Third World Think Tank

This week we had lectures on Submission and Authority from Steve O’Hearn (the national director of YWAM Australia!) which was quite an honor. I learned that submission and obedience are different things, dang it society! Submission is an attitude that means we are giving someone full respect and authority over a situation or for God we should submit our whole life. Submission is an attitude and obedience is an action, therefore we can be obedient and not submissive or vice versa. Interesting.

Steve also taught on relationships for a few days, which was super awesome. He talked about boundaries, God’s view, baggage, submission and authority in marriage, and seeking God first. I’m not going to talk about all the things I’ve learned through that because it’s so much, but you could ask me about it when I come home or something.

One cool (and a little scary) thing that happened was that it was my turn for ‘encouragement time’ which we do every week during small group. So I sat in the chair and everyone encouraged me and then prayed for me, after which there were some prophesies spoken over me. There was a general theme of mercy, compassion, and empathy through all of them so that was pretty rad. Throughout my life I’ve had countless (seriously A LOT) people say to me, ‘God is going to do great things through you,’ and I’m so sick and tired of hearing that because there was never anything specific said… and ‘great things’ is so ridiculous vague. But I think God may have narrowed that down now, but we’ll see what He wants to do with my life. I’m sorry blog readers, but to be honest, some of the prophesies are pretty big deals and I’m not going to write about them on here because it’s kinda public and I just want to see what God says first.

Jesus Christ , my sanity and clarity.

We had a meeting about our Fiji/Samoa outreach today (woo-hoo) and found out some more stuff about it. Fiji looks like a lot of serving, hanging out with the Fijians and evangelism. I hope some of you have heard about this but I’m ridiculously aware of how the U.S. sucks at world news, but Samoa was hit by a huge tsunami in October and the country is simply leveled. Ravaged. Decimated. But there’s a YWAM base there so we’re going to be helping them rebuild, fix, clean, and reconstruct stuff for them and for their community. It also looks like we might get the opportunity to work through Habitat for Humanity to build some houses for the community. Sweeeet!

I would like prayer for encouragement this week. I was dealing with some things earlier in the school and I got so tired of dealing with them that I just bottled them up and put them on the shelf, only half dealt with. When our small group was praying for me, one girl told me that God wants to free me from some things that I’ve given up on dealing with and that I need to let Him finish off the process that He has started in me. Wow. So I’ve re-opened the bottle and am working through stuff again, which can get exhausting. So I would really appreciate some prayer.