The last chapter but just the begining

I am concluding my adventure with YWAM for the past six months……I truly know in my heart this is just the beginning to somewhere I have no idea….I find myself in a similar place when I started this journey little to no money…..having a lot of peace in my heart and excited for the journey ahead….now when I say the word excited that includes anxious, scarred, over whelmed, unsure, and this crazy feeling in the pit of my stomach…….In reality I have no idea what it’s like to give up my life for faith…..I have never been without food I have always lived in places where I could read a bible on the corner Starbucks and freely love the Lord and pray in public………. I would love to tell everyone DTS is the reason that my heart has been completely transformed….however the reality is that I opened my heart completely to receiving what Jesus wanted to do in me and allowed Him to work in whatever way possible…..for the last 6 months I ate slept and breathed around Christians that have been totally and radically in love with Jesus now I am headed back to where I am from to people that are Christian but I am not sure they will understand my character change to the full extent. My plans for the future I am unsure of….I have a lot of opportunities my way……now what God wants I know he will reveal that to me in His timing. All that He requires of us is that we are ready and willing to do whatever work He has required of us. Quote from Dan Baumann” I want to lean so hard on Jesus that if He moved I would fall down.”Be aware of the risks we are embracing but do not base your decisions on those risks. Remembering failure is always another opportunity for God to work…….

Imagine the most beautiful picture in your mind….. now imagine painting black streaks on it that is what happens when we rush God’s timing…….God is capable of doing the impossible and he is able to take those black streaks and wipe them all away but wouldn’t you rather wait and never have the painting ruined in the first place…….A famous author once wrote just because we think we are in God’s will doesn’t mean we actually are….I am humbling myself each and every day of my life and my walk with Jesus knowing that He is in control and let Him lead me and guide me in every step. I know I am not perfect and I will always fail but I will also succeed at what God wants me to do and I have no doubt in my mind that God wants me to remember and meditate on my successes and learn from my failures. I now know God doesn’t want me just to love……..he wants me to show God’s love and make it apparent that I love my neighbor as myself for this is the greatest commandment by God. For people will know that we are His by the way we Love………..

We all go through pain in our lives….sometimes physical sometimes spiritual……however God sometimes doesn’t always reduce our pain because of our fallen world we live in but He does change our perspective of the situation to make it clear to us that we are not alone in this cruel hateful world….We are diseased terminally, wounded fatally, and lost eternally……………until we have Christ to take that all away with one swift swoop of the cross…….As Christians living in today’s society we need to be confident in the Love God has for us. Everyone is afraid of failure but sometimes God can meet us in our failures if we allow Him in. If we give our full hearts to Him than we can encounter what God has for us to the full extent……

Santorini and last part of Athens

Santorini was this amazing island that we camped at for one night......we had a pool and a beautiful sunset and town to enjoy......the houses were white and very beautiful probably the most beautiful homes and shops I have ever seen.......it was very enjoyable.....I spent most of the day with some Korean friends on my DTS and I had an amazing time......We went into town and caught a bus which I got away with only paying half price.....shhhhh...... we went to Ia the town that sisterhood of the traveling pants was filmed and has these amazing sunsets.....it was beautiful but I have seen too many amazing sunsets in my life to say it was the most beautiful........:)...........I was so exhausted from traveling by the time we got back to the campground it was after 10pm and I was exhausted and went right to sleep..........Our ferry back to Athens was very late so we had a lot of down time waiting for the ferry so I finished the book I was suppose to read back in lecture phase of my school.....lol.....It is about hearing God's voice.......it was really cool because it gave me a clear view on the direction God is leading me too.....God I know wants me to work in evangelism when I get home!!!!!...........what that exactly means I am not sure......however I know God is calling me to be a soldier to bring hope to this hopeless world....there is corruption and injustice all around me everywhere I look but God does not want me to think about the hopelessness of this world I live in He wants me to be filled with hope and live that hope out in my life........pretty cool revelation.....:)
The boat ride was pretty uneventful......other than watching X-men Wolverine and not being able to sleep and getting back to Athens at 2am in the morning and catching a bus at 230am and getting back to where we are staying at 3am.........we did more traveling to Santorini then we did on Santorini ha ha..........
The next day was a day off to rest or shop or walk around so I went to Starbucks and shopping with some amazing girlfriends in my DTS :).......I got shoes for one euro but I will tell you more about those shoes later ha ha lets just say they wore me ha ha ha........The next couple of days we spent some team time and down time with the Lord......a friend and I got an opportunity to hear God's voice tell us something.....he was so inclined to talk to this man that was super down and out on life he smelled and looked real bad....he spoke very little English but what we got from him is that he has no family at all in this world and feels like he is nowhere and has no where to go for help....compassion for this man fell on my heart big time.......I knew he made some bad choices in his life and some awful circumstances............so I decided to spend the last 2 euros I had on him to buy him a small meal and we decided to bring him back to where we were staying to give him some free clothes and a sleeping bag some people from our team was throwing away.......he did not understand why we were helping him and told us that we have the biggest hearts he has ever seen.......I hope this mans life turns around for him....reality I am unsure if it ever will but I know we gave him hope and just having caring hearts gave him the little we had probably was the biggest gift he has ever seen in a very long time.......we performed one night to shoot for a video of the performance and that was a little stressful because we kept messing up and stuff and we had a time limit on the church we were using ha ha.........but the next morning we went to the Korean church and performed.......I am starting to fall more and more inlove with the Korean culture.....I couldn't really perform because of the thing I told you earlier about those wonderfully cheap shoes well they kind of ripped skin off my ankles......so I was hurting.......:( and still am......the afternoon we helped out with the feeding ministry at the building we have been staying at.....I got to play with some kids and hold a little baby so a mom could eat her food with no worries :)........It was a awesome time and now I am ending my last night with sudden news about family that I have been left out of the loop and I feel betrayed a little.......I deserve to know things and my family keeps doing this to me and I am unsure why and I have come to a point where I just don't understand why they do these things......... how I wish my mom was here I feel like my family will always have this hole in it and it will never be filled..................well I am going to try and not think too much about it and head off to Egypt with no worries and let things be that are suppose to be......Jesus is my savior and He will pave the path I need to take.............

Northern Greece

We teamed up with a ministry in Athen's for ten days to perform and share the gospel.........We stayed most of the time at a beautiful camp ground next to this amazing beach.....we stayed in little yurts.......so it didn't feel exactly like camping.........but we got back really late every night.....we went out just about every night to different towns to perform.....it was exhausting and a lot of our team got sick......but luckily God was good to me and kept me healthy......:)....It was really awesome to get to know other Christians staying strong in something that is really hard at times.......There is only 15,000 evangelical Christians in all of Greece......so its really hard for these ministries to keep going with little support from the outside world..........So I will be praying for my new Greek friends and their ministry........We were able to visit some really historical biblical places.....we performed at Thessolonika where there was a ton of spiritual warfare our microphones blew up for the actors leaving only one workable microphone.........however someone that was just walking buy ready to commit suicide saw our performance and changed there hearts to bring hope to there heart.........despite all the hardships God always wins and works it whatever circumstance possible..... 3 other of the performanaces was small street performances in little towns and it was a lot of fun we almost got kicked out of one town because we didn't have the permission to perform so we did it anyways lol............During the day we ate really good Greek food :) I gave up on trying to watch my figure and start enjoying whatever comes at me :) We were able to have a couple hours of free time during each day to get on the internet or go swimming on the beach...... We had to spend two other nights in the city Drama and it was a lot of fun and the girls slept in the sanctuary with air conditioning :).There was a really yummy dish that was my favorite so far it was greek salad with ground beef rolled in this really goood cheese so gooooood.... We were really encouraging to the pastor and his wife who were super friendly :) On our way back to our last place to stop to perform we were able to stop in the town Philippi where Paul visited and wrote Philippians....I was able to walk all around this ancient place for free luckily there was some really nice people that let us in for free :) I got to see the jail Paul was in prison......pretty amazing every time I read the book Philippians I can now picture this ancient place....... We also performed at a camp twice....the first time it was a lot of teenagers......they loved every moment of our performance and had some awesome fellowship with them.....this girl Kristina even gave me an awesome bracelet.....so amazing.......the second time we performed at the camp there were a lot of families......so they loved it so much....it was our last performance of the trip so it was a tired ending but it was good also........right after that we had to depart to Athens by train.......the train arrived around 12 am and it was the worse train ride ever.....we paid for seats and people took all our seats so we had to kick most of them out I felt really bad..........sleeping on the train was almost impossible because there little monkey kids were getting our attention the whole time playing with the three of us in our seat.....they didn't like that I was falling asleep they would poke me and play with me while I was trying to sleep.........We finally made it back to Athen's at six in the morning.........

Journey to Athens Part One

We left Italy by Boat to travel to Athen's the boat ride was 12 hours (which we barely made it in time )......We couldn't afford any rooms so we piled all our luggage and ourselves on the deck of the ship.......As the day came to end we said goodbye to Italy and prepared our hearts for Greece we were told we would be staying in the red light district......Sleeping on the boat was surely an adventure.......I woke up the next morning where water and black stuff covered my sleeping bag and I was already grumpy because it marked 4 years since my mom had past away......Not a morning to remember however God showed me beauty in the passing islands as we made our way to Greece........We arrived in Greece to meet our host.........where we traveled by bus a couple hours to reach Athen's......On our way we were able to stop by the ancient town of Corinth.........It was a sight to remember.......To be in the same town Paul shared the gospel and where he wrote Corinthians it was truly amazing.....I began to understand Paul's heart beat.....seeing the mountains behind the town and the large temple where they would sacrafice animals.............Then we stopped at another ancient place where Paul actually shipwrecked before he made it to the town of Corinth......there we ate lunch and made our way to where we would be staying....

We were housed in a 4 story buliding where they house a few refugee's from the middle east that are Jesus followers......the district we were in was directly around the Muslim culture......so we were not allowed to go out alone and most of the time we should take a guy with us.....We could see the brothel from our windows and watched men go in and out of the place.....At night the streets came alive and it was really noisy I didn't sleep much......It was so hot that I sweat all night long and I would constantly be having bad dreams I even woke up screaming once......I know God is bigger than any power trying to discourage me......:)

Outreach times: Our first performance was at a local church which was really fun and met a lot of Christian Greeks that were so wonderfully nice.......The next two performances were at a park square where alot of the illegal immigrants from the middle east live and do drugs........The first night was a little nervous because they gave cat calls almost the whole performance and at the end a local pastor preached to the audience and it wasn't presented in the way I think needed to be presented........It was a little direct and harsh and it made the crowd angry to a point they were yelling and booing all of us........After wards we got to share our hearts with the people and I think it was good........The second night was about the same except a recovered drug addict student in our DTS shared his personal testimony of how God brought him out of his addiction.....they really like what he had to say.....Almost the whole crowd stayed and listened and after wards I was able to meet some guys from Afghanistan and shared with them what little I knew of their culture from working at Barbur World Foods..........

The next Performance was at the place where we stayed......two times a week they fed the refugee's so we performed our show to them and they loved it and a couple of them even gave their life to Christ......after that ended we went up at night to the Parathanon and viewed the whole city of Athen's by night it was so breath taking.......Another place where Paul shared the Gospel........I was able to fellowship with one of the young men living as a refugee in Athen's it was really humbling to know how easy I live my life.....He has to wait another 5 years before he can leave the country so he can get his papers......He hasn't seen his family in 5 years and has a part time job and helps out at the building where he lives.......I am learning that the circumstances in my life may have been hard but their is so much blessing in my life that I never even thought about............

The next day we cleaned and packed for our next outreach adventure to the northern part of Greece where we will be teaming up for 10 days with Christian Greeks where we will be traveling to many different citys to share the gospel.........

Sicily

I am in Greece right now but I will try to give what it was in Sicily......We arrived in late morning where a lot of our team was able to stay on a Ship called the next wave a YWAM base......It was a total blast I slept almost every night on the deck of the ship :).......We walked in and out of the port....we almost got caught with out pass ports once and almost had to stay the night on the street lol......The other team members stayed in a house that used to be used by the mafia that the government took away from the mafia and gave to a local church.....lol so I can say I have visited a mafia house lol........The ministry oppurtunities were amazing.....We performed and helped hand out bibles........again it was a starving nation for the Gospel........very few churches are united together and by us performing we were able to bring unity amoung the local churches......they fed us a lot of good food....... my stomach is getting bigger lol........people loved our performance I think we planted a lot of seeds amoung the people of Sicily.......There are lots of more cool details but I just don't have much time these days we are go go go............Hopefully I can give you an update on how Greece has been so far.......... Love you and miss you all very much

Rome

We arrived in Rome on a really late night bus ride to a house that a local Korean Church provided for us........The very next day we performed our show to bless the people that blessed us so much......First Korean service I have ever sat in on and it was neat to see how another culture worships the same God.........We had no shows booked for the rest of the time so we did three days of touring historical places.......

Our first day we went downtown Rome and visited the collosseum where the Christians we fed to the Lions and the gladiators competed against each other, seeing the Roman historical city surrounding the collosium was amazing I felt like my eyes were too small to take it all in......Then we headed to the famous water fountain that was in the movie with Audrey Hepburn.....there I had my first Gelato......yummyness :) Then we headed over to the Spanish Steps and a Old Opera house with amazing paintings.........

The second day was probably the most humbling expirence I have ever been through as a Christian....our first stop was the water channels where they first built the water system to supply Rome and also the house that BBC films their T.V series Rome.......We went to the road Paul walked on to enter Rome where he would later be captured and beheaded because he was preaching the Gospel........It was a walk to always remember....... how a road could change the course of Christianity......Then we headed over to the actual jail cell where Paul wrote Second Timothy......Then we walked the walk where Paul was beheaded and historians tell us that when he was beheaed water sprang up from the ground and they built a church as a memorial for Paul's life and their is actual water still coming up from the ground then I went and read Second Timothy and was very humbled by Paul's life and how he risked everything to share the gospel with people and how in his last moments of his life he still was praising God and making sure Timothy knew His heartbeat sitting in that jail knowing that it was going to be the end of his life..........then we went to the place that changed my perception of what it means to loose your life for your faith.....This place we got the oppurtunity to see this very old burial site that was used as a underground refuge for Christians to preserve their faith.....If the tunnels were stretched out straight they would be 500 miles...someone could easily get lost and never come out again.....Christians were living in this place for over 300 years families were being made in these tunnels they lived in close to no light(when people came out of tunnels they were blind) or food the only thing that was keeping them alive was their faith.....

The third day we all had the chance to see the Vatican....Which a friend provided the funding to bless me......The paintings and sculpture were pretty stunning and my eyes could never take everything in.....Crazy to think that these painting and sculptures have been preserved for thousands of years........It was really cool to think about how people view Christ so differently....Some think of him dying nailed on a cross.....some think of him as a loving father.....some view him as a gentle man holding a baby lamb.....some view him just a face with a beard.....the one thing that brings all of us together Catholic,Methodist or Protestant is that we all believe in Jesus..........

Being in downtown Rome walking around was really awesome as well.....Passing little alley ways......little houses right by the Vatican with grape vines coming out of the wall......However the bigger picture of Rome is that it really reminded me of Mexico...There was a lot trash in the alley ways and grafiti everywhere........The city itself has a lot of needs their is also a lot of corruption in the Catholic Church in Rome..........Their city has a lot of Potential to be a vibrant awesome place but it is a city in deep need.......

The rest of the week was time we spent growing together as a team where we all took turns organizing the schedule for the day.........It was a lot of fun to be so united together as a team.........We also got a great chance to perform a couple pieces of the show at a local Catholic Church parking lot where we got to connect with a lot of the youth in the neighborhood where we were staying....It was awesome to love on a young group of people that were in so need of attention and someone to care about them...they hung out with us for the following 3 days after we performed and ended up doing the full show for them...part of me wish I could of stayed and started a youth group because they were so curious about our faith.........

All in all Rome was more than I could ever thought he would be for me........

Switzerland

So my time in Switzerland is winding down.....Its been an amazing time here......The landscape reminds me of home with the green hills and the large mountains....The German part of the country was very welcoming thanks to Joel a student from last years DTS.......Everything there was so interesting.....everything from the houses, the shops and the streets.......We performed at two different places a theatre and a church.....over a thousand people came to watch our performance :)......It was a great start to our outreach.....

After the German part we traveled to the French part of Switzerland where we stayed for 10 days at the YWAM base in Lausanne.........The beds are comfortable and the food is really good......however our team has been fighting off sickness since the moment we got here :(.....But we are doing our best to hang in there.... We are performing in a outreach called Regeneration at the famous Jazz festival in Montreux..... We perform and share the gospel with people for about 9 days.....I had the opportunity to share the gospel with my personal testimony.......The atmosphere is a little hard to be in at times.....lots of drinking and smoking.....we know that we had purpose being there....even when we worship in the park or when it rains and all we can do is worship till the rain stops we get a crowd.......I know that God is dropping seeds in peoples hearts through our production......:) Next stop Italy