Wholeness (October)

I am not sure if I’ve ever shared with anyone what first drew me to YWAM. In a word it would be this: people. Let me explain that a little further.
June 2004 was my first contact with YWAM. I had been out of high school for a little over a year, and had only been seriously following God for around two and a half years. After high school I joined the youth group as one of their small group leaders, and every summer the group does a missions trip.
This year’s trip was to Cancun, Mexico, and who did we team up with; you guessed it YWAMers. The thing that really stuck me with these people was how genuine they were. Following God was not about going to church, or being happy all the time. God was about love, and change. Change as in God wouldn’t automatically make life better, but He would change you, make you more like him. And this is not an easy process. This ten day trip introduced me to the idea that just because I was a christian, I didn’t need to have it all together, and therefore I didn’t have to pretend that I had it all together.
Another thing I have really grown to love about the YWAM community is how God seems to permeate every aspect of life. What I mean is this: at home, with friends, or wherever, God or christianity was not a huge topic of discussion. It seems that God was only talked about in church, or at Bible Study. YWAM was the first time I was within a community where at any moment God could enter a conversation. And man, that was freeing.
It reminds me of a paragraph in a book called “Knowledge of the Holy” by A.W. Tozer. In there Tozer is talking about how if a celestial being came down to earth and joined in one of our day to day conversations that it would be bored out of its mind. Why, because this being has seen and knows the true God! What importance is there in NBA rankings or the the new car we are looking to buy. And although these thing are interesting and important, they are nothing compared to God. and yes so much of our lives are focused on these things.
I think this is because so many of us have compartmentalized God. And I really think that takes away from some of the power of Him in out lives. Just think how different things would be if we would spend more of our day just talking about God, or even realizing that we have the freedom to talk about God.

I think once we let God be active in every aspect of our lives then the world will change.

Trust me, I am no expert at this yet, but that is one amazing thing about God is that he shows us something, and then teaches us how to grow in that.
Meeting people who were an example to this really made me realize how I need it in my own life. And those are some of the reason I love being with YWAM.
I am really excited to see what God will be doing while I am down here. these past few weeks I’ve gotten to work on a couple of rather exciting projects. First, I got to record a chinese translation for the Global Day of Prayer Project. Now, this thing took me a grand total of four hours of work, but the implications of this thing is massive. This video is being sent to China. As many of you know the church growth in China is the (or one of) most rapid in the world. You probably also know that China is a closed nation that does not allow christianity. So being able to work on a video that will help encourage the church in China is really amazing.
Another project that I have gotten to work on is a short film for one of our local Cape Town churches. It is about quite a few things but mainly addresses hypocrisy, trust, and family unity. It was a fun project to film and as of today is proving to be a bit of a task to get the sound edit the way I want. The basic story is about a family where the father and mother are going through some shaky relationship trouble. They get into an argument before church and the teenage son takes off with his skateboard. The parents and the daughter head to church, completely disconnected and putting on the “everything is great” mask we sometimes love to put on for church. Anyway I won’t give away the ending, cause that just won’t be fun, plus I fear I may be boring you already. I do have to say that it deals a lot on James chapter 3.
A couple weeks ago about half of the Media Village production team headed down to Argentina to attend and film a massive conference down there for Harvest evangelism. This is a ministry Media Village has worked with closely and it was awesome to have the team come back and share how God has been using their videos to effect people around the world.
As I said most of the team was gone for two weeks, this did not include me. So I was chilling here in Kalk Bay with little official work to do. (And trust me I’m not complaining.) In my quest to fill the hours I finally started getting my Matthew study project up onto my computer. So I now am almost finished with chapter 1 of this project, which really makes me happy.
Thank you all so much for your prayers and support. God bless you
~J


Prayer requests:
-That even though projects can be repetitive, I need to see the big picture on how they are being used by God.
-That I keep in my Bible, my time focusing on reading the word is definitely not as often as it needs to be.
-I have found a church here in Cape Town, and just that I can be actively involved and growing in the community there.