come home! Just a few more weeks here!