A Banging Prayer Room and a Cockroach

To catch you guys up since the last time that I wrote, I’ll try to let you know a little bit about my week last week and along with the update for this week!

We had our second out of three Corporate Weeks last week. Kris Vallentin came to Kona to speak about our Identity in Christ. Corporate Weeks are so meaningful and influential on my spiritual life because every DTS school is all together in community learning, praising, and praying for the same reason in one room! It is very cool to be able to grow deeper in my relationship with God with the help of every one of my close friends here. My roommates, other friends in different classes, leaders, worship directors, we are all in the same lecture and worship the entire week!

Kris talked a bit about Identity, but each day it was so different, and so challenging to my faith at the same time. As my leader said, we have to take a bite of a very boney piece of meat. Chew it up a lot, and spit out all the bones or bad parts, things that we don't believe are true or things that contradict what our personal beliefs are. Kris was a bit unclear about some of his teachings, which challenged me a lot, but he had so many GREAT things to say! Some totally new revelations that I have never thought about before. For example, the fact that when we choose to follow God for the rest of our lives means we receive grace and mercy, but it does not mean that we go on sinning. We still make mistakes, but it is not being one of his followers if we keep committing our same sin over and over again. I really didn't get the meaning of this until Kris said that he does not sin. I was like, 'wow, that's a bold statement.' I still don't know if I totally agree with that, but once he explained it, it made more sense. He said that once he made this commitment, he said that God's followers don't have the right to go on sinning. Sinning to him means that we do something wrong on purpose, we know that we are doing something wrong and still do it anyways. In 1 Peter 4 it talks about how we do not go on sinning and doing our same earthly desires when we truly want to live for him. I do believe that God's followers still make mistakes. But here it says that we are not to go on doing our same sins if we truly want to live for him.

Kris and his wife Kathy also taught of the gifts of the Spirit. They emphasized on prophesying to others and they said that that is the most common gift from God. We were taught was it is, how we act out prophesying, what it feels like, and we then were forced to practice it. What a great way to be challenged to get out of my comfort zone! It was very awkward at first. But we had to pair up with someone we didn't know and then ask God for a word of knowledge, a true fact or picture from God about the other person’s life. It was so cool to be able to try that out. Getting something relevant to my partner's life and watching others as well. And making mistakes too! Then we asked God to give us a prophecy for the other person. This was a bit harder, even though it might have not happen yet, it was hard to hear God on a more meaningful word about the other person's future! But it was still cool to try and learn!

Not much new this weekend. Just went to visit a new beach. Went to Jamba Juice for the first time in my life, and loved it! Tried out stand up paddle surfing. Swam with a sea turtle. And other fun things!

This week we have a speaker for our Justice school from India. Coming out on such a high from last week, it is hard to sit in class during a four hour lecture understanding and being engaged the entire time. What he has to say is awesome! But I believe that our class is not growing in unity as much this week, like we all wish we would! Hopefully our class will be able to grow so much in this last half of DTS so that during our outreach we don't need to build that bond. We can start off going in as a unified family.

Tuesday night there was an all night prayer session in our Prayer Room here on campus. Apparently God was waking people up from their sleep to go into the prayer room. There was constant prayer, praise, worship, prophecy, and more going on all night! That room was banging! I wish you all could come here and hear what it is like being in my dorm, a ways away from this building, but still being able to hear when there is people jamming out in the prayer room! You can almost tell what song they are singing and it is totally amazing! This was going on all night long! There were a few people who pulled all nighters. And the funny thing is, God gives us all extra energy the next day when we spend that time not sleeping, but worshiping him! In the morning when there was the Fire and Fragrance school worshiping during breakfast, I joined after my work duty. It was so much fun! We had another outreach group in there and there were families, kids, and the regular F&F School! So much fun to sing at the top of my lungs, dancing, and just have fun praising God with these little kids! Makes for a great start to my day!

Last night, my roommates and I had our first encounter with a cockroach in our dorm room! We've heard random screams other rooms during this quarter when others had cockroaches in their dorms. When I heard those screams, I said to myself, 'If we ever had one in our room, I wouldn't be that scared and I'd be tough and just kill the thing.' But our room is the cleanest dorm room of all, and we got blessed with having this nasty bug in our room. Of course there was extremely freaked out and screams came whaling from our room!! We spent a half hour looking for this bug. Of course I was determined to kill it because it kept crawling by MY BED! So, shoe in hand, I went for it. It took a good few whacks, but finally! We defeated the bug!

What a night! Hope that you guys are all doing well! Thank you again for everything. One prayer request if you could keep me in mind. It has been really heavy on my heart what God's plan is for my life after outreach. I've always had a plan in my head, but I've learned that I am not living this life for myself. I needed to lay it down for God. And now, I've come to realize that my plan is never as good as God's. So if you could pray that he reveals to me what it is that he wants from me after outreach. I would greatly appreciate that! Thanks guys, you're amazing!

God Bless and Hazak!