Break From The Mold

I cannot believe how fast time is flying by!  This week was so fun yet so busy!  This week we had Rick Wilkerson speak on Culture of Revival: Whole-hearted worship.  He had some amazing points including the fact that we all have a purpose in life; God did not create us to be robots.  We should not just be Christians on autopilot.  God wants us to get to know Him and relate to Him that way we are able to pray what it is He wants us to pray.  He wants us to partner with Him.  He wants us to abide in Him.  “Slow down and talk to God!”  Just like in the parable of the 10 Virgins in Matthew 25, we need to take time to spend time with Jesus, abiding in Him so that we will be ready for Him when He comes.  Are you Ready?  Did you take time to buy the oil ahead of time?

In the later half of the week we had a road trip up to the Beacon House of Prayer in Stoke-On-Trent.  On the way up, we stopped in at Derby to visit the DTS there.  Their DTS is a smaller group, but they have a beautiful old house with multiple stories and many rooms!  It was such a neat place to visit. (Especially with me loving architecture and all!) That evening we played fish bowl!  I love that game!  It was so nice to just look around the room and see how much of a family we have all become already.  It is such a comforting feeling being surrounded by people all with the same love for our Awesome God. 

The next morning, we got up early, as we always do, and headed over to Stoke to the Beacon House of Prayer.  I had no idea what to expect when we got there.  Basically it was a group of believers who have a passion for praying and interceding for the nations.  We had a lot of time in worship, as well as a lot of time praying for each other and for all the nations of the world.  In addition, we spent some time discussing what we all do at our individual houses of prayer to see if we could come up with a way to organize and plan out how to move forward expanding and bettering each individual house of prayer.  During one of the prayer times, we broke up into small groups to discuss the topic of the last session.  God however had a different plan in mind for my group.  I was with three ladies from different houses of prayer and then one of the leaders from my DTS, Hannah.  The three ladies really felt a call to pray for Hannah and me.  It was amazing!  These ladies knew nothing about either of us, but the words God spoke through them hit home for both of us.  For me, they received:

            A flat needle meaning God is going to weave together things in my life that I never thought could be put back together, or even together for the first time.

            A compass meaning that God is revealing to me the direction He is going to be sending me in soon.  The flat needle also tied in as the pointer for the compass showing that I will be sewing into people and pointing others in the direction they will be going and sending them out.

            I was also given Zephaniah 3:17- “The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves.  He will take great delight in you; in His love He will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.”  The person who gave me that also said that she could just picture God taking me in His arms and holding me, telling me I am His child.  That was a cool one to get!

 

Basically, this past week included a lot of growing and stretching.  The whole people getting words for me from God is very new to me.  It was a lot to process.  I know it is something that occurs, and occurs often, but until moving here, I had never had anyone get words from God for me.  It is such an amazing thing that our God, the God of the universe wants to speak directly to us.  He wants to spend time with each of us.  We are His children.  He created us to love on us and to spend time with us.  He would not just create us and then never communicate with us.  In addition, I had a lot to process about what Rick said about abiding in Christ, so it was good to have this week to process it.    

This week we also had a lot of fun bonding time as a team.  A group of us went rock climbing, which was so much fun!  We also had a bunch of movie nights as well as game nights!  It is amazing how after only a few weeks, we can feel like we have known each other for quite a while. 

                                                        The Girls from the rock climbing group!

                                                                    Game night teams!

One major way God has been working in my life is that He is teaching me how to break from the mold.  For starters, you have to learn to be quite flexible when on a DTS.  Basically you have to learn to go with the flow.  It is all great stuff that we are doing, you just find out about it last minute at times.  It is good for me though because it is teaching me to be okay with not having an exact schedule.  In addition, as many people know, I am weird with food!  To say weird with food is obviously an understatement.  However, I eat everything that is served to me.  Meaning, I try all the different types of food that is prepared.  I actually enjoy most of it too!  God gave me that extra push that I needed to eat the meat!  It’s great! I know that sounds childish, and well yes it is, but that part of my life needed a lot of maturing.  

                                                                 Me Carving the Chicken!

One fun way that God taught me to break from the mold is baking a cake without a recipe.  If any of you know me, well I do not know how to work without instructions.  I have lists and order and recipes.  That is how my brain works and functions.  But one of my friends here challenged me to break from that and make something without a recipe.  He picked out all the ingredients that would go in and we just threw stuff in without measuring.  It was actually really fun!  It turned out pretty decent.  Let’s be real it was not the best cake I have ever made, but it was good.  

 Sorry for the insanely long post.  And for the fact that I am a week behind, I will get into a routine of it soon enough...Let's hope.  Still getting used to the whole blogging thing.

God, the missionary God.

If I learned nothing else from this trip so far, I learned that God is Love and that He loves us more than anything.  He has a funny way of bringing you on adventures that move and amaze you.  If you asked me three months ago what I would be doing right now, I would never have guessed that I would be living in Cambridge England with an amazing group of people.  In just over one week’s time, I feel like our team, which is made up of 9 students, and almost just as many leaders/staff, is already family.  This place feels like home, and it is amazing.

So, to rewind a bit, I arrived in Cambridge last Sunday at around 1:30pm just in time to join the team for lunch.  People continued to arrive throughout the rest of the day.  It was really exciting to meet the people who I would be living in community with for the next nine months of my life.  We spent the remainder of Sunday getting to know each other, settling into our houses, and hanging out.  To say we live in community is quite a valid statement.  We live in three houses all in the same neighborhood.  There is a girls’ house with 5 students, and two young adult leaders, then the guys’ house has 4 students and 2 young adult leaders and finally, the head leader of the YWAM Cambridge DTS and his wife and new adorable baby live in the third house. 

The DTS officially started off on Monday.  They decided a good way to have us get to know the area would be to have us go on a scavenger hunt throughout the city of Cambridge.  (Side note:  We live in Arbury, which is a short bike ride away from the city center, so getting to and from town is quite an easy commute.)  We students decided to do the scavenger hunt together as one group so we could get to know each other better.  (At this time, only 7 of the 9 of us had arrived because of Visa issues, and a broken hand that potentially needed surgery.)  It was a beautiful, sunny day in Cambridge, so it was a fantastic day to explore!  To say that Cambridge is a beautiful city is a major understatement.  Going around the city just reminded me of how creative God is.  I, being obsessed with architecture, was in awe of the beautiful, historic buildings, streets, and alleyways that make up the city. 

As I was biking/walking around God reminded whispered to me, “See this here; this is for you.  I brought you here to share with you my artwork.”  It was really neat to see because as people would ask me why I chose Cambridge.  I really had no answer.  God didn’t say to me, “Becca, I want you to go to Cambridge.”  To be honest, the name of my particular DTS sounded cool.  It is titled, Revival and Reformation.  The focus is more of a revival and reformation in Cambridge, but well, I want revival and reformation within my life!  So, I said alright, sign me up!  It was just really neat to have God affirm to me that I am in the right place.

Teaching started the next day.  Basically the week is scheduled to have teaching Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, as well as Tuesday evenings.  We have prayer and worship for two hours every afternoon, which is AMAZING!  The people from this team are so talented!  The musical ability that makes up this team is astonishing.  Not that amazing ability is what is needed for worship, but let’s be real, it is an extra perk!  It is such a blessing to be able to worship with people who worship with their whole heart.  It is not just saying the words to the song, but it is living the lyrics.  The worship is ALIVE!  After prayer and worship, we typically have some free time, unless it’s your rotation to cook dinner.  YES, that includes me!  I will be learning to cook here!  It’ll definitely be an adventure!  In the evenings, we will either have free time, planned events, or we will go to Cambridge House of Prayer (on Thursdays) where we get together with Christians around the area who have a passion and heart for prayer.  We have a lot of other activities scheduled within our week, however, I will not bore you with the details now.  I can explain more at a later time.   

 One major part of our week is outreach.  We have outreach every Saturday.  The first time we went on outreach, I was paired up with Peter, the leader.  Outreach includes walking around the city, talking to people, hearing about their lives, and sharing the Gospel with them.  Anyway, the first person Peter and I came to, Malachi, was really interested in what we had to say.  He was involved in the conversation.  To my surprise, he was not just listening to be polite, he was actually actively listening.  Now, knowing God, I should not have been surprised that He is able to work through simple interactions to bring people to Himself, but I was surprised.  And I am so happy to share that Malachi came to the Lord that afternoon!!!   Malachi was not the only person who came to the Lord last week.  Four others gave their lives to Christ, and one woman was healed of a pretty major knee injury where she lived in constant pain.

I would love to go on an on sharing in major detail everything that is happening while I am here, however, then I would be writing a book.  I do want to share some overall highlights about the teaching that has been happening here so far.  The first week, we had the privilege of having Shephen Mbewe speak to us.  Shephen is an amazing man of Christ who has so much to share.  He reminded us that God is a missionary God.  He is a God of the nations, not just a God for a select few.  We are not to reduce God to small tribal gods who are only there for your and your family’s needs, but to realize that He is there for all and we must not keep Him to ourselves.  It is not our responsibility to bring salvation to people, but to carry the Gospel to people and to bridge the gap between the unreached and God’s Truth. 

The speaker for our second week was our own leader, Peter.  He spoke on Jesus: the God-man.  He reminded us that Jesus was fully man when He was here on earth.  Jesus grew up right here on earth like everyone else.  He asked questions, learned, submitted Himself to His parents.  He got hungry.  He got thirsty.  He got tired.  He was betrayed and misunderstood.  Yes, we have all heard that before, but do we really think of what that means.  He left everything He had up in Heaven to come down to face agony just for us all so that He could be united with us once again.  That is love.  True love.  I have truly been in awe of what God has done in my life with all the teachings, worship, and quiet times that have occurred over the past few weeks.  I am so blessed to be able to have this experience and to share it with such amazing people. 

I am going to end with an amazing poem that Peter shared with us.  It is called, The Vision, by Pete Greig. 

          

So this guy comes up to me and says "what's the vision? What's the big idea?" I open my mouth and words come out like this… The vision?
The vision is JESUS – obsessively, dangerously, undeniably Jesus.
The vision is an army of young people.
You see bones? I see an army. And they are FREE from materialism.
They laugh at 9-5 little prisons. They could eat caviar on Monday and crusts on Tuesday. They wouldn't even notice. They know the meaning of the Matrix, the way the west was won. They are mobile like the wind, they belong to the nations. They need no passport.. People write their addresses in pencil and wonder at their strange existence. They are free yet they are slaves of the hurting and dirty and dying. What is the vision ? The vision is holiness that hurts the eyes. It makes children laugh and adults angry. It gave up the game of minimum integrity long ago to reach for the stars. It scorns the good and strains for the best. It is dangerously pure.
Light flickers from every secret motive, every private conversation. It loves people away from their suicide leaps, their Satan games. This is an army that will lay down its life for the cause. A million times a day its soldiers choose to lose that they might one day win the great 'Well done' of faithful sons and daughters.
Such heroes are as radical on Monday morning as Sunday night. They don't need fame from names. Instead they grin quietly upwards and hear the crowds chanting again and again: "COME ON!"
And this is the sound of the underground The whisper of history in the making Foundations shaking Revolutionaries dreaming once again Mystery is scheming in whispers Conspiracy is breathing… This is the sound of the underground
And the army is discipl(in)ed.
Young people who beat their bodies into submission.
Every soldier would take a bullet for his comrade at arms. The tattoo on their back boasts "for me to live is Christ and to die is gain".
Sacrifice fuels the fire of victory in their upward eyes. Winners. Martyrs. Who can stop them ? Can hormones hold them back? Can failure succeed? Can fear scare them or death kill them ?
And the generation prays like a dying man with groans beyond talking, with warrior cries, sulphuric tears and with great barrow loads of laughter! Waiting. Watching: 24 – 7 – 365.
Whatever it takes they will give: Breaking the rules. Shaking mediocrity from its cosy little hide. Laying down their rights and their precious little wrongs, laughing at labels, fasting essentials. The advertisers cannot mould them. Hollywood cannot hold them. Peer-pressure is powerless to shake their resolve at late night parties before the cockerel cries.
They are incredibly cool, dangerously attractive inside.
On the outside? They hardly care. They wear clothes like costumes to communicate and celebrate but never to hide. Would they surrender their image or their popularity? They would lay down their very lives - swap seats with the man on death row - guilty as hell. A throne for an electric chair.
With blood and sweat and many tears, with sleepless nights and fruitless days, they pray as if it all depends on God and live as if it all depends on them.
Their DNA chooses JESUS. (He breathes out, they breathe in.) Their subconscious sings. They had a blood transfusion with Jesus. Their words make demons scream in shopping centres. Don't you hear them coming? Herald the weirdo's! Summon the losers and the freaks. Here come the frightened and forgotten with fire in their eyes. They walk tall and trees applaud, skyscrapers bow, mountains are dwarfed by these children of another dimension. Their prayers summon the hounds of heaven and invoke the ancient dream of Eden.
And this vision will be. It will come to pass; it will come easily; it will come soon. How do I know? Because this is the longing of creation itself, the groaning of the Spirit, the very dream of God. My tomorrow is his today. My distant hope is his 3D. And my feeble, whispered, faithless prayer invokes a thunderous, resounding, bone-shaking great 'Amen!' from countless angels, from hero's of the faith, from Christ himself. And he is the original dreamer, the ultimate winner.
Guaranteed.

Wow.  That is all I have to say about that.  Wow.  I want that to be me.  I want my DNA to choose Jesus, and I pray the same for you too!